You never know what you will find at the Friends of the Lawrence Public Library book sale.

Here I am strolling down one of the many aisles on the opening day of the sale, and I find on a shelf the answer to all my yard problems: “The Grass is Always Greener over the Septic Tank.” Or on another shelf I find what surely will come in handy in today’s international world: The Concise Oxford Spanish Dictionary. It was 4 inches thick. I’m holding out until my semi-truck arrives, and I’ll buy the unconcise version. (I’m sure, by the way, I eventually will find “unconcise” listed as an actual word in the very unconcise versions of English dictionaries.)

And then sometimes you are really shocked by what you find: “The Best of the Best from Missouri.” I had no idea the publishing industry experimented with books with large amounts of doodle space.

But what surprises me the most are the lines. In order to shop at the sale during its opening day, you must be a member of the Friends of the Lawrence Public Library organization. The group has some enthusiastic members because the doors to the sale did not open until 5 p.m., but people started lining up at 3:30 p.m. Mary Burchill — one of three women who while sitting around a kitchen table 42 years ago decided to start the friends of the library organization — said the lines should not surprise me.

“Lawrence is a community that loves books,” says Burchill, who is the current chairwoman of the friends organization.

We love them, it appears, for varied reasons. There are many people in line who will fill up boxes and bags full of books, and will read every single one of them. There are others who won’t. It doesn’t take you long to realize there are two types of people at the book sale: flippers and scanners. Flippers are most of us. We flip through a book, maybe read the back cover and decide whether to make a purchase.

Then, there are scanners. This one fellow had a tabletlike device strapped onto this forearm. In his hand, he had a scanner that could quickly read the ISBN number of the book. The tablet would display what that book currently is selling for on Amazon. It is a system that allows for very quick purchases. I do mean quick, as one scanner had a box the size of a fruit case more than halfway full within two minutes of the sale opening.

Some of the flippers don’t care much for the scanners because while you are still snickering about “The Best of the Best from Missouri,” the scanners have loaded up sections A-F of the nonfiction section onto a cargo plane. But I did manage to talk to a couple of scanners, and I found them to be lovers of books as well.

“This still lets me be around books,” said Mary Allen, a retired bookstore owner who goes to about two such sales a month. “I’m not getting rich, but I’m having lots of fun.”

At this sale, you can’t throw a book (pray that it is not the unconcise version of the Spanish dictionary) without hitting a book lover.

Jan Loux estimates she reads two to three books per week. Janet Mody, at 80 years old, reads at least a couple of books per week. It was not uncommon to talk to people who say they have more than a thousand books in their homes.

Twenty years ago, people were not sure this would be the case. Kids of the 1980s were glued to television sets and video games. Technology had turned the world into one of pictures, not words. Then along came the Internet, and there was a worry it would kill reading, until we discovered that the Internet was billions of pages full of paragraphs, sentences and words. There is less worry today, it seems, that the joy of reading is going to become a thing of the past. The most successful book series of this generation was geared toward teens: Harry Potter.

“My theory is that every kid loves to read, if they find the right book,” says Mody, who is a retired high school English teacher.

But it does help if children get in the habit of reading early, she says. This sale helps with that too. Mody is part of a group that buys children’s books for women who are incarcerated at the state prison in Topeka. The female inmates are recorded reading the books, then a copy of the video recording and the book are delivered to the women’s children. Finding more children’s books was at the top of Mody’s shopping list today.

“If you ever get a chance to talk to a mother there, you can really tell how much it means to her to read a book to her child,” she says.

There were several children or grandchildren in tow at the sale, and it sure appears that there is going to be a healthy crop of readers in the future.

“When my husband and I would find out we were having a baby, the first piece of furniture we would buy for the baby’s room was a bookshelf,” Loux says. “We would have it full of books before we ever got the next piece of furniture bought.”

Indeed, Lawrence does love books. It is one of the things that makes Lawrence. A full bookshelf in a baby’s room does too. That’s the great thing about loving books. It helps us love lots of other things along the way.

Like green grass. “The Grass is Always Greener over the Septic Tank” was taken before I left the sale.

At last check, “The Best of the Best from Missouri” was still available.