Marina gets a new bookstore, run by a nonprofit, in support of the library.

When Marina resident Joanne Bowman first started volunteering five years ago with Friends of the Marina Library, she and her husband, after volunteering at the nonprofit’s book sale, were asked to take a truckload of books to the Marina landfill.

“I cried and said, ‘Never again, I’m not doing that,’” she says.

She never did, and now, Bowman is preparing to open The Friends of the Marina Library bookstore on Reservation Road.

“I created this monster that’s just taken off,” she says. “I had no idea it would become so big. There has been so much support and involvement it’s phenomenal.”

That support largely comes from the army of volunteers Bowman has helped marshal to make the nonprofit’s bi-monthly book sales wildly successful over the last few years. Now, Bowman says, the sale’s reputation has grown to the point that donated books are pouring in at a rate faster than the book sales can sell them. The bookstore, which will be open six hours a day for six days a week, is intended to solve that.

“I’m so excited to offer this to the community because there’s really big demand,” says Bowman, a retired accountant whose organizational acumen has been the guiding force for the book sales’ success.

“She’s a numbers person,” says Cristina Medina-Dirksen, FOML’s board president. “We really have it down to a methodical operation.”

That wasn’t always the case: The nonprofit has been hosting book sales for years, but the books were less organized and harder to find.

Bowman applied her expertise, and with the help of scores of volunteers, turned the operation into a fine-tuned machine where thousands of titles are painstakingly sorted by genre. In early 2014, Bowman launched an Amazon bookstore, and makes daily trips to the post office to ship off books.

“I hit all 50 states in the first year,” she says. “I’ve shipped to 26 countries and four territories.”

The bookstore will be entirely volunteer-run, and most books will be priced at 10 percent of their retail value (and because of a nonprofit exemption, there will be no sales tax). Once the overhead expenses are paid, every dollar will go back to the Marina Library to buy books; last year, Friends gave the library $15,000.

Over the next month, volunteers will sort and move thousands of books now held at Marina Mini Storage, where Friends has both a unit and an office. Standing in the office on a recent afternoon, Bowman and Medina-Dirksen are joined by volunteer Rebecca Avegalio and her 5-year-old twins Laina and Fata, who help with sorting books.

“It’s really a community effort,” Medina-Dirksen says. “It’s almost like a co-op.”

Bowman says nearly 200 volunteers pitch in every year. “Everything I’ve done has grown beyond my expectations,” she says, adding that she’s excited for the next chapter: “Opening a bookstore is a big offering to the community.”

She expects the store to open in late October or early November.