Dale Riepe has more books than he needs at home, so he’s been slowly shedding tomes during the past six months.
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Every week, the 87-year-old retired philosophy professor takes a few to the Olympia library, some because they’re too heavy for him to enjoy, others because he just doesn’t plan to read them again.

The Friends of the Library group takes them off his hands and puts them on its sale shelf to raise money for the library.

But the group was surprised last week when Riepe produced a 300-year-old Latin volume librarians say won’t go on the $1 table: it’s likely worth as much as $1,000.

Group members will meet with rare book dealers to find its true value, and then auction it off and spend the proceeds on library programs.

Riepe, long a benefactor of the arts — he’s been active with a half-dozen galleries and museums, the Washington State Historical Society and The Evergreen State College library — suddenly is something of a library celebrity.

‘De Rerum Natura”

The book, an edition of the poem “De Rerum Natura” (On the Nature of Things) by the Roman author Lucretius, has generated a buzz.

“We were all very excited when we got it here last week,” said librarian Cheryl Heywood, cradling the gold-embossed, calf-skin-bound volume, published in 1712. “It’s fun to touch history.”

Although the library won’t stock the book — “We don’t keep rare books,” Heywood said. “I don’t think this would stay on the shelf” — libraries consider it a valuable donation, a gem among the 60 to 80 boxes of books they get donated every week.

“When I saw this one last week, time stood still,” Heywood said.

At the Olympia home where Riepe lives with his wife, Charleine, it’s hard to turn a corner without bumping into a historical volume.

The walls of almost every room are lined with bookshelves.

Squeezing through a hallway with more room devoted to book storage than pathway, Riepe pointed out a few that jumped out to him: “The Essays of Montaigne,” “The Life of Delacroix,” a well-worn Sanskrit-English Dictionary.

“Here’s a history of Herodotus, if you want to read it,”
Riepe offered.

Riepe taught philosophy at the State University of New York Buffalo campus for most of his academic career; his wife of 58 years taught Greek and Latin at high schools and at the university. They also spent years abroad, mostly in Asian countries, because Riepe focused his studies on Eastern religions.

The bibliophiles estimate they have between 8,000 and 9,000 works in their library.

“We’ve never counted,” said Charleine Riepe. “When we moved from Buffalo, we had 500 boxes — just of books.”

Lately, Dale has been winnowing the volumes.

“Wherever he is in the house, he decides, ‘Oh, this ought to go,’ ” Charleine said. “I think he’ll just see something and say, ‘This is better at the library than with me.’ ”

Riepe enjoys donating to the library because he wants to share his collection with new readers, he said, and he likes to free up room on his shelves.

“You get more space for new books,” he said.

He didn’t think much of giving up the centuries-old Lucretius volume.

Of the half-dozen languages he reads, Latin is not among them. The book was his wife’s.