Library News

This week (April 6-12) is National Library Week and the Library has lots of things going on this week and through the month.

April is National Poetry Month.

April is also Earth Month.

April is also Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) Heritage Month.

You could find out about these sorts of things in a slightly more timely manner by subscribing to the Library's mailing list. Like us, they send one or two messages per month, more usually one.

You can find out about other things they want you to know from the Palo Alto City Library Blogs page. Or you can subscribe to them with an RSS reader.

-Frank McConnell

 
April Sale Notes

Our April Sale will feature many great books. In our Children's Room look for lots of Golden Books, books about parenting, books by Beatrix Potter and Shel Silverstein as well as a wide selection of Manga and Dog Man Graphic Novels. In the Main Room we have loads of Genealogy, MCAT study books in Reference and in European Languages we have many incredible Spanish books and loads of French fiction by women authors. Immanuel Kant? No Immanuel Can with over 20 of his books in Philosophy. Check out the great Poetry deals during National Poetry Month as well as the beautiful books in Home & Crafts. Don't forget to check out our beautiful Art book selection. See you at the sale!

-Sven-Erik Geddes

 
Sale Parking for April

The City's work to construct Temporary Fire Station Number Four in the parking lot closest to our Main Room has begun and a part of that parking lot is fenced off, which limits available parking in that lot.

You can park in the larger lot at the rear of the campus by the baseball and soccer fields, then walk past the tennis courts to the Main Room. The best way to get into that larger lot is probably to enter the campus at the Middlefield/Montrose intersection, drive toward the back of the campus, then turn right, go past our Children's Room and turn left to get to the large parking lot at the rear.

-Frank McConnell

 
SF&F and Comics

This month's batch of Ace Doubles is so big we had to move it to the special event shelves near the front door. It's mainly the 35-cent D series and later unlettered ones, but a few stragglers from other series are there. A few very early Dean Koontz novels are featured, these are hard to find since they were never reprinted.

In Comics: a lot of new manga, Sandman, Omaha the Cat Dancer, and oversize collections of Uncle $crooge McDuck and DC Wednesday Comics stand out.

Shelf pictures at fopalbooks.com.

-Rich McAllister

 
Music Pop Up Sale

There will be no Music Pop Up Sale this month. It will return in May with a huge selection of new releases, including some specially curated CDs.

-George Chaltas

 
Music CDs

Once again the CD section will be offering SEALED (new) CDs for sale at a fraction of their cost on Amazon. In addition, in the absence of a Music Pop Up sale, there will be quality vinyl for sale in the CD section. Check it out!

-John, the CD guy

 
Home & Crafts

In Fashion this month, look for Liberty Equality Fashion: The Women Who Styled the French Revolution. For a modern American look, you'll find New York Fashion: The Evolution of the American Style by Caroline Rennolds Milbank. In home decorating don't miss Home Body: A Guide to Creating Spaces You Never Want to Leave. And a must-read: If the Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home by Lucy Worsley. There are lots of titles for home maintenance and improvement: organizing, storage, and even Moving Mom and Dad! Home styles in April include: Ibiza: A Mediterranean Lifestyle, Berlin Style edited by Angelika Taschen, Irish houses and Paris interiors, and a beautiful book on Houses and Palaces of Andalusia.

April showers of floral designs will guide May flowers to your tables; in April look for ideas in Floral Arts for decorating and arranging flowers, as well as creating potpourri. This month in the Crafts section you'll find the Super Cute World and other coloring books. Discover Paperie: The Art of Writing and Wrapping Paper. Bedazzle your friends with A World of Beads, or be inspired by the Crafts of Mexico. In Fabric Arts pursue an array of resources: sewing, knitting, and quilting guides, as well as crocheting, embroidery, and needlepoint. For starters, you might try Knitting in Plain English.

eShelf photos can be found at https://fopalbooks.com/crafts.html.

-Virginia Perry

 
Antiques & Collections

In April we feature jewelry collections from Bulgari, as well as traditional jewelry from India. This month there are several splendid books on toys: Antique Toys by Gwen White, Timeless Toys by Tim Walsh, and American Antique Toys by Bernard Barenholz and Inez McClintock. There are also a few new books on dollhouses and their interiors. Find titles on coins and stamps, furniture and rugs, and other resources for your collecting reference.

eShelf photo can be found at https://fopalbooks.com/crafts.html.

-Virginia Perry

 
Poetry

Winter's done, and April's in the skies;
Earth, look up with laughter in your eyes.
This month brings a brand new op:
High Value books, ten dollars a pop.
Books selling online for twenty or more
Can now be yours for a ten dollar score.
The top shelf's where you'll find these buys
So come on in and claim your prize,

(Shelf photos at https://fopalbooks.com/poetry.html)

-Mandy MacCalla

 
Art

Shelf and book photos at https://www.instagram.com/p/DIFENW6z6qH/?img_index=1

-Fiona

 
Judaica

Browse the Judaica section for books on the Jewish religion and culture including editions of the Torah and other basic texts, Kabbalah, Jewish history, the Holocaust, memoirs, Israel, Jewish Women, the Jewish American Experience and other related subjects.

Special interest this month -

• World Perfect - The Jewish Impact on Civilization
• Understanding the Talmud
• Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke's Louisiana
• A Bookshop in Berlin: The Rediscover were Memoir of One Woman's Harrowing Escape from the Nazis
• (((Semitism))): Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump

Special for this Passover season -

• The Telling : How Judaism's Essential Book Reveals the Meaning of Life

Most fiction with Jewish themes will be found in Modern Literature/Classics or Current Fiction. Books entirely in Hebrew are shelved in the European Languages section.

Shelf photos at https://fopalbooks.com/judaica.html

-Charlotte Epstein, Judaica Section Manager

 
Children's Room

Several holidays to celebrate in April and early May: Passover (April 12-20), Easter (April 20), Cinco de Mayo (May 5), and Mother's Day (May 11). We have lots of books for each of them. April is Poetry Month, so be sure to check out the bins of poetry books in the Picture Books area. (National Scrabble Day and Hairstylist Appreciation Day also fall in April, but I'm sorry to report that we have no books for those observances.)

Our Beginning Readers section has many inexpensive sets of short books on history and science topics.

In Parenting you'll find books for new parents and parents of teens, and ages in between, with plenty of good advice.

Look on the Non-fiction shelves for books on a wide selection of subjects, as always, including Boy Scout handbooks.

The Picture Books section is bursting with books, including a ton of Golden Books; many giftable hardbacks including a Young Australian series; Shel Silverstein poetry and story books; and Beatrix Potter story collections. You'll also find the Sesame Street Library Treasury series, and Pete the Cat, Clifford the Big Red Dog, Curious George, Daniel Tiger, Arthur, Mercer Mayer stories, Maisy stories, Marvel Avengers series, and the Magic School Bus series.

On the counter under the front windows we offer a number of interactive board books, with buttons to push, music to play, flaps to open, etc., always appealing to little ones. Lots of board books in the Llama Llama series, too, and alphabet and number books.

If you love beautifully illustrated classics, our School-age Fiction section is for you. Look for the following: Carl Sandburg's Rootabaga Stories; Treasure Island; King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table; Poems of Childhood; and Treasury of Classic Fairy Tales. If you're in the market for book sets, we have Classic Adventures of Paddington Bear; Nancy Drew; and Tom Swift. You can't miss the bookcase full of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series--it's packed like never before! For the early chapter book reader you'll find Bad Kitty books by Nick Bruel. In the fantasy section we have Percy Jackson and the Olympians, and the Divergent series. Another book in the Hunger Games series will soon be released. While you wait, check out the most recent book in the series in our teen section: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.

Special offerings in our Activity section include craft kits, bags of Legos, and an art case full of supplies. Be sure to visit our well-stocked graphic novels shelves featuring a particularly large collection of Dog Man, Calvin and Hobbes, and manga (including a Collector's Edition Cardcaptor Sakura).

-Carolyn Davidson

 
Children's Vintage

There's some fun stuff in children's vintage this month. How about an Edward Lear coloring book or Betty Boop paper dolls? A rich selection of fables and myths or Horizon Caravel books on explorers and heroes/heroines? Some especially nice little kids books in dust jackets or some nice copies of classic stories for older readers? Shelf pictures are available at www.fopalbooks.com.

The children's vintage section is located in a cozy nook in the left hand corner of the children's portable. Books are initially priced at 50% of the lowest comparable online price and then marked down by an additional 50% for another two months. What an affordable way to add to your collection! Even more children's vintage books can be found at our eBay store https://www.ebay.com/str/friendsofthepaloaltolibrary

-Lisa Heitman

 
European Languages

In Spanish, we have various books by Miguel Delibes or about his work.

We have lots of French books (mostly fiction, many by women), including a novel (Ailleurs) about a grown-up only child who finds out at his father's bedside that he actually has 52 siblings from 52 different prostitutes in Ferrara, and sets out to visit them all....

-Susan Strain

 
Reference

The Reference section this month contains an abundance of MCAT (Medical College Admission Test) study materials, including complete sets from Kaplan and Princeton.

-Bruce Heflinger

 
Sociology/Anthropology

The Sociology/Anthropology section offers 421 books for the April sale. The four sub-sections with the most books are Cultural Anthropology (77), Theory and Methods (76), U.S.: Self-Reflection (43), and Race (40). The number of books in the remaining thirteen sub-sections varies from 4 in the Social Movement and Political Sociology sub-section to 26 in the Cultural Anthropology: Asia sub-section. All sections offer something unique and appealing. For instance, the Theory and Methods sub-section features a classic research work on declining social ties in communities: Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert D. Putnam. The significance of this 2000 book is well illustrated by the title of an interview with Putnam: "Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone sounded an alarm we still haven't answered," which appeared in The Harvard Gazette in 2024.

-Natalia Koulinka

 
Genealogy

Explore your family roots with our special selection of genealogy books. This section will be featured on the shelf to the right of our popular science section, right near the entrance. These books will be of particular interest those with family origins in colonial New England.

-Wy Ais

 
Philosophy

Available for our April 2025 sale FOPAL has received an unusual collection of books by or about Immanuel Kant. The twenty two books include editions in German and editions in English, six titles from the academic publishing house de Gruyter, as well as assorted publications containing essays on Kant. Books typically only sold through our high value channels are included in this sale to give our monthly sales attendees first chance to buy them.

Shelf photo can be found at https://fopalbooks.com/philosophy.html.

-Nigel Jones

 
Nature

Teddy Roosevelt once said, "There is nothing so American as our national parks.... The fundamental idea behind the parks...is that the country belongs to the people, that it is in process of making for the enrichment of the lives of all of us." With that in mind, this month the Nature section is highlighting our beautiful National Parks and getting outdoors, including with vintage newsletters from the 1920s and oversized photo books centered on Yosemite, Death Valley and more within our state. Don't forget to pick up some books about bushwacking and wilderness survival, because wilderness does not care about cell phone reception.

-Serena Bramble

 
Computers

Remember that language you were going to check out? Was it Ada or APL? Haskell, Lucid or Modula-2? Or was it Prolog or Scala or Smalltalk? All those and others are waiting for you here!

-David Cortesi

 
Self Help/Personal Growth

Featured Books this month: The Let Them Theory (#1 on Amazon!); The Creative Act -- A way of being; Pressure to Pleasure; The Experience Machine, How our minds predict and shape reality; Goodbye to Clocks Ticking; Tapping the Mighty Mind; Joy Document and The Bookstrap Fallacy (a rare book with few in print!). SPECIAL!!! There are 44 copies of Every Man a Hero; Every Woman a Coach -- the book sells, used, for $9.61 plus shipping, on the Web; buy as many as you want for $3 each! Come browse the 3 shelves of 'Popular on Amazon', 4 shelves of 'New Arrivals' and all the different subsections. Happy Spring!

-Marnie

 
History

This month we got a donation of books on colonial American history, including several books on the westward migrations of the 1700s. We also have a large selection of books about both Presidents Roosevelt. We continue to feature books on Afrian-American history, women's history, and immigrants' history. In world history there is a new selection of books on the Middle East, including an archeological account of Jerusalem.

There are some curiosities that should appeal to collectors, including a 1846 edition of Walter Scott's Tales of a Grandfather; Being Stories Taken from Scottish History (three volumes, printed in Edinburgh in 1846; foxed but otherwise in very good condition for more than 150 year old books), a History of the United States for the Use of Schools (c. 1850) and many others. There is also a small collection of Soviet Union-published reprints of Lenin-related pamphlets, priced to move.

-Lin McAllister

 
Donations

We accept donations on Monday through Saturday from 3-5 pm in the Main Room. But we close to donations in the week before the sale so that we can prepare the Main Room for the sale, which means that we are closed for donations from Sunday April 6 through Sunday April 13. Please hold your donations until Monday April 14.

Construction work near the Main Room between Monday April 14 and Saturday April 19 may get in the way of access to the Main Room. Look at our donate page to see if we've figured out that we should accept donations elsewhere on the campus.

Please read our donation guidelines before you bring materials to us.

 
Suggestions?

We're always eager to hear your suggestions for ways to improve our book sale. Please email us at suggestions@friendspaloaltolib.org.