Half Price Books―an Opportunity for Urantia Book Dissemination

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By Rod Holland, Dallas, Texas, USA

This impromptu Urantia Book placement project was conceived by Irmeli Sjölie, Urantia Book ambassador for Urantia Foundation, and Rod Holland, a member of the Urantia Book Fellowship. Irmeli purchased twenty new Urantia Books from the Foundation; Rod provided ten Urantia Books (five slightly used) from his personal library.

Rod then gifted the thirty books to Half Price Books, a large, independent, bookseller chain with fifteen branches in the Dallas/mid-cities area and a total of one hundred and eighteen stores in fourteen states. Half Price Books offers a unique environment for placement of Urantia Books since these stores sell high-quality books at great prices. Also, Half Price Books maintains long business hours, encourages casual browsing, and provides plentiful seating.

We placed the books two weeks before Christmas, and by mid-January, we checked on seven of the stores and five of them had sold a Urantia Book. This suggests that gifting new and slightly-used editions of The Urantia Book to all Half Price Book stores in the United States should become an ongoing, volunteer-based distribution effort.

Half Price Books typically pay minimal amounts for the books they sell (or receive by way of donation), but their monetary return is often sufficient to cover transportation expenses and the purchase of additional books to keep the project moving forward.

This volunteer distribution project will not result in profit, but it does result in helping to disseminate the teachings of an epochal revelation.