The South Side Gallery & Book Fair is a community event bringing FREE, NEW books to the school-aged (K-8th) children of Williamsburg and Bushwick. By collecting unused paperbacks from NYC publishers, editors, and readers and by soliciting online donations of new books, the day will provide these kids with a vast range of high-quality books…to keep.
Books are not the most out-of-reach or in-demand luxury items for neighborhood kids. Maybe an X-Box 360 (600$) or a pair of limited edition sneakers (150$ or so) would fit that bill. And local libraries already serve a vital role in providing kids with reading material. But the pleasure and luxury of book ownership-- keeping it by one's bed, putting it up on a shelf or on top of one's dresser as a badge of honor – 'I read that' – is a rich and rewarding stage in the development of any lifelong reader. For cash-strapped parents, it can be perfectly sensible to strike the cost of buying new books from their household budgets; for media-addled kids, the choice between using whatever disposable income they have for clothes, food, and flashier entertainment options like music or movies is, unfortunately or not, even easier to make.
That's where our book fair steps in: a one-day event for kids and their parents to browse from and freely choose high quality books to take home: picture books for the early readers, young reader paperbacks, YA novels, classics, etc.
Any books remaining at day's end will be divided between local community organizations, schools, libraries, and the Prisoners Reading Encouragement Project.
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