A couple months before facing hefty bills for Winter Quarter book-buying, students stocked up on cheap finds at the University Library Book Sale on Tuesday.

Jane Mackie, a Weinberg senior, left with four books for $10 Music graduate student Christine Billaux decided to wait until later in the week to make her selections.

“I could spend hours looking at books,” Billaux said. “If I start buying some, I won’t stop.”

Faculty and students got a sneak peak at the wares, but the general public will get a first chance to shop today from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.

The sale features about 12,000 books, some for as little as 50 cents a copy. Tuesday’s earnings totaled more than $4,100, said Jessica Bartlett, the library’s gift coordinator and the sale’s organizer.

The sale runs through Friday in the Ver Steeg Faculty Lounge on the third level of the library’s south tower. Hours on Thursday and Friday are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. All books are 50 percent off Thursday, and a regular-sized shopping bag of books costs $1 on Friday, Bartlett said.

Selections include English fiction, children’s books, medicine and health titles and African history books, among other choices. Philosophy and European history titles and multi-volume sets were especially popular Tuesday, Bartlett said.

“Everyone has their own taste,” she said. “We have a huge number of art books, and those are selling pretty quickly.”

Maria Goff-Shih, the spouse of a faculty member, struggled under a stack of about a dozen books Tuesday at the sale.

“There were some good finds,” she said. “Nearly half the fun of going to things like this is the thrill of discovery.”

Some books were formerly part of the library’s collection, but “most are gifts to the library that either were out of scope for us or were already in our collection,” Bartlett said.

Hardcover books cost $3, regular paperbacks are $2 and mass-market paperbacks are 50 cents. Select titles are more expensive.

About 800 of the books on sale are overstocked titles from the NU Press. Although those books are unused, most are priced the same as other books.

Proceeds from the sale, which the library holds every few years, fund the replacement of missing or damaged books. The last sale in November 2001 brought in more than $9,000, an attainable goal for this year, Bartlett said.

Although the last sale wrapped up with 4,000 books left, Bartlett said her “personal goal (this year) is to have 10 books left.”