Oxfam bookshops
Magazine
Give your superfluous books to Oxfam
We have made Oxfam our UK Christmas charity this year because it’s so easy to make book donations to Oxfam bookshops. All of us have books we no longer need, so what could be better than to donate them to a charity which will make the most out of selling them, raising money to support its work?
There are now 110 Oxfam bookshops across the UK, although all 750 Oxfam shops do sell some books. Most of them are staffed by volunteers, except for the manager, who is a salaried bookseller. The managers are given autonomy over their shops and can therefore develop each one in a way that relates to its local market and uses the skills of its volunteers. The biggest UK shops are in Glasgow and in Bloomsbury in London, each of which stock around 12,000 titles, but most of them have between 6,000 and 8,000 titles.
The vast majority of Oxfam's book stock comes in as donations and the charity accepts everything that is given to them (no need to worry about the saleability or the condition of the books you give), filtering out what they can effectively sell in each store, and disposing of the rest. The emphasis is on running each shop in a professional and commercial manner, so as to raise as much money as possible for Oxfam. And the bookshops have been a great success - in 2005-2006 Oxfam's UK book sales were £16.6m( $32.5m), a 6% increase on the previous year. As noted in News Review 25 September 2006 bookshops now contribute substantially to the charity’s revenue, both in the UK and across the world.
Oxfam’s informative website gives full information about how the money is used and an effective account of Oxfam's international work.
So, if you want to help, all you need to do, instead of donating money, is to have a clear-out of your bookshelves over the holiday period and take all those unwanted books down to your nearest Oxfam bookshop.
To find your nearest Oxfam bookshop in the UK.
Here's a clever infographic about the impact of our food consumption in the UK, which updates as you look at it to show exactly what is going on.
