The idea of recycling more than 1.5 million used children’s books to schools, families and students throughout Marin and beyond might sound exhausting, but not to Marilyn Nemzer.
The Tiburon resident hasn’t missed a beat in 37 years of directing the effort.
“Nobody can figure out why I did it,” she said this week at her expansive operation in Terra Linda. “I just had so much fun meeting all the teachers, parents and the students who were all so excited to get the books.”
On June 1, Nemzer will step aside as executive director of the Book Exchange. The operation, until now the local arm of a global book distribution organization, will become a separate nonprofit. Two longtime volunteers, Diane Brandell and Carolyn Beazley, will co-direct the new entity.
“This just feels like home to me,” Brandell, a retired teacher who lives in San Rafael, said Wednesday during a student field trip to pick up books.
“Retirement wasn’t as much fun as this is,” said Brandell, who has been a volunteer at the Book Exchange for about six years.
“Just seeing the kids being excited about books and reading,” she said. “You can always hear the buzz in the room — there’s nothing better than that.”
Nemzer, who will stay on the organization’s board of directors, said she is shifting out of the director’s post to free up time for other projects. That includes an update to her 2003 book, “Energy for Keeps,” about creating electricity from renewable energy sources.
She also plans to stay in her seat as an elected trustee on the Marin County Board of Education, a post she has been elected to five times since 2000.
“I’m not retiring, and I don’t like the word ‘retire,'” Nemzer said. “I’m just stepping back as director of the Book Exchange.”
A former teacher in San Francisco and school guidance counselor in San Mateo, Nemzer is still as fired up by the power of books, reading and public service as she was in 1987. That was when several Marin private schools, at her invitation, dumped 80 boxes of used books in the driveway of her Tiburon home.
The unceremonious deposit was supposed to be a help for some of Nemzer’s private school teachers and tutors who were working at her home-based placement agency at the time.
Instead, it pushed her into what has been her life’s calling: rescuing used books that many schools would otherwise throw away, and instead putting them in the hands of children and teachers who hunger for the printed word.
With the help of several newspaper articles and later, online apps such as NextDoor, Nemzer spent the next four decades getting the word out on the availability of the used books.
The response was so overwhelming that Nemzer had to move the operation five times as it expanded, or as the free space that was provided was no longer available.
The first location, for only a year, was a vacant building at the Montecito Shopping Center in San Rafael. After that, Nemzer petitioned federal politicians such as former U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer to give her a space at Hamilton Field in Novato.
“Hamilton was owned by the Navy back then, not Novato,” Nemzer said. “They gave us a little shack down by the Coast Guard building.”
At that point, the New York Times found out what Nemzer was doing. It was 1989, and the article, “California Educators Taking New Leaf From Book Exchange,” exploded the idea into the public consciousness.
“We were getting thousands of books from almost every school district in Marin, keeping many tons out of our local landfills,” Nemzer said. “This was a huge service to the schools, giving them a great option to the dump and saving them lots of dollars in dump fees, too.”
It wasn’t always perfect.
On a rainy day in about 1990, Nemzer arrived at the Hamilton facility and found the parking lot covered with palettes of soaking wet books from the Denver Public Library in Colorado.
“They had trekked two semis full of books, because they had read about us,” Nemzer said. “I wasn’t there, so they just left them in the parking lot.”
A waste company donated five dumpsters, and senior students recruited by Nemzer from San Marin High School “spent all day throwing wet books into the dumpsters,” Nemzer said.
After four years, the city of Novato, which at that point owned Hamilton Field, allowed what had by then been dubbed the Book Exchange to move to the basement of a building at 500 Palm Drive.
In 1992, the Tiburon-Belvedere Rotary Club contacted Nemzer with a proposal. It changed everything.
“They wanted to ship a container of books to Kenya,” Nemzer said. “And so, we got a 40-foot container on the property, and the Rotarians came and had a barbecue. It was a big deal.”
“That was the beginning of our international shipping operation,” Nemzer added. “Since then, we’ve shipped over 1 million books to 45 countries.”
In 1999, the Book Exchange moved to a 10,000-square-foot warehouse across from what was then called New Beginnings, now Homeward Bound, at Hamilton. It stayed there until 2009 — expanding all the time.
“We had so many books,” she said. “We were open to the public, and we had families coming, teachers coming, a lot of charter schools.” The overseas shipping continued too, allowing for more space to receive more books.
In 2009, a board member at what is now the Miller Creek School District offered to rent a storeroom in Terra Linda to the Book Exchange. The storeroom was full of furniture, which the district was going to throw out.
“Don’t do that,” Nemzer says she told the official. “Let me put it all on Craigslist for you and sell it and I will give you the money.” The Book Exchange has been there ever since.
“Without Rotary and without the whole Marin community bringing books to us, we couldn’t do this,” she said. “We need the books and we need the donations.”
The last two international shipments of books by Nemzer and her crew are taking place through the end of May. One is a 40-foot container filled with books that is now in Tanzania on the way to Uganda; the other, a 20-foot container, is loading May 17 to go to the Philippines, Nemzer said.
The latter container has room for some surplus furniture, Nemzer said. If any schools are looking to dispose of such items, they are encouraged to contact Nemzer.
“The truth is that it was both local and international equally,” Nemzer said of the effort. “The international component helped us move books, made room so we could take in more.”
In 2014, Nemzer added a new local wrinkle. Instead of shipping the books to schools, what if the kids could come to the Book Exchange themselves and pick out their own books to take home?
That was the genesis of the weekly field trips, where children from six Marin schools visit the Book Exchange and are allowed to choose up to 10 free books to keep.
Children who come to to the field trips, which occur on Wednesdays, can also come back with their families on Saturdays to choose five more books for each family member to take home.
Bus transportation for the trips is provided by local donors. Over the years, a number of Marin Rotary clubs have contributed not only money but also furniture and other resources to the operation.
Elementary schools participating in the field trips include Bahia Vista, Laurel Dell, Venetia Valley and San Pedro schools in San Rafael; Hamilton school in Novato; and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Academy in the Sausalito Marin City School District.
“This book is cool,” Xavier Green Jones, a third-grader at MLK, said of his book choice, “Dragons Love Tacos,” by Adam Rubin. “It’s like a dragon and a boy getting along.”
Madeline Tanner, 9, said she picked out two Roald Dahl books, “Fantastic Mr. Fox” and “Esio Trot.”
“We’ve been reading his books in class,” she said. “I like them a lot.”
Jayln Quitana, 9, was especially taken with the book “Dog Man: Mothering Heights,” by Dav Pilkey.
“I love this book,” he said.
The class of about 25 students was one of four MLK classes to visit the Book Exchange on Wednesday. With 100 students getting 10 books each on any given Wednesday, and about 2,000 students per year receiving the 10 books, that means close to 20,000 free books have gone to children and families annually.
Nemzer estimates that up to about 160,000 books have been given away to Marin students and families since the field trips were started in 2014. Since 1987, Nemzer estimates that 500,000 books have been either sent to Marin schools for students to use, or given directly to students and their families.
Community organizer Bruce Burtch, who will take over as board president of the Book Exchange of Marin after Nemzer steps down, said Nemzer’s contributions have been vast.
“For over 37 years, Marilyn has been the guiding light of the Book Exchange, providing free books, raising the literacy levels and offering joy to hundreds of thousands of Marin students,” Burtch said.
For all her work, Nemzer has won numerous awards, including the national Jefferson Award for Public Service and the Award of Excellence from the Marin Economic Commission.
The upcoming changes in leadership also will be a break for Nemzer’s husband, Ken Nemzer, an attorney who has maintained the voluminous legal and tax documentation, accounting and other paperwork for the book exchange operations.
He has also engineered the upcoming transition to a single nonprofit. It has taken at least six months to make all the arrangements, Marilyn Nemzer said.
“I couldn’t have done it all without my husband,” she said. “I’m just so excited and proud that we don’t have to close — just because I’m not going to be running it anymore.”
“I feel truly blessed,” she said.
