Gale Brewer Predicts a Joyful Children’s Book Fair This Month

Upper West Side City Council Member Gale Brewer is now accepting donations for a free children’s book fair that her office will host on Jan. 25, in what has become an annual tradition.

The event will occur between 1 and 4 p.m. at the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan, which is located at 334 Amsterdam Ave., between West 75 & 76th Sts. “We need to collect those outgrown books,” the Council Member noted in an iteration of her newsletter.

“Starting next week, please bring clean, children’s-only book donations (especially Spanish-language titles) to my District Office (563 Columbus); we’ll accept them through 1/16, and after that at the JCC (Monday, 1/19–Friday, 1/23),” she added.

The book fair has become a colorful staple of Brewer’s tenure, and attracts donors come rain or shine.

The inaugural 2023 iteration—also held at the JCC—pulled in about 3,000 titles for eager kiddos, even though “the rain fell so hard it turned white on the pavement,” as Spirit contributor Dean Jamieson put it. It was held in partnership with the Church of Latter-Day Saints, the Bank Street School for Children, and a local group dedicated to providing books for asylum-seeking families.

Last year’s event drew in 6,000 books, with leftover books dropped off in local schools.

In a Jan. 5 interview about this year’s fair, Brewer told The Spirit that the event is always “a real joy . . . for both parents, kids, and teachers. I didn’t realize the depths to which these wonderful teachers go, to make sure that there are free books within their classrooms.”

Brewer noted that these educators end up coming to the fair from “all over,” not just her Upper West Side district. She’s seen them hauling bags to the event in recent years, in order to load up on as many titles as possible for their young students. “They build their whole libraries,” she said.

“You have kids running around with 10 books, having chosen them,” Brewer added. “It’s exciting to see that. . . it almost makes the whole event worth it. When you go to a bookstore, or you go to a library as a 10-year-old, you can’t take 15 books. You can take, you know, two.”

On the other side of the ledger, Brewer said, is the fact that many of her constituents have “books that [their] kids have outgrown.” Donors with adult children have been “calling us for the last month, because they want to get rid of their books,” she explained with a laugh.

Indeed, her office has run into donors who are so eager to offload their inventory—for a good cause–that staffers have had to explain that books are only being accepted as of Jan. 5, and not “last week or the week before.” Given the sheer volume of books being donated, Brewer said that pre-fair sorting would likely prove to be an intense undertaking.

Brewer reiterated that she was especially looking for Spanish-language titles, and anticipated that families living in shelters or NYCHA housing would greatly benefit from the event.

“We’re a reading community on thei Upper West Side,” Brewer concluded.