Dear Reader

We would like to share a bit about ourselves and why we opened Thoroughly Read Books. (FYI: “read” is pronounced like “red”.)

We are a small town, homeschooling family. We love to read; it’s one of our favorite sources of entertainment and education. As a large family with a single income, we have had to rely on secondhand books for much of our reading. We have fallen in love with the very idea of well loved books: they have told incredible stories, intrigued minds, touched hearts, travelled far distances, and started to show physical signs of that beautiful lifelong journey. We have become pretty good at finding inspiring stories on jam packed thrift store shelves, magical tales stacked precariously high on garage sale tables, and hidden gems in large book lots online.

• We believe books should be well loved and thoroughly read. 
• We believe a book deserves to be plucked from the shelf, thrown in a bag, and taken to a park bench or the beach or an airport to be read. We believe a book should be shared with a family member or friend, and possibly come back with a few more wrinkles to the spine or crinkles to the pages. We believe if a book’s owner has decided to pass it along, we should help it get into the hands of someone excited to give its story a try. 

There’s nothing wrong with wanting a crisp, new book to read or collect; however, there are so many used books collecting dust on shelves and we are on a mission to get them into the hands of new readers.

Now, specifically about why we created our Blind Date Books: we thought, “How do we help these used books get into new readers’ hands?” We all can pass up a great story by “judging a book by its cover” so what do we do to help readers see past the imperfections of a used book? The answer was to create an excitement to getting a used book by hiding the book’s title/author, and making it a joyful experience finding out what the story is inside the book. The idea of Blind Date Books (BDB) is not unique; when we went looking for inspiration we found many incredible makers on Etsy already selling BDB. We took all that inspiration and put our own art style into making our BDB extra beautiful to look at and extra fun to open. We also do things a little differently than most by only offering used books, offering older titles (though there can on rare occasion be newly released titles), and being truly “blind date” by only offering a synopsis and basic publishing information, and not offering to wrap specific titles or use readers’ book lists to make sure they don’t get a book they already read. We offer as many fun and usable goodies with our BDB as we possible can, some are purchased in bulk at low prices that we pass directly on to you, and we are proud to include some of our personally designed and handmade products, as well.

Our books come from thrift stores, garage sales, online sites, library sales, etc. We make sure that every book we send to you is in at least “good” condition, with most of our books actually being in “very good” to “like new” condition. There may be, but not limited to, very minimal writing inside the book (as in a name, library stamp, etc.), dents to covers, slightly crinkled edges, bent page corners, slight damage to dust jackets, normal wear and creasing to spine, signs of sticker removal, signs of aging, etc. 

Our books still have plenty of life left for multiple readings or to pass on to many more readers, and even if they are a bit worn, they will be in a condition worthy of proudly displaying in your home library. 

(To find out more about our BDB, please visit the “Blind Date Books” page.)

We are also always working on improving and adding to our handmade product selections. Book lovers need their bookish goodies, right? Using everything we can think of, including scrap paper, yarn, ribbon, bits and bobs, etc., we experiment with making fancy tassel bookmarks, book bag clip on tassels, art prints, and so much more.

(To find out more about who we are, please visit the “Meet Us” page.)