The City that Reads' gets free books

"Nobody's insane enough to do what I do," says Russell Wattenberg, founder and executive director of The Book Thing of Baltimore, Inc.

A man of commanding stature, with dirt-covered jeans, a t-shirt boasting the name of his organization in typewriter print and a Jack Daniels baseball cap, Wattenberg is the brains behind a non-profit organization that accepts donations of used and new books and offers them to the public free of charge.

As he sits in his "executive suite" at 2645 North Charles St. on a Sunday afternoon, partitioned off from the rest of the room by a literal wall of books, he calls out to patrons rifling through some 200,000 books.

"Make sure everybody's greedy," he says.

As one book-fiend halls a full box to the front and apologizes for taking all of the "larger" books, Diane Cerkanowicz, a volunteer with the organization for three years, reassures him.

"We don't count by the thickness of the book. We count by the number of books," she says. Their policy: the more the better.

With a non-negotiable price of zero dollars, customers and volunteers alike take their time to sort through sections like history, sociology, romance, classics, health and more. Section titles written in black marker on the water pipes and fluorescent pink signs, shelves pitching down toward the floor from the weight of words, and excess piles narrowing the walkways transform this basement into the best makeshift bookstore in Baltimore.

But the Book Thing did not always exist in such luxurious, unheated, low-electricity, dust-blanketed quarters. The first free books were given away from the back of Wattenberg's van in 1997. Working as a bartender at Dougherty's Pub downtown, Wattenberg served drinks to the teachers who came in for Friday Happy Hour and listened to their frustration of trying to provide books for their students. Libraries were extinguished from the public schools, and teachers didn't have the resources to get books for their entire class. Wattenberg made a decision to use 10 percent of his tip money each week to buy books and offer them to the teachers for free. They were skeptical at first.

"Whenever you try and give something for nothing, they're always wondering what it costs," Wattenberg said.

Sooner or later, they came to trust him, and the word spread. First, he offered books from his van at the bar. Then, he started using the bar itself and finally added his apartment as his collection and interest grew.

Wattenberg applied for 501-C3 status, allowing people to donate money and/or books and get a tax write-off. After getting approved, he gave up his job at the bar, rounded up his extra stashes from friends' garages and set up camp in April 2000 at the present location off of 27th Street.

The first task was to unearth the ground from layers of dust. He also had to organize his 150,000 books without any shelves and used boxes from the bar. All classics were stored in Rolling Rock boxes. Jack Daniels boxes stored children's books, and Budweiser boxes housed fiction. People began coming in regularly on Saturdays and Sundays to grab some books and helped organize and sort new donations.

"I never really recruited volunteers," Wattenberg said. "People came in to get books at first and never left. [The Book Thing] depends on them now."

Mark Keiper, a volunteer for a month and a half, started helping out when he came in search of books for his personal science library.

"I love this place," he said. "It has every conceivable book you could possibly imagine."

After his first visit, he drove home with about 180 books. Now, he limits his searching in between shelving and leaves with no more than 12.

With books in every category, the shelves get lined with a mix of literary staples, obscure titles and prehistoric prints. The health section includes a handbook titled Pills that Don't Work published in 1980, and self-help houses The Peter Pan Syndrome -- Men Who Have Never Grown Up by Dr. Dan Kiley, for example. The Book Thing also gets donations of rare books and recently received $1,400 after selling a donated first edition of The Grapes of Wrath.

The Book Thing has regular volunteers from the Circle-K and Alpha Phi Omega service groups at The Johns Hopkins University most Wednesdays, the only volunteer day during the week, and many other locals and out-of-towners come in to help out. Wattenberg always provides free pizza, but volunteers have to be there when he orders at 6:20 p.m., and he lays permanent claim on all anchovies. He also has water and soda, but he has to bring in ice to keep it cold, because the basement doesn't have enough electricity to power a refrigerator.

"He's lucky he has a fan in here," Cerkanowicz said.

The lack of electrical umph is just one of the reasons Wattenberg has been looking for a new location. With an average of 20,000 books coming and going each week, he needs a larger space to adequately sort the free spread -- and he'd like to be able to provide his patrons and volunteers with a bathroom. But Wattenberg can't afford a space that would be usable, so he's forced to wait for a building owner to donate ground-floor space.

"I think that because I give stuff away all the time, everyone else should," he said. "I'm hoping for tomorrow. I just don't know."

Trying to get new space and running the Book Thing don't leave Wattenberg much time for reading, although he often rereads Charlotte's Web. He's gotten suggestions to start up similar organizations in other cities, but he plans on sticking to his full-time job in Baltimore.

"Giving away books is the easy part," Wattenberg said. "It's giving more books to more people that's the hard part."

The Book Thing, Inc., located at the rear entrance of 2645 North Charles St., is open for browsing Saturdays and Sundays 9 a.m. -- 6 p.m. Volunteers also are needed both days, and on Wednesdays 3 p.m. -- 10 p.m. All patrons and volunteers are welcome. For more information, check out the Web site at http://www.bookthing.org.