When Retirement Leaves You Lazy, Give Away Books

April 25th, 2006 · 1 Comment
by Booksquare

You know us and our penchant for feel-good stories (hey, it happened once!). We all worry about what we’ll do with our post-retirement selves. A few friends have noted that “sitting around” is their number one goal, and while we salute sloth, we think it might get boring. Thus we have a solution: spend the last of your earthly sums on books and give them away.

That’s what Irwin Herman is doing — and he’s happy. You want to be happy, don’t you?

“I kicked back,” Herman said. “I swam. I got brown. Then a friend said that the guys at the jail had nothing to read.”

Using donated space and lot of cataloguing skills, the enterprise is practically a full-time business. Minus the actual reason people go into business: cash flow that goes both ways.

“My entire budget is $60,000. We give away half a million books a year, and nobody takes a dime out of it. When we come up short, somebody tosses something in.”

In addition to great benefits of bringing books to people who need them — and so many people do need them — there is a key benefit to working long hours with books:

“I work six days a week, start at 6:30. Saturdays I hit every sale I can. By the end of the day I’ve spent $250, $300, but I have a truckful of books. What else am I going to do with my time – follow my wife around Costco and look at cans all day?”

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