Every couple of days I visit the Friends of the Berkeley Public Library book sale, which has its home in a neglected mall off Telegraph Ave under a parking lot. The Friends sale is easy to miss: north of the cashier, across from the elevators, it’s out of the way even in this out of the way mall. Parked outside its doors is a cart marked Free, and this is my destination.

I am here on assignment: how better to study the ecosystem of the book trade, the mysterious circulatory processes and agents of the Interstitial Library, Telegraph Ave itself, than by hanging out at the Free cart? The best part is (and this is what quickens my step as I get closer, practically running up the steps at the Channing entrance to the mall, past the frame shop, Revolution Books and the mailroom) there might be something really great there today. You never know.

The Free cart gets a lot of action. This is where books donated to the Friends go when they’re deemed unworthy of a place on the shelves inside, or have failed to sell at the Friends’ already rock bottom prices. On the cart you might find de-acquisitioned library books stamped DISCARD, outdated textbooks, Readers Digest condensed classics, pocket book westerns, mysteries and science fiction, multi-volume encyclopedias with volumes missing, diet books from crazes past….To be weeded out by the Friends a book has to have fallen pretty low. On the other hand the Friends are amateurs, and sometimes there’s a real prize. Last week I found a nice Ace double, a handful of Ross MacDonald pockets and a bound volume containing the complete 1941 run of Popular Science's Home Workshop magazine. Great illustrations.

The cart’s offerings change throughout the day, so it gets a steady stream of hopeful visitors, many of them regulars - the man who hawks paperbacks on the corner outside of Cody’s for a quarter, homeless people from the Ave looking for something to sell at Moes, serious book scouts, a certain librarian on his lunch break. It’s a gamble; some days there’s an air of excitement around the cart -- Friends bringing books by the handful, extra free boxes laid out nearby for the overflow, scouts swarming around.

Other days the books are crap, nothing but that set of Reader’s Digest classics that’s been sitting there for weeks and that Extra Large Print Tom Clancy. Then the cart is a bummer, feels like the end of the road. For books and maybe people, too. Free cart mood swing: one minute you’re a bold adventurer, a prospector with a secret map, the next you’re a lowly carrion eater.

It happened to me on Friday, a real crap day at the cart. While I stood disconsolately by, a man came up with an armload of books and actually returned them to the cart. I figured he had tried them at Moes and Shakespeare with no luck. It was nice of him not to leave them on the street.