Pre-loved books

(posted by Paul Zilmer)

When we started out, some books were donated to the BEC, and this formed the core of our library — reference and inspirational books that might be of interest to our students.There has not been a huge amount of interest in these, but there has been some, and a couple of students have checked books out.

Recently a few more books were donated by well-meaning brothers and sisters — and I wondered what we should do with them. I wasn't really sure adding them to the library would be useful. In Durban, we had received some similar donations, and we had offered them for sale very cheap, as "pre-loved books". But we didn't have enough to make any kind of display that anyone would want to browse through.

Then, one of the on-line booksellers we use sent an electronic newsletter, highlighting free shipping for some used books. I thought, what if we could find some fairly decent used Bibles and study aids, and offer them? I poked around through the site, and found some Bibles, a handful of Bible atlases, and some other reference books. They were cheap enough to give it a try.

The books came in over the weekend, and yesterday we set up our own "pre-loved books" display. As with everything we've done, this is an experiment. Will there be interest?  Don't know — but we're going to find out! Hopefully, this can be an additional service we can provide to students and others who come in: locating low cost ways for people to add to their personal library of Bibles and related materials.