Boxcar Books marks 4th year with charity auction

With the beginning of the new semester, students typically spend several hundred dollars on textbooks. While many students might dread this task, not all members of society, like prisoners, have the opportunity to learn through literature. \nThe local non-profit bookstore Boxcar Books and Community Center, Inc., 310 S. Washington St., has a solution. It supports the Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project which sends books to prisoners around the United States.\nFor more than 10 years, Pages to Prisoners has helped rehabilitate hundreds of prisoners by processing their requests for educational reading material and shipping them donated books, free of charge. \nTo celebrate its fourth year in business, Boxcar Books and Encore Café will hold a silent auction starting Saturday in the entrance of Encore Café, 316 W. Sixth St. \nProceeds will benefit both the Pages to Prisoners Project and Boxcar Books, which is run entirely by volunteers.\nEach item, including gift certificates for local businesses and local artists' pieces, will be accompanied by a sign-up and bid sheet. At the end of the bid period Feb. 14, the item will go to the highest bidder. Encore Café will donate 10 percent of its Tuesdays' sales through Feb. 14 to Boxcar Books' Pages to Prisoners endeavor. \nAli Haimson, the co-founder of Boxcar Books, said the store has three main goals: It provides books for the Bloomington community that might be difficult to locate elsewhere; it provides a free meeting space for community and literary groups; and it also provides space, funding and volunteers for the Pages to Prisoners Project.\nVolunteer Geoff Hing said the cooperation of the two organizations is important because the donations Boxcar Books receive in the auction go directly to the prisoners. Its volunteers solicit donations and community involvement for Pages to Prisoners. \n"Boxcar is able to reach a part of the community that isn't coming into the stores," he said of the prisoners who benefit. "It requires a lot of outreach and a lot of thinking to break down those barriers." \nMegan Selby, an IU advocate for community engagement, works with the Pages to Prisoners Program, helping students to get involved.\n"When you're doing volunteer work, you rarely get to see the impact that you're having," she said. "At Pages to Prisoners, we get so many letters of thanks and explanations of exactly how the books have helped them through a rough time or how the books helped their studies. Some of them might be enrolled in classes within their prisons and the books really help them out with that." \nBoth Boxcar Books and Pages to Prisoners always welcome donations and new volunteers. The Pages to Prisoners Program meets three times per week: from 7 to 9 p.m. Mondays, from 7 to 11 p.m. Thursdays and from 2 to 5 p.m. Sundays at Boxcar Books. \nVolunteers meet, read letters, match requests to donations, write personal letters to each prisoner and ship the packages. Selby said feedback from prisoners comes through thank-you letters from them she keeps in a binder.\nA letter from a prisoner in Carlisle, Ind., wrote: "I would like to say thank you very much for the knowledge you have bestowed upon me. Also I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for acknowledging us in prison. Reading is just one of the many keys we need in finding ourselves, so we can give back what we took from society"