Librarian Anne Shafer works at a massive elementary school with 930 children, but it doesn’t have a healthy budget for new books.
“The book fairs are the only opportunity I really have to use sales revenue to purchase books for our library, so I take advantage of it,” says Shafer, who has worked as a librarian media specialist for four years at Jean Stewart Elementary School in Montgomery, Texas. For her first couple of fairs, she worked with another company but switched to Literati after seeing how it can inspire a large school to think big with its fairs — despite limited resources.
While coordinating activities for so many students is challenging, the other side of the coin is that she has a large pool of volunteers and more students buying books. “Our fairs have been very successful,” Shafer says. “I gross approximately $20,000 at each of my fairs. For me, it’s about adding books to our collection, constantly keeping the books up to date in the library, as well as getting the newest books that are in a series that the kids love.
“I also am so fortunate because I have a huge team of parent volunteers and an amazing library committee,” adds Shafer. “I have volunteers every single day on a regular schedule, and I have a coordinator that I work with that is so amazing and creative.” She says Literati also uses another strategy to attract volunteers. “The company gives all my volunteers 20% off their purchases. That’s a nice little incentive for them to come and help for a few shifts during the week.”
Shafer says the parents appreciate the quality of Literati books — and the children love shopping at the book fairs. “They say it’s more like going to a bookstore and buying a book,” she says. The quality of the books is just as high as you’d expect from a bookstore, but Shafer goes the extra mile to make it an interactive experience as well for the students and families.
Her first couple of fairs were run by a different company, but she switched to Literati after noticing that the books held up better. Shafer says while she concentrates on buying more books, it’s clear that the kids and their families are having a blast at the fairs too — a recent Literati fair had a Story Arcade theme where students raced around a course in the school’s expansive library dressed in colorful boxes designed to look like arcade characters and icons.
The parents value all the decorations Shafer and her team take the time to put up. “I have a really big library and there are windows all the way around it,” she says. “And so we decorate the entire library. For an ocean themed fair, one class made little paper plate fish and another class, little jellyfish.”
Sometimes we do the fairs in conjunction with something else, like a musical performance by one of the grade levels, or a family night where we host games and set up all different sorts of things for the kids. The parents love it. It’s jam packed in here — lines are to the door.”
Shafer says parents also recognize the fair’s focus on books and selections tailored to different reading levels — plus the fact that Literati book fairs focus on the books themselves and eschew the smelly erasers and plushie toys that have become synonymous with other book fairs. “They see that we don’t have the books with the accompanying little trinkets and necklaces that kids buy simply because it has a toy with it.”
The book fairs have been a great success for Jean Stewart Elementary library’s budget, Shafer says. But she says it’s the excited faces coming into the library each day that are even more rewarding, and she likes to ramp up their enthusiasm with dress-up days, guessing games like how many items are in a jar, and raffles for poster giveaways. “The kids have a great time,” she says. “Some kids come every single day to the fair – every chance that they get.”
