Organizing 4,600 Books

Last month we received the 111 boxes containing 4,600 books we imported to stock our bookshop and reading clubs for the next twelve months.  Before opening the boxes to put the literature into service, I took a detailed inventory of all the volumes we already had on display, in our library, and in our stock, to ensure that the information in our computers corresponded to the reality on the shelves.  I used that data in determining where the incoming titles would go.  I also organized our storeroom more meticulously than ever, ridding it of clutter to make room for the sizable delivery.

Last Sunday after church, our congregation cleared chairs, benches, pulpit, and everything else out of its meeting space, the largest room on our property, so we could use it to sort the load of books.  Early Monday morning, our employees carried in all the boxes of literature.  Over the next six hours, two volunteers and I opened each package, sorted its contents by title, counted each stack, and checked it off on my list.  I laid papers with the letters of the alphabet around the perimeter wall, and my helpers carried each book to the letter with which its title begins.

On Tuesday, three volunteers and I arranged the books in exact alphabetical order and confirmed the count of each title.  We ensured that they were uniformly stacked, with groups of ten volumes in alternate directions for large quantities.  One study Bible was missing three copies, but there were five extra copies of a different Bible, and one extra of another book.  Everything else was exactly what we had ordered.

We then began pulling literature for various destinations.  Three customers had submitted and paid for lists of volumes; and for new titles, one copy always goes on display and another into our library.  For each of these five sets of books, I walked around the room once, tapping with my foot stacks on the floor corresponding to the documents in my hands while two volunteers loaded the books into boxes and the third verified that the filled boxes conformed to their lists.

My sixth lap around the room took longer, as we used the same method (minus the verification) to fill 29 boxes with nearly 2,000 volumes for our reading clubs around the country.  While my two female volunteers unwrapped and labeled books for our library and display, my male assistant climbed a ladder to stack those 29 boxes three high on our storeroom’s highest shelf.  Lifting the heavy cartons up to him was strenuous exercise; my legs were still sore two days later!

On Wednesday morning, a single volunteer helped me arrange the new library and display books appropriately among those already in our bookshop.  That afternoon, back in the large room that now contained only the 2000+ new volumes for our sales stock, she broke down the empty boxes for storage while I meticulously adjusted the barcodes and names of fifty different kinds of Bibles on my spreadsheet.  Verifying the codes of the other 280 titles went much faster.

I spent Thursday morning preparing to import the new inventory data into our sales computer.  Seventy titles that had never before been in our stock entered our database for the first time.  Hundreds of others were already in our system (though some had sold out), so in those cases I merely updated their quantity and price.  I also updated the price of many more books that weren’t part of our new order, to reflect their current replacement cost.  (By selling everything at only replacement cost, we operate at a financial loss, subsidized by donors who value the spiritual profit of providing Christian literature to impoverished Africans.)  Finally, I standardized the capitalization and punctuation of some titles.  By lunchtime, all the data was successfully imported into our sales system.

On Thursday afternoon, a volunteer helped me load the Bibles onto a cart in alphabetical order of the names I’d given them the previous day.  In several trips, we took them to our storeroom, where I climbed a ladder and he handed them to me in stacks of ten to arrange as tightly as possible on the highest shelf.  We continued onto lower shelves, and I breathed a sigh of thankfulness to God as we discovered that there was just enough space on the Bible side of our storeroom for every last Scripture copy!

We proceeded to bring the other literature on carts into our storeroom, where we inserted it into the alphabetical sequence of our existing stock on its other side.  We slid books along the shelves, including four that I had recently emptied for that purpose, to make room for the new supply while maintaining alphabetization.  My volunteer’s shift ended at 4pm, but I pressed on, alone, to complete the job by 6pm.  Once again, I was overwhelmed with gratitude to find that the space was exactly sufficient for our new stock with none to spare!

Good Friday was a holiday, but I needed to finish processing the books to return the space to the church on Sunday.  A church member helped me load a stack of conference books into a corner I’d found for them in the storeroom.  Then I took the booklets — all that was still arranged alphabetically on the floor — into our bookshop and inserted them into the alphabetical sequence of those already there.  My assistant removed the broken-down boxes for storage and returned the church’s furniture to the room.

I also needed to ensure that the bookshop was ready to function with the additional literature.  I showed our attendant the new arrangement of the storeroom and instructed him regarding the new stock, new pricing and updated titles.  I helped him process the sales he’d made while I was updating the computer, and fixed a glitch we found in the system.  I took inventory of all the stock in the storeroom and praised God that both the order and the quantity on the shelves corresponded with the computerized data.  Satisfied with my week of labor, I went home on Friday afternoon for a weekend of much-needed rest!