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CUBBERLEY
USED BOOK SALES
Saturday
January 13
10 am - 4 pm
Main Room opens at 11 am
Sunday
January 14
1 pm - 4 pm
Featured topics for
January:
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Baseball (lots!)
"Boy Books" Series
California Gold Rush
Chinese DVDs/Videotapes
Fitness and Nutrition
Harry Potter
History of Transportation
Literary Criticism of Faulkner
Little Golden Books
Maurice Sendak
Yoga
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 line that forms before the 11 am opening.
Each person may pick up one or two tickets.
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 and the Bargain Room open 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.
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Please Donate Paper Grocery Bags |
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Here's an easy way to help out the sale: please bring empty grocery bags and
give them to our volunteers at any time at the sale. We're always running low on
bags, so contributing these helps a lot! |
Library Closed for Martin Luther King Day |
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All
Palo Alto's libraries will be closed on Monday, January 15 for Martin Luther
King, Jr.'s birthday. Even
when the libraries are closed, you can still
search the online
catalog, submit
reference desk questions,
access many online resources, and
get book
recommendations. |
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, January 14.
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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Fiction Now Alphabetized by Author! |
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Thanks to a lot of extra work by our volunteers, all of our Main Room fiction sections
are now sorted by author. The main trade paperback section by the
western wall now has the A's in the corner, beginning with Chinua Achebe's
Anthills of the Savannah, right through to end of the alphabet with
Banan Yoshimoto's Amrita. Other fiction sections are Mystery,
Science Fiction, Hardback, Historical, 2005, 2006, and winners of the National Book Award, Nobel Prize for Literature, Pulitzer Prize, and Man
Booker Prize. We hope sorting by author makes it much easier for you to find specific works and want to
thank all the volunteers who helped out. |
Window Shop on Your Computer |
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Check out our shelf preview
pictures to see some of the tens of thousands of books for sale this weekend. |
Fence Alert |
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Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Robert Frost, The Mending Wall
We're
sorry to report that a new fence now separates the Cubberley Community
Center from the Charleston Shopping Center, where Piazza's and Pete's Coffee
are located. This means that you'll need to go out to Middlefield Road
to get from our booksale room to the shopping center. Others have
already complained about the fence, and a gate is planned for the middle of
it. In the meantime, we wanted everyone to know about the problem in
advance and regret any inconvenience it creates. See the
Palo
Alto Weekly article. |
Library Offers Extensive Free Genealogy Materials |
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You're just seconds away from researching your ancestors and
relatives in the massive Heritage Quest genealogy resource, which the
library recently obtained. Just go to the
library online resources webpage, click on the "Heritage Quest" link,
and enter your library card number. You can search for people through
various United States census records from the very first in 1790 up through
1930, which is the most recent available for public viewing. For
example, a search on the surname "Pelosi" finds a Louis Pelosi in Milwaukee
in 1860 who was the "director of the theater" at age 34. Heritage
Quest lets you search through many other genealogical databases as well.
The library also now offers the Ancestry.com genealogy resource, although
you must use it from computers at the branches. Ancestry.com contains
approximately two billion names from the U.S. census records and thousands
of books, government records, and genealogies. An annual membership in Ancestry.com costs $155 or more, so using it for free at the library is a
great bargain. |
Palo Altans Like Their Libraries |
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The City Auditor's office
asks Palo Altans annually about municipal services, including
the library. The
2005-2006 City of Palo Alto Citizen Survey
results were released recently and show that:
• 78% of Palo Altans rate our overall libraries as good
or excellent,
• 71% feel the variety of library materials is good or
excellent, and
• 73% rate our neighborhood branch libraries as good or
excellent.
Just 9% of those surveyed rated the neighborhood branch libraries as poor
and only 5% said the overall libraries were poor.
These statistics are approximately the same as in
previous years.
Other cities in the United States that use
the same survey also found generally high praise for
libraries. As a result, Palo Alto's high marks for its
overall libraries ranked only in the 60th percentile. However, these
rankings are volatile, as Palo Alto ranked in only the 40th percentile just two years ago. The variety of our
library materials also now ranks in the 43rd percentile,
up from the 38th percentile two years ago.
The survey found that
76% of survey participants used the library or its
services at least once a year and 32% visited more than
12 times a year. Non-residents account for 20% of
library circulation. |
2007 Officers and Board Members |
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The Friends of the Palo Alto Library has new officers and board members for 2007
based on the election held at last October's Annual Meeting. Our new president is Martha Schmidt,
who steps up from vice president since Betsy Allyn won't be able to serve as
president for personal reasons. Martha is a retired librarian who has served as the
City of Santa Clara's interim library director. She's
well-known to many of our booksale customers as a cashier on Saturday morning
and she has also helped sort incoming book donations.
Our new
vice president is Betsy Allyn, Margarita Quihuis will continue as
secretary, and Jeff Levinsky will be treasurer. John Burt, an avid booksale volunteer currently in charge of the
Non-Fiction and Movies/TV sections, is rejoining the Friends' board this year
and serving as assistant treasurer.
Enid Pearson, who served on the Palo Alto City Council in the 1960s and 1970s,
is also joining the Friends board. The other 2007 Friends board members
are Wendy Akers-Ghose, Rudy
Batties, Gretchen Emmons, Gerry Masteller, Bob Otnes, Marty Paddock, Gloria
Reade, Jim Schmidt, Barbara Silberling, Steve Staiger, Ellen Wyman, and Tom
Wyman. |
Polling to Shape Library Proposal |
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By a 9-0 [corrected] vote, Palo Alto City Council members decided in December to use an outside
polling firm to help gauge public interest in various library improvements,
including a new Mitchell Park
library and community center. The same polling effort is also likely to
ask about the proposed new public safety building / police station. The
first poll will occur early this year, perhaps in February or March. A second poll
is anticipated to hone the ballot language, with the ballot measures expected to
appear on the June 2008 ballot.
Some council members expressed concern about the approximately $40,000 needed
for polling, while others felt it was vital to determine how to attain the
necessary 2/3 majority.
You can learn more by reading the
Palo Alto Daily News and
Palo Alto
Weekly articles and our
previous coverage. |
Main Library Remodeling Underway |
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The Main Library is slated to stay open during most of a three-month
remodeling effort, which began this week. The project will shrink the
circulation desk to provide more display of books and media items, create a
new area in the rear for current periodicals, and make the public restrooms
more accessible. The remodeling was approved in early 2005, with
additional funding allocated in 2006. See
previous
coverage. |
Children's Library Progress |
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See our month-by-month
picture record of the Children's Library renovation and expansion. The
branch is currently scheduled to reopen in September 2007. Photo credit:
Ray Jadwin. |
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