Publicist Lisa Roe has put together a wonderful literary donation project for this holiday season. I’m a bit late posting about it, but please don’t let that stop you from participating if you’re just hearing about it! As she says in this blog post (go read it when you’re done here):

As I write this, I think of a favorite blogger who passed away this time last year. Her spirit lives on in the Dewey Read-a-Thon, Weekly Geeks, and The Bookworms Carnival. She loved reading. She loved books. She supported Banned Books Week and believed everyone had the right to reading material. In her honor, I’m calling this donation project The Dewey Tree. It’s a little bit The Giving Tree, a little bit Dewey, a little bit charity.

Here’s what you do:
*Gather up the books you can live without. It can be 4 books, 10 books, or 20 books!
*Find a worthy group you would like to donate your overflow books to. It can be your local library, a literacy campaign (mine will go to the literacy center I volunteer for), or overseas. There’s a great list of book donation sites here on the ALA. Find a charity that speaks to you!
*Then take a picture of your donation and email it to me (onlinepublicist [AT] gmail [DOT] com). It can be a pic of the mailing label on your package, one of your kids giving a box of books to a librarian, or you handing books over to your literacy center. Be creative and have fun!

I will accept pics (and will post favorites) until January 4, 2010.

The post then goes on to tell you where to go to enter your information to win a custom tote from her!

Dewey was such a wonderful part of the book blogging community. Her readathon was the one real book blogging major activity I took part in as a blogger, and she had a knack for bringing people together in ways that magically didn’t seem to involve a lot of drama or strife. I think this is a fantastic way to honor her memory.

I tend to donate a lot of my review copies to the local library anyway when I’m done with them—but frankly, it’s time for me to do a somewhat more thorough cleaning out of my shelves than that. So next week I plan to post my photo!

Also, anyone who orders from one of our craft stores by January 4, 2010 (errantdreams.shophandmade.com or errantdreams.etsy.com) and has participated in this project can put the words “Dewey Tree” in the “notes to seller” field of their order or payment and I’ll enclose a little something extra with your order, like a hand-sewn cloth gift bag, beaded keyring, or a randomly-chosen recently-published book! This one’s on the honor system, folks, so please be honest! It’s just a little thank-you for doing something nice in Dewey’s memory.

And thank you, Lisa, for putting this together!