For three days in late October, the used-book economy of the Fargo-Moorhead metro will run on a single shared calendar. The Friends of the Fargo Public Library are hosting the second Metro-Wide Used Book Sale Crawl from Thursday, Oct. 22 through Saturday, Oct. 24, 2026, timed to National Friends of Libraries Week. The event is free and open to the public, and it is less a single sale than a small tour: the Friends groups of Fargo, Moorhead and West Fargo have coordinated their fall clear-outs so that a reader can spend a long weekend driving between them and come home with a carload.
The Fargo leg happens at the downtown Main Library, 101 4th St N. The stock is the usual Friends mix: gently used books alongside CDs, DVDs and other media, most of it withdrawn from library shelves or donated by the public.
What makes the crawl unusual is the cooperation behind it. Library Friends groups are typically hyper-local operations, each raising money for its own building and its own programs. Here, three groups on two sides of a state line — Fargo and West Fargo in North Dakota, Moorhead in Minnesota — agreed to promote a shared event rather than compete for the same Saturday shoppers. The format debuted in April 2026, when the three groups ran a joint crawl for National Library Week, April 23-25. That first outing came with a punch card that could only be completed by visiting a Fargo branch, the Moorhead library and the West Fargo library — a deliberate nudge to get book buyers to cross the Red River and the city limits. The October edition is the second running, and the first tied to National Friends of Libraries Week rather than National Library Week.
That timing is not incidental. National Friends of Libraries Week is coordinated nationally by United for Libraries, a division of the American Library Association, and 2026 marks the 21st annual edition, running Oct. 18-24. The week exists to celebrate the volunteer groups that raise money for library programming, and in many communities those groups fund the extras that public budgets do not cover. The crawl is that celebration translated into something tangible: shelves of books, priced to move, with the proceeds going back into the libraries.
The Friends of the Fargo Public Library have been doing this work since March 1995, when the organization was formed as a volunteer nonprofit supporting the city's library system. Its fundraising has paid for things that show up in a patron's week rather than a line item: the annual One Book, One Community reading program, the Northern Narratives project, StoryWalk installations, Crafternoons, Tuesdays for Toddlers, books for the Summer Reading Challenge, and furniture and equipment for the buildings. The group also runs used book sales at all three Fargo branches and sells book bags.
Its most visible enterprise is Second Editions, a small bookstore the Friends opened in 2009 on the first level of the downtown Main Library. Open during regular library hours and staffed by volunteers, it sells used books from the library alongside donated books and media, with proceeds funding programs throughout the year. Since July 2024 the store has been managed by Perry Bekkerus, a Barnesville, Minn., native who studied music education at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, taught choir in Nora Springs, Iowa, earned a master's degree at Florida State University, and then taught vocal music in Denison for more than 25 years before retiring into the bookstore job. The store accepts donations of books, DVDs, CDs and audiobooks, though not mass-market paperbacks, textbooks, magazines, old encyclopedias, VHS tapes, cassettes or damaged and musty items.
Second Editions matters to the crawl because it is where a lot of the inventory comes from, and because it illustrates what the Friends do with the money. The group is currently in the middle of a capital campaign to renovate the Dr. James Carlson Library, with a $100,000 goal aimed at keeping the south Fargo branch in step with the city's population growth — another reminder that the nickels and quarters from a used-book table add up.
The crawl also lands in a metro whose retail book landscape has been shifting. Zandbroz Variety, the Broadway store that anchored downtown book buying for 33 years, closed in June 2024. Ferguson Books & More left 214 Roberts Alley in October 2025, reopened inside Daily's Market as Fergie's Bookshops, and closed for good on Jan. 30, 2026, its shelving and stock sold on to Overbooked. Against that backdrop, the library Friends sales have become a more substantial part of how local readers find secondhand books — and the crawl is a way of making that circuit legible in one weekend.
Practical details are straightforward. The event is free, no ticket or registration is required, with Moorhead and West Fargo running their own sales during the same window. Friends members get a perk at Fargo sales — two free books — and membership is open to anyone who wants to support the library year-round.
For a metro split by a river and three separate library systems, the appeal is simple: one weekend, three towns, and a shared reason to walk into a library you might not otherwise visit.