The Work

It starts with a letter from an incarcerated person asking for some books. Requests are wide- ranging in genre — self-help, mysteries, fantasy, drawing primers, plumbing, woodworking, landscaping skills, poetry, religion, history, grammar, how to write, and more.

Subterranean Books, our liason-bookstore, receives these letters on our behalf. Because dictionaries and thesauri are some of the most requested items, we purchase them from this bookstore.

We fill requests mostly from our collection of donated books. We receive donations from a number of sources: Subterranean Books, Washington University, Saint Louis University, book drives on our behalf by local churches or student organizations, and individuals. Some books are not practical to mail. These we then sell to used book vendors, or we offer them at various outdoor markets.

Each book package contains an address label, an inventory sheet of the contents, and a list of the topics in our collection.

We generally send two books per package, depending on weight and shipping cost. Each package requires solid wrapping to withstand the rigors of media postage delivery.

Our volunteers make regular runs to the US Post Office. We send well over a thousand packages yearly at an average cost of about $6.50 per package.