The BYOB Book Drive 2015 Round-Up

Jenn Northington

Director, Editorial Operations

Jenn Northington has worked in the publishing industry wearing various hats since 2004, including bookseller and events director, and is currently Director of Editorial Operations at Riot New Media Group. You can hear her on the SFF Yeah! podcast nerding out about sci-fi and fantasy. When she’s not working, she’s most likely gardening, running, or (obviously) reading. Find her on Tumblr at jennIRL and Instagram at iamjennIRL.

This year, Book Riot and the Harry Potter Alliance organized a day of book donations and meet-ups in honor of World Book Night, April 23, and what a night we had!

Five amazing bookstores and one great bar agreed to be donation drop-off points and host a hang-out for booknerds in five cities: Chicago, IL; Richmond, VA; Washington, DC; New York City, NY; and Lexington, KY.

Some events doubled down on the snacks, like Richmond:

donuts at Fountain Bookstore BYOB

All the attendees really took our challenge to clear out their bookshelves to heart.

And some were incredibly generous:

Yes, that is a SIGNED FIRST EDITION of The Bone Clocks. Commence drooling at will.

The Apparating Library, in case you’re not familiar, is a roving library that appears only where Harry Potter Alliance folks are. Books are donated by event attendees, get cataloged, then traded and circulated amongst library donors. A few of the the BYOB events had full-on libraries; if you got one of those books, you can help track its journey here!

Thank you so much to everyone who came out and donated books; between the five cities, we collected more than a thousand books (!!!) and donated to five different literacy charities.

And if you missed it, never fear. The Harry Potter Alliance is running their book drive, the Accio Books campaign, through June.

See you in 2016!

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