WHITE LAKE, NY — Margaret Hickman is a volunteer at the Past Perfect Bookstore, which sells gently used hardcover, softcover, large print, audio and children’s books, as well as magazines, jigsaw puzzles, movies and music. They are all donated and sold to raise funds for Literacy Volunteers of Sullivan County, an organization that helps adults improve their reading skills. 

Hickman explained the pleasure she gets during the three-hour shift that she has been working each week for the past two years: “I have three hours to read, to sit and read uninterrupted, except if somebody comes in.”

When someone does come in, she said, “Most people kind of know what they want,” so she just tells them that she is there to help them if they need her and lets them browse. 

She had a 37-year career employed by Shoprite, first as a cashier and then working her way up to become a scanning coordinator.

“When I was out on the floor, I helped the customers,” she recalled. This experience enables her to continue to feel comfortable interacting with people in the years since she retired.

Working at the Past Perfect Bookstore is not Hickman’s first volunteering experience. She’d taken a first aid course and was approached by a woman who’d been volunteering at the Monticello Volunteer Ambulance Corps for years.

The woman asked her, “Why don’t you join us?” and told her, “You’d ride a six-hour shift a week.” Hickman was raising her young children at the time and still working at Shoprite, but she volunteered anyway, riding in an ambulance on her day off. “I loved it, helping people,” she said, “I did it for a lot of years.”

Once she retired, she had more time to read, something she loved to do. Since she lived locally, she knew about the Past Perfect Bookstore, having come in to buy some books there. A volunteer told Hickman that the bookstore was always looking for volunteers. Hickman thought about it for a while and, because of her desire to give back to the community, she returned to the bookstore and agreed to become a volunteer there.

Hickman knows the importance of having a local bookstore because she herself values holding a hardcover or softcover book in her hands over downloading it onto a device such as a Kindle. She tried that once and didn’t like it. “Holding a book is like having a friend.”

Besides helping visitors to the bookstore find what they’re looking for, Hickman also has other responsibilities. She unlocks the front door when she arrives to begin her shift and puts out a sign indicating that the bookstore is open, because people can’t see the building from the road. Sometimes she finds a box of donated books people have left at the door. 

“When I unpack the books, I go through them, make sure they’re not damaged in any way or written in,” she said. “Then I clean them, wiping them down… because a lot of them are dusty.”

When she makes a sale, there is a book in which she lists each item and its cost. At the end of her shift, she adds up the day’s total and leaves the money and the book in the store to be picked up later. She removes the sign, indicating that the bookstore is no longer open, and locks the front door. 

More people come into the bookstore in the summer than at other times of the year. Hickman is especially happy when they bring their children with them. “Sometimes the children will sit on the floor and they’ll pull the books out,” she said. “It just gives me joy to see that.” 

She believes that children need to be introduced to books when they’re young and to have a library of their own. “When my grandchildren were little, their mother was always buying them books. To me, reading is the basis for everything. If you can’t read, you can’t learn.”

Although Hickman has no plans to leave the Past Perfect Bookstore, she said, “I’d love to volunteer at one of the animal shelters, but I can’t. I’m too emotional. It just breaks my heart to see those animals caged.”

She laughed, adding that if she did volunteer there, “I would have 27,000 cats in my house.”