The Cracker Barrel restaurant chain announced last year that it would give 15,000 books to the county, on behalf of an area resident who had won a contest. But when the delivery truck finally dropped off the books in May, it turned out there were only 10 different titles in the whole lot. Besides multiple copies of a cookbook, a craft book and some outdated college texts, there were exactly 11,496 copies of the children's book "What Would Happen If...?"
It seems that a publisher took advantage of a national book drive led by Cracker Barrel last August by unloading thousands of books that never sold in stores, called "remainders." While the publisher un- doubtedly got a tax break, Cracker Barrel, in turn, offered the books to 10 winners of a contest it was sponsoring, who could donate them to the library or school of their choice. But few institutions would welcome hundreds of copies of the SAME book.
In addition to Maricopa County, libraries in Columbus, Indiana, and Gadsden, Alabama, among others, received dozens of boxes of books that will never reach their shelves. "We were really disappointed to learn of the difficulty caused by our donation," says Cracker Barrel spokeswoman Julie Davis.
Maricopa County plans to give all of the children's books away to day care centers and elementary schools, and Cracker Barrel has offered to take away, at its own expense, any of the others that the library doesn't want. "We were lucky," says Maricopa County librarian Harry Courtright. "Otherwise, we'd have to pay to have them taken to recycling or a landfill."
