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CUBBERLEY
USED BOOK SALES
Saturday,
October 14
Main Room
9 am - 4 pm for life members
10 am - 4 pm for other members
11 am - 4 pm for non-members
Bargain Room
9:30 am - 4 pm
Children's Room
10 am - 4 pm
Sunday,
October 15
1 pm - 4 pm
Featured topics for October:
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Africa
American Black Literature
Asian language books
Classics • Computers
Contemporary books in Hebrew
Cookbooks • Entomology
Erotic Art • Jamaica
Jane's Fighting Ships
(and 11 other Jane's titles)
Libraries and Collections
The Great Courses on Tape
Science
And over 50,000 other items
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4000 Middlefield Road
Palo Alto
Northwest corner of the Cubberley Community Center
Map
More information on the sales
Donate your old books
All proceeds go to help Palo Alto libraries.
Main Book Room Sale
In our Main Room, prices are way below what used book stores charge.
Paperbacks are 50 cents and up, and hardcovers are $1 and up. Numbered
tickets for the Main Room are given out beginning at 8 am on Saturday.
These reserve your place in the 10 am members-early line this month.
Each person may pick up only one ticket this month.
Children's Books in K6
Room K6 in the K wing (see
map) is
entirely filled with children's books and toys. You'll find picture books,
school age fiction, award winners, non-English titles, and books for parents and
teachers, many for under $1. This room opens at 10 am on Saturday.
Bargain Books in K7
Next door in K7 is the Bargain Room, where paperbacks
are 50 cents, hardcovers
are $1.00, and children's books are just 25 cents each. Pay just half of that in the
Bargain Room after 12:30 pm on
Saturday and all day on Sunday. On Sunday, you can also buy grocery
bags in the Bargain Room for $5 and fill them with books. The Bargain Room
opens at 9:30 am on Saturday this month.
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Children's Room Features Special Picture Books |
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You'll find many
fancy autographed and/or first edition picture books in the Children's Room this
month. Some of these are Caldecott and other award winners while other are popular newer titles.
Authors include Jan Brett, Maurice Sendak, Jack Prelutsky, Beverly Cleary, and
Jon Scieszka. These all come from a special collection of picture books recently donated to
us. |
Diane Jennings Named Library
Director |
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After a nationwide search, Palo Alto librarian Diane Jennings was named in
September as the City's new library director. Diane has served twice as Palo
Alto's interim library director, first in 2002-2004 and then again this year,
and also for many years as the familiar head of the Main Library.
Diane has an undergraduate degree from Duke University, a masters in library
science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and another
masters in Political Science with an emphasis on Public Administration from
Virginia Tech. She began working for the Palo Alto City Library
in 1986 when she and her husband came west for his doctoral studies at Stanford.
We congratulate Diane on her new (but familiar) position and wish her the best of success.
Recent
Foreword newsletter profile
Palo Alto
Weekly article |
Children's Library Floor Poured |
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Palo Alto's multi-million dollar renovation and expansion of the Children's Library is making great strides.
As the picture below shows,
the cement floor has now been
poured, so it's much easier to walk around inside the building. The checkout area
and staff areas on the west side of the building have been framed in, as have the
nearby loading dock and the area for librarians in the new wing.
Workers found that dry rot near the loading
dock had entirely eaten away a few wall studs, which will be repaired.
Meanwhile, the building's original single-paned windows will not be replaced,
but instead will have their frames refinished.
The Children's Library is scheduled to reopen in 2007. In the
meantime, see more
photographs of the latest activity. Photo credit: Barbara Silberling. |
Non-Profit Book Giveaway |
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Non-profit organizations and schools that need free books should come to the
Bargain Room this month from 4 to 6 pm on Sunday, October 15.
Please bring grocery bags to put books into.
More
information. |
Suggestions? |
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| We're always eager to hear your suggestions for ways to
improve our book sale. Please email them to us at suggestions@friendspaloaltolib.org
or mention them to a volunteer at the sale. |
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Members Admitted Early at This Weekend's Sale |
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This month's booksale is the once-a-year chance for members of the
Friends of the Palo Alto Library to be admitted early to the Main Room. Life members will get in at 9 am and can
purchase up to 50 books during that hour. At 10 am, the rest of our
members will be admitted and everyone can buy the usual 12 books at a time.
At 11 am, non-members will be admitted. The limit on purchasing 12 books at a time will
expire at noon.
Tickets for early arrivers will be handled
differently this month. The tickets given out will be for the 10 am line
at the Main Room, since most
people who come early are members of the Friends. There will be no
tickets for the 11 am line. Each member will get
just one ticket, although members at the $25 through $250 levels get to
bring in their families.
The Bargain Room will open at 9:30 am on Saturday, rather than the usual 10 am, so
that members can visit it at right at the start. The
Children's Room will have its usual hours of 10 am to 4 pm and all rooms are
open on Sunday from 1 to 4 pm as always.
Regular membership in the Friends
is only $15 ($10 for students and seniors, $25 for families) and is tax-deductible.
Members also receive a discount coupon for the sale, discounts at Books Inc.
at the Stanford Shopping Center,
and eligibility for the Stanford Federal Credit Union. If you're
not a member, avoid delay at the sale by joining
online
right now. |
Huge Hewlett-Packard Donation |
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When Hewlett-Packard's scientific research library in Palo Alto decided to
downsize a few months ago, it offered us a "large number of books" and
publications. That turned out to be almost 400 boxes of books and
journals, which by extraordinary effort our volunteers brought over to our book
sale and sorted through this past month.
Among the many interesting books are S. H. Kaisler's INTERLISP, the Language and Its Usage,
N. J. Cutland's Computability: An Introduction to Recursive
Function Theory, and Computability by George Tourlakis. The
many proceedings include the Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers (SS&C),
the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), and the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP).
Some of these items will be displayed
on our regular
science and computer shelves in the Main and Bargain rooms. Others will be
located on the specials tables and shelves where the Main Room checkout line
forms. We exhausted all of our space, so journals of lesser interest have
been passed along already to a technical university in India. We'd like to
acknowledge Hewlett-Packard for providing this donation and the heroic effort of
our volunteers in processing it. This is a wonderful community-minded gift
that we and our customers really appreciate. |
Window Shop on Your Computer |
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Check out our shelf preview
pictures to see thousands of the books for sale this weekend, including some
of the technical books donated by Hewlett-Packard. |
Farewell Megabooks |
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We're sorry to report that long-time Palo Alto bookstore Megabooks has
closed its doors. Located on University Avenue for many years, the
store held its final sale in mid-September and then donated 384 boxes of
books to our booksale, as well as
some furniture and supplies. It took a dozen of our volunteers to
carry all the books off. Our thanks to Megabooks and also to Faith Bell of Bell's
Books for her assistance. |
October 19 Annual Meeting
Includes Mini-Booksale |
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Our Annual Meeting on Thursday, October 19 will include a mini-booksale inspired
by the many countries that Los Angeles Times reporter Richard Paddock, the evening's
speaker, has covered. Richard served overseas in almost 50 countries, including Russia, Indonesia, and Iraq.
He covered such events as the killing of civilians by U.S. troops in Iraq, the
Bali nightclub bombing, the resurgence of headhunting in Borneo, and the Indian
Ocean tsunami.
Richard also explored remote parts of Asia and the South
Pacific and wrote unusual feature stories, such as the use of giant stone money on the
Micronesian island of Yap. He will talk about
the life of a foreign correspondent, the dangers of working as an American
journalist overseas, and how the United States is viewed from abroad.
The
annual meeting will also feature the yearly election
of our board members and officers. The nominees for
2007-2008 board seats are Rudy Batties, John Burt, Gretchen Emmons, Jeff Levinsky,
Gerry Masteller, Enid Pearson, Gloria Reade, Steve Staiger, and Ellen Wyman.
The nominees for next year's officers are Betsy Allyn as President, Martha
Schmidt as Vice President, Margarita Quihuis as Secretary, Jeff Levinsky as
Treasurer, and John Burt as Assistant Treasurer.
The meeting includes refreshments, is free to the public, and begins at
7:30 pm at the Palo Alto Arts Center Auditorium at 1313 Newell Road. |
Library Collection Improvements
Studied |
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On September 28, Palo Alto's Library Advisory Commission reviewed the library
collection policies and expenditures to consider what improvements to propose for an
upcoming library ballot measure. Palo Alto currently enjoys one of the largest
collections and collection budgets in California among cities of our size.
Palo Altans also check out among the most items per capita in the
state, for a total circulation of 1.3 million in the
2005-2006 fiscal year. This was approximately the same as the previous year and
close to our all-time record, even though the Children's Library closed in
December 2005 for a two-year renovation and expansion and the loan period
lengthened in July 2005 from three to four weeks, which generally lowers circulation.
During
2005-2006, the Mitchell
Park branch checked out 525,105 items, up 8% from the previous year.
Combined, the Main Library and the nearby Children's Library circulated 613,271
items, declining 7% from the prior year perhaps because of the longer loan period
and closure. The smaller Downtown Library checked out 49,962 items, up 19%
from the year before, while the College Terrace Library circulated 89,146 items,
down by 7%. In addition, 3,063 e-books were checked out over the Internet.
The library staff observed that if the quality is maintained a smaller collection can serve as well as a
larger one. As an example, Mitchell Park's collection of 79,165 items
generated almost as many checkouts this past year as Main's and Children's combined but is only
about half the size.
Books remain popular, accounting for about 60% of
overall circulation, with DVDs and videos representing another 24%. Music CDs, books on CD,
and other items make up the
remainder.
Library Director Diane Jennings noted that duplication in the collection isn't
that different from cities with just one library, which also acquire multiple
copies of high-demand titles. The main impact of Palo Alto's multiple
branches on collections is the purchase of extra copies of magazines, newspapers,
and popular children's and teen paperback series.
The staff suggested a number of ways to improve the collection, but Commission
members expressed concerns about costs, benefits, and how to apportion
extra funds among branches. The commissioners selected four top recommendations
from among the options presented by staff: spend over $1 million to enlarge
Mitchell Park's collection to 150,000 items
if the building is expanded or replaced, provide $4,000 more each year to improve the variety of
e-books, spend $3,300 annually to support a children's collection at Main
after the Children's Library reopens, and buy $31,600 of additional materials
a year for the College Terrace and Downtown branches. Library staff will
come back with more information on some of the other proposed options.
The Commission will hold three more meetings on its
proposed library upgrades, which also include replacing or expanding the Mitchell Park library and
extending hours at most branches. The public is invited to attend the meetings, which are always
held at 7 pm at City Hall, 250 Hamilton Ave, or to email comments to
library.commission@cityofpaloalto.org. The
remaining meetings and
topics are:
October 12 - new library technology
October 26 - capital expenditures and staffing
November 16 - final review before presentation to City Council |
Palo Alto Reads
Underway |
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 Over
300 people attended the
kickoff lecture by Palo Alto resident Firoozeh Dumas
about her book
Funny
in Farsi: A Memoir of
Growing Up Iranian in America. Many more events are upcoming in
the library's Palo Alto Reads … Funny in Farsi community reading
program, and all are free to the public:
October 15 - Teen/Parent
book discussion on Funny
in Farsi. Persian treats
and tea served. 3:30 pm,
Mitchell Park Library.
October 19 - Friends of the Palo Alto Library Annual Meeting with guest
speaker Richard C. Paddock, an Los Angeles Times journalist who had
two recent Baghdad
assignments. 7:30 pm, Palo Alto Art Center
Auditorium.
October 20 - A Persian
Excursion celebrating
Middle Eastern cultures
with poetry, dance and
music. Persian
refreshments served. 7:30 pm,
Main Library.
October 24 - Book
Discussion
Group - Funny
in Farsi. Bring
your lunch. Persian treats
and tea. Noon,
Downtown
Library.
October 25 - After
School Special: Tales
from the Arabian Nights for grades K-5. 3:30 pm,
Main Library.
November 1 - Starlight
Special: Roya Ansari
presents Iran—Ancient
Land, Civilization,
People and Culture for ages 4 & up.
7:00 pm, Mitchell Park Library.
November 4 - The
Future of US/Iran
Relations with Reza Aslan, NPR commentator and author of
No
God But God: the Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam. 7:00 pm,
Cubberley
Theater.
November 8 - Book
Discussion Group:
Funny in Farsi. Persian
treats and tea served. 7:30 pm,
College
Terrace Library.
You can read comments on the book and add your
own at the
Palo Alto Reads Blog and find
more information at the
Palo Alto Reads website. Our thanks to the generous donors who
contributed to this project. |
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