Lakeland places excess inventory of old yearbooks up for sale | News Sun

The school’s yearbook office was assigned a new room this school year and decided it would be easier to sell old yearbooks than hang onto them and watch them continue to gather dust.

While yearbook students sometimes use those older books to look for ideas, most of them just sat untouched. The yearbook staff owns as many as 40 or 50 copies of particular years.

Selling the excess inventory of books won’t erase any school history. The yearbook staff owns a complete collection of yearbooks, dating back to 1965, Lakeland’s first graduating class. Another complete set is in the school’s library. And a third complete set is housed at Lakeland’s administrative office as well. So Lakeland’s history is well protected.

But having 500-plus aging books takes up a lot of extra space, so first-year yearbook advisor Samantha Stanford got permission to sell all those additional multi-year copies of the Mirage.

To get that ball rolling, Stanford put out a notice on Facebook hoping to let the school alumni know the excess collection was up for sale, and at just $10 a book. She included a list of yearbooks by year, showing how many books were available in each of those years.

Stanford said she was surprised just how quickly she started getting responses.

“That first night, by the time I went to bed, I had over 60 emails from people, and I still have tons of emails to go through,” she said. “We had multiple requests for many of the same years. The 1975 book was very popular and so were the 1992 and 1993 books.”

Unfortunately, Stanford said, she only had one extra copy of each of those three years so those single copies quickly disappeared.

In other years, such as the 2011 yearbook, the yearbook staff had 48 additional copies to sell. It had 64 extra copies for the 2007 yearbook.

Many people included stories with their email, explaining why they wanted a new yearbook.

“I had someone write asking to get two or three years of her high school yearbooks. She told me all of her books were ruined in a flood,” Stanford explained. “She was super excited about the opportunity to get these again.”

Another person told Stanford hers were stolen and she wanted to replace the four books she bought while she was in high school.

The money raised by the sale of these yearbooks will help the yearbook staff raise the funds the program needs to operate. Normally, the yearbook staff sponsors a November semi-formal dance that helps it raise the funds it needs, but last fall that dance was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic.

“We’re hoping this sale will fill in for the funds we normally would have raised holding the semi-formal,” she explained.