I’ve been thinking a lot this year about what we do. Receive Books. Sell books. Ship books. Process the accounting for receiving, selling, and shipping books.

Sounds rather straightforward, yet it’s only the stencil for a rich tapestry.

Behind the scenes, as a company we hire people, train people, pay people for the work they do. We help to build careers, share ideas with each other, learn from our mistakes, learn from each other, and together build a company we intend to last for decades.

We create a promise called a brand, which is about price, quality, service, selection, loyalty, and experience. We build relationships with customers who return to us repeatedly, first as hopeful young readers, then as devoted adult readers, and eventually as parents and grandparents bringing subsequent generations into the miraculous impact of printed words bound by covers and titles.

We build our business on the foundation of one of the oldest technologies in the history of humanity, the earliest modern examples of which were in evidence some 2000 years ago. Imagine that, a form of technology that has changed so little since ancient times. Compare that to your own experience of the phone’s evolution in just one lifetime. We carry the tradition of sharing the written word on scrolls, parchment, and eventually printed paper from our ancestors to those who aren’t yet born.

We deliver a relatively inexpensive form of media that may encompass storytelling, science, history, biography, education, law, religion, philosophy, poetry, art, music, recipes, instruction, or any other memorialization of human achievement. We deliver it in any number of languages across international borders. We deliver a book from one human hand to another over a hundred thousand times each day.

Yes, we do all that. We do all those things. I think we do it better than anyone in the world.

Yet given the emotional tenor of the past year, I think we do something even more important.

We touch lives.

We open minds.

We soften hearts.

We bring families together around the shared love of a classic tale.

We help the pages of an author’s creation inspire the thinking of a fellow traveler to consider a different point of view.

We bring to the door a proven tool to inspire personal growth through interpretation and resonance.

We join in the dialogue of exploring human purpose, to reveal the mysteries of the universe as they are discovered and conveyed.

We work hard to let ideas circulate, drive discussion, ignite important debate, and reinvent ideas that time suggests warrant revision.

There is nothing as powerful for me as seeing the moment when young non-readers suddenly take a book from the hands of their parents and demonstrate themselves to be a reader. Every time I see that light come on I see a path of enlightenment reoccur. It is reading that connects us from then to now, from now to the future, and forever to each other.

Books do that and will continue to do so as far into the future as I can imagine. ThriftBooks is harmoniously immersed in that continuum. We are a bridge on that road to enlightening minds.

That is what we do. That is the world we change.

It is said as we age our paths evolve from seeking success to seeking significance. In the more than two decades we have served our customers, we have become evangelists of reading and embarked on a legacy of significance. It is one part privilege, one part responsibility, and many parts celebration.

This holiday season, as we revisit our various notions of significance, as we think about the gift of kindness, let’s remember we do much more than the unending work of building a company together. 

My wife, a beloved ESL teacher, joyously affirms that our books are our treasures. We celebrate the people who read them as even more precious treasures. We bring one form of treasure to another. 

These are the lives we touch.

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Photo: Pixabay