Library News

The Library is celebrating TeenTober. More info on the Library's web site.

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

 
Main Room Sections Moved

Some Main Room sections have had their sections changed. We have a map linked from our Book Sale Directions page. More info below in some of the section writeups.

-Frank McConnell

 
Home & Crafts

The leaves are falling; it's time to plan for holiday gift-giving with original items you can make for family and friends.

This month in Floral Arts we have several titles on flower arranging, including Five-Minute Florist to help with autumn table decorating. To brush up on your craftiness, try Classic Crafts: A Practical Compendium of Traditional Skills. There are Craft books on macramé, jewelry-making, and creating your own greeting cards. For cat lovers you'll delight in Catification: Designing a Happy and Stylish Home for Your Cat (and You!). Fabric arts abound: an entire shelf for knitting, including Fancy Feet: Traditional Knitting Patterns of Turkey. There's also another shelf for quilting, featuring 101 Full-Size Quilt Blocks and Borders. In addition you'll find many resources for sewing, crocheting, needlepoint, and embroidery.

On the beauty shelf, look for Jessica Alba's The Honest Life: Living Naturally and True to You. In Fashion you'll find Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years. Do you remember all those beautiful gowns? On the other end of the spectrum, there's Project 333: The Minimalist Fashion Challenge That Proves Less Really is So Much More. We have two new Home decorating titles: Domino: The Book of Decorating, and Domino: Your Guide to a Stylish Home. When you need it, you'll find Right Place Right Time: The Ultimate Guide to Choosing a Home for the Second Half of Life. There are titles on office spaces, small spaces, and A Woman's Shed: Spaces for Women to Create, Write, Make, Grow, Think, and Escape. Regional designs include Fusion Interiors: The International Design of Andrew Martin. Home building offers Building Green. Home maintenance includes Smart Solutions: 250 Simple Remedies and Quick Fixes for Everyday Life. Don't miss out on these many other resources at affordable prices.

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

-Virginia Perry

 
Antiques & Collections

In the month of October you'll find Tiara by Diana Scarisbrick and other jewelry guides. Try An Infinity of Things: How Sir Henry Wellcome Collected the World. We have American Silver by Millicent Stow and other silver resources. Also of interest, The Kovels' Collector's Guide to American Art Pottery. New this month is a unique book, English Glass for The Collector 1660-1860. For another kind of glass, there's Bottle Collecting in America. You'll also find the vintage doll book, The Doll by Carl Fox. Look for furniture, and rugs, plus other antique guides for your collecting reference.

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

-Virginia Perry

 
Politics

With all the political turmoil brewing in today's world, we can't take the news for truth. And so, you might be wondering, then what can I do to really understand the political factions today. The answer is right in front of you! Stop by the Political Sciences section for books on our president, former presidents, and current events in our government. Featuring books about the Libertarian Mind, how our president became the person he is today, and even signed books by former president Jimmy Carter himself. Don't know where to start? Pick up a book about what the parties really represent, and how they've shifted overtime. All in all, everything leads to this. To drop by the Politics section! I hope you enjoy what you find.

-Emma Chen

 
Philosophy

For this month the largest selection for a single author is Rousseau with 10 volumes for sale with different titles and different editions, something for everyone. Rarely seen, we have three volumes by Merleau-Ponty and two by Piaget. Left from last month's sale we have three Wittgenstein still available. However I would say that the pick of the litter is Erasmus' In Praise of Folly written in 1509 and in many ways applicable over 500 years later. Folly orates her great virtues and her benefits to mankind in a mock serious satirical style that is laugh out loud funny and would be very much at home in the Humor section. It's a wonderful edition with decorated covers, brilliant illustrations, a glassine dust jacket, and a slip case, all in excellent condition. "... wise men deserve a name and I should call them foolosophers".

-Nigel Jones

 
Children's Room

Witches and goblins and ghosts, oh my! Halloween is frightfully close, and we have scared up enough Halloween books to fill the library of a haunted house. From board books for little ones to scary novels for teens--don't miss out!

First call for holiday shopping! Thanks to some generous donors, we also have much more than our usual supply of hardback picture books in perfect condition. This is a great chance to score some terrific gifts at bargain prices for the children on your list.

School-age Fiction highlights several sections this month. On the early chapter books shelves, look for the Owl Diaries series, friendship stories featuring animal characters youngsters will love. In the popular series section, take a look at the I Survived series (reading levels for grades 3 through 7), for books on exciting historical events. Featured in the entry to School-age Fiction this month is The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick. This book won the Caldecott medal and was a National Book Award finalist. Regularly priced at $24.99, it's a bargain at $5.00; it's perfect for children in fourth through seventh grade. Another find in the entry area is Voyage of the Basset, by James C. Christensen, beautifully illustrated and in the tradition of Gulliver's Travels and Around the World in 80 Days. In our fantasy section, check out the ever popular books by Rick Riordan; we have like-new hardback copies of several of his series.

On the Beginning Readers shelves there is a great selection of Mo Willems books, along with many National Geographic mini-books on animals, historic figures, and marine life--perfect for curious kids and for classrooms. And as always, we have a wonderful selection of books for early readers at all levels.

In our Activities section we have a Bonnyco Top Secret Pack full of notebooks and pens with invisible ink, enough party favors for a classroom of kids. Our Klutz shelves are filled to capacity with vintage and new titles, many of which we haven't seen in the Children's Room for years! As usual, our Graphic Novels shelves have overflowed onto a nearby table; look for giftable box sets of Dog Man and Baby-Sitter's Little Sister. There are games galore and puzzles too. And be sure to check out our big selection of mathematics books, including several sets of Beast Academy!

Under the front windows you'll find bins full of board books, flap books, and pop-ups for the littlest "readers." And opposite those bins, on nearby tables, are bins and boxes of bargain-priced picture books for slightly older children. Start children reading (or being read to) when they're young and they'll enjoy reading for a lifetime.

-Carolyn Davidson

 
Children's Vintage

Of course October means Halloween in children's vintage, but we could also call it "really nice classics month" too. We have especially nice copies (most in dust jackets) of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, several volumes of L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables books and William Farley's Black Stallion books, and a couple of Pollyanna books, including a very nice copy of Pollyanna's Debt of Honor. We also have many, many books by William Mayne, a British writer who has been called "one of the outstanding children's authors of the 20th century" and "the most original good writer for young people in our time" but "notoriously little read by children and much read by adults." He sounds like an author you need to check out!

Shelf pictures are available for all of these items at www.fopalbooks.com. And you can find even more children's vintage books at our eBay store. Also, for a sneak preview of the Halloween books, follow us on Instagram @friendsofthepaloaltolibrary.

-Lisa Heitman

 
Poetry

Oh, beautiful, the autumn time!
October days are here;
And so is lots of poetry
From poets far and near.
The shelves are full, make no mistake,
No one is left behind.
All verse from Whitman down to Blake
Awaits for you to find.

https://fopalbooks.com/poetry.html

-Mandy MacCalla

 
Sociology/Anthropology

For the upcoming sale, the Sociology/Anthropology section offers a larger-than-ever collection -- 740 books. Its core is constituted by the books from a home library of a Stanford professor, which means that the major expansion is experienced by the sub-section on theory and methods. When looking for the books in this sub-section, please pay attention that the shelves holding them are located in three places within the section. To make a search easier, all of them are clearly marked. The collection of books on theory and methods includes the works by such 19th and 20th century classics as Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, Karl Mannheim, Vilfredo Pareto, Anthony Giddens, Talcott Parsons, Michael Young, and Pierre Bourdieu, to name a few, as well as critical and biographical research on them.

-Natalia Koulinka

 
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 this month -

• Real Jews: secular versus ultra-orthodox and the struggle for Jewish identity in Israel
• Chutzpah: Why Israel Is a Hub of Innovation and Entrepreneurship
• Zegota: The rescue of Jews in wartime Poland
• Violins of Hope: Violins of the Holocaust--Instruments of Hope and Liberation in Mankind's Darkest Hour
• Judaikitsch: Tchotchkes, Schmattes and Nosherei
• What's Wrong With Being Human? Notes from the battlefield of human relationships

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

 
Humor

HUMOR HAS MOVED!!!
Humor used to be in the Cooking aisle but has now moved over one aisle to B3, the Science Fiction aisle. If you are looking for Asimov and Bradbury and you turn around you will see an excellent collection of cartoon books especially those of the New Yorker. Also Monty Python, David Sedaris and probably Humor's most favorite author, P. G. Wodehouse. Maybe in Sci-Fi there will be some cross pollination in the style of Douglas Adams.

-Nigel Jones

 
Classic and Modern Fiction

To celebrate the expansion of our section (we've taken over the shelves that belonged to Essays and Short Stories, which is now opposite Mysteries), we're having a special sale of a large number of vintage mass market paperbacks. These have very colorful covers and are protected in mylar sleeves. They make a very interesting, highly decorative collection.

The shelf of the New York Times "100 Best Novels of the Twenty-first Century" has expanded to include novels from 2015-2020.

Current Fiction (2020-2025) has moved to two bookcases opposite Mysteries.

-The Classic and Modern Fiction Team

 
Computers

Each month's donations are different. This month Perl books have muscled out Python and Ruby from the "Scripting" shelf. The "Security and Hacking" section is full, but C++ and Java are on a diet, while every aspect of programming language implementation is in a special section. Look for other unique little collections here and there.

-David Cortesi

 
SF/Fantasy/Comics

The big news in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Comics is we're expanding. We've been getting so many great donations recently we've not had room on the shelves for all of them. Science Fiction has expanded by one bookcase, pushing Comics out to the other side of the aisle where it's nearly doubled in size, sharing a new bookcase with an expanded selection of SF anthologies and "Best of" collections. Standouts include a lot of "Torchwood" and "Doctor Who" books from BBC Books, in attractive photo-hardcovers. Look for a new section featuring the popular (and prolific) writers Kim Stanley Robinson, Philip K. Dick, and Neal Stephenson. An exceptional number of signed copies this month: Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar, Scalzi's Miniatures, Wesley Chu's Time Salvager, and more.

-Rich McAllister

 
History

It's Russia month! We got a large donation of books on Russia and the Soviet Union, including some obscure collectable volumes. There were also big donations in British and general European history, as well as ancient Greece and Rome. In American history, there is a large selection of books on the eastern states, especially New York and Illinois. And - it's time to start thinking about holiday presents - FoPAL's gently used books make great gifts!

-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 October 5 through Sunday October 12. Please hold your donations until Monday October 13.

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.