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.â€
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.â€
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?â€
Technorati Tags: bookman, used books, san diego
1 response so far ↓
Lorra Laven // Apr 25, 2006 at 9:05 am
How fantastic is this! There’s a special place in heaven . . .