News from the Library, by E-mail and RSS

If you have ever given the Library your e-mail address, like this newsletter editor did when he signed up for a Palo Alto Library card, you have probably noticed that they are sending you one to a few e-mails per month.

The Library would like you to know that the Summer Reading Program started on June 1 but you can still sign up, and that this year it's Summer Reading for a Cause, and that Mitchell Park Library will be opening on Sundays starting July 9, and probably some other things because they post more often to their blog than we send out this newsletter. You can subscribe to their blog with an RSS reader.

And if like yr hmbl newsletter editor you have not been paying attention and are wondering what is open and how much the Library has a Current Library Services page.

-Frank McConnell

 
June Sale Notes

June is FOPAL's busy donation time and FOPAL's members are benefiting with a Members' Early Sale. All FOPAL paid members can get in earlier than the normal 11am start time. Because of this, the normal Main Room entry procedure is changed. See the section below pertaining to the Members' Early Sale. Summer is almost here, donations are up and we've got plenty of great reads, music, and more! For FOPAL's June sale 2023, look for a unique special of Music CDs, and Vinyl, inside and outside the Main Room. Enjoy this opportunity to shop the media inventory/back stock at the June's Member's Early Sale/MES. And regarding media offerings consider the June sale as a wee sample of what will be available next month at the FOPAL Summer Super Sale. (See Nigel Jones's mention below)

Main Room information notes: For June check out an equally special selection of books, carefully curated by FOPAL 60+ Section Managers! The Puzzles & Games section is FULL this month! Gender/Pride books may be found top shelf of its respective section, the Children's Room has a TON of terrific books, games, and puzzles received from several generous donations. Also, the DVDs section is brimming with a myriad of movies for your viewing pleasure.

-Janette Herceg

 
FOPAL Members Get the First Pick at Members' Early Sale

A super big fun FOPAL Members' Early Sale is scheduled for this Saturday. Twice a year, FOPAL holds a Members' Early Sale, at which members of the Friends of the Palo Alto Library are admitted early to the Main Room sale. Members enjoy a less crowded main book room and get the first crack at FOPAL's wonderful collection of materials!

Life & Sponsor Members Enter at 9am: At our Members' Early Sale, Life and Sponsor Members (and one spouse or guest) may enter at 9am and can purchase up to 100 books per membership only during that first hour. Each Life Member and Sponsor Member must give one Purchase Slip per membership to the cashier before 10am in order to purchase up to 100 books. If a Life Member or Sponsor Member exits without purchasing all 100 books, he/she may take the Purchase Slip and reenter to fill out the 100 books as long as they are purchased by 10am.

Other Members Enter at 10am: Members at all other levels can enter the sale at 10am, and purchase 25 books at a time.

General Public Enter at 11am: At 11am, non-members are admitted. The usual limit on purchasing 12 books at a time lasts until there is no longer a line waiting to enter.

Ticket Handout Procedure: At the Members' Early Sale, tickets are given only to members of FOPAL. Look for two check-in/ticket lines; one line for renewing members, new members, and those members without a membership card, and one line for members with their cards. To speed your way through the ticket line please find and bring your membership card! Tickets given out are for the 9am and 10am lines at the Main Room, since most people who come early are Members of FOPAL. Each Member will get just one ticket, although Life and Sponsor Members may bring one guest between 9 and 10am and Family Members may bring in their families, consisting of one other adult and minor child, beginning at 10am. No tickets will be given out for the 11am line.

Join FOPAL Now: If you're not already a paid-up member, avoid delay at the sale by joining online now.

-Janette Herceg

 
FOPAL Summer Super Sale

At the same time as our July Monthly Book Sale FOPAL will have another of its very successful High Value Sales.

The sale will have around 2,000 items including books, ephemera, and CDs.

What:
FOPAL will be selling books from its High Value inventory that have an online value of $20 to $59. All books will be significantly reduced with a price range of $10 to $25. The books will cover subjects from art to travel to children's vintage, with both hard covers and soft covers.

All books have been specially selected by our High Value team and will be the cream of the crop of what we have within that price range.

FOPAL has just agreed to make a grant of $100,000 to help increase the Library's circulation, that is, more new books, more updated books, as well as helping to shorten the time it takes to get a book that is on hold.

Literally every time you buy a book from FOPAL to put on your shelf at home it puts a book on a shelf at one of our excellent Libraries!

When:
Saturday July 8th
10am to 4pm

Where:
The parking lot outside the Children's Room, the south west corner of the Cubberley Community Center.

We look forward to seeing you.

For more information on FOPAL please go to www.FOPAL.org.

-Nigel Jones

 
Puzzles and Games

The Puzzles section is once again full to the max at all piece levels, including a recent large donation of 1500-2000 piece puzzles. In Games, we have lots of family favorites and a couple of new adult strategy and adult entertainment games for your summer enjoyment. The Games book section (located under Postcards) has lots of new chess strategy, casino gaming, and even magic tricks books. To the right of the Games area on the bookcase under the window are several strategy books for board and table games such as Go, Backgammon and Scrabble, among others.

-Vicky Evans

 
Children's Room

Summer has begun, school is out--time to shop our sale. For foggy mornings, there are indoor games galore in our Activities section. To maintain student math skills over the vacation, there are workbooks, textbooks, and manipulatives including pattern blocks, attribute blocks, and an abacus. For a bit of drama, we offer a 4-foot-high Melissa & Doug puppet theater! And be sure to see our display of books for Flag Day, Independence Day, and Fathers' Day. Look on the World Languages shelves for books in French, Polish, and German (all particularly well stocked this month). Check the Chinese shelves for simplified Chinese reader bundles, storybook collections, manga, and parenting and educational books including Montessori. The Japanese section has many chapter books that are translations of the classics. In School-age Fiction, we have a deluxe illustrated Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (originally $40, a bargain at our low price), recent like-new Rick Riordan hardbacks, several books in the Wings of Fire series, and gift sets of The Worst Witch, Upside Down Magic, the Serafina series, and the Origami Yoda File. You can help early-grade readers sustain their reading fluency with selections from our extensive collection of the best early chapter books. For children just beginning to read, check out the books on animals, space, history, and biography in our Beginning Readers section. Finally, our Parenting section has a great selection of books for parents of babies to teens, and some for grandparents, too.

-Carolyn Davidson

 
Children's Vintage

Children's vintage has some special items this month, two of them with a Palo Alto connection. David Starr Jordan's Eric's Book of Beasts from 1912 is done in watercolors with appropriate accompanying jingles. Uncle Arthur, more formally known locally as Arthur Stanley Maxwell, wrote children's bedtime stories, and we have them in a nicely preserved 5-volume set.

History buffs will be happy to find many Landmark books on offer this month, all in dust jackets. From the Crusades to the conquest of the North and South Poles, the Landmark books were written by well-known authors rather than academics: war correspondents, Pulitzer Prize winners like Pearl Buck and Robert Penn Warren and other established writers. We have 16 titles on the shelf this month with many more to come in the following months.

Plus, for those nostalgic for the "good old days" when parenting was easy and children were seen and not heard, check out our suddenly large collection of mid-century parenting books for tips and tricks to get those rascals to behave!

And if history is not your thing, our fiction section includes a 7-volume set of Narnia books and The Three Investigators in French! A bit of something for everyone!

Photos at fopalbooks.com.

-Lisa Heitman

 
Education & Language

Special set available in June: Book History published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, Volumes 1-10 at $70. Also in this section: theories of education, language and linguistics; reading and libraries; writing, grammar and syntax; ESL and sign language; K-12, and post-secondary education; plus teaching and education administration.

See photos at www.fopalbooks.com.

-Virginia Perry

 
Home & Crafts

For June, the Home section showcases beauty, etiquette, and discounts on wedding ideas from Martha Stewart and Colin Cowie. You'll also find fashion and costume design theory. Other shelves include home decorating styles and interior design concepts, including the High-Access Home. Building and remodeling titles are available, along with home organizing, home improvement, repair, and maintenance.

The Crafts shelves include: floral arts and arranging; craft guides from jewelry to decoupage and mask making; delightful coloring books; and fabric arts such as sewing, quilting, knitting, and the Complete Crochet Course.

Photos can be found at www.fopalbooks.com.

-Virginia Perry

 
Antiques & Collections

Among the June offerings in Antiques & Collections: Rugs and furniture; Miller's Art Glass: How to Compare and Value; The Comic Book in America: An Illustrated History (1989); plus guns, watches, and antique toys.

Photo can be found at www.fopalbooks.com.

-Virginia Perry

 
Poetry

What is so rare as a day in June?
Our poets singing us a tune.
John Masefield heads the list this time.
"Sea Fever," "Trade Winds" and other rhyme.
Give Poetry's top shelf a look.
You'll find a rare and curious book
Which holds a letter by that rake
Lord Byron, and it's yours to take.

-Mandy MacCalla

 
Medicine

This month we offer a plethora of cardiology books, including those on the benefits and adverse side effects of statin therapy...Statin Nation, and The Great Cholesterol Myth to name a few.

Read The Discovery of Insulin on how even jaded professions in the 1920s marveled at how it brought sometimes comatose patients back to life.

Special offer this month are leather bound gilded paged Classics in Medicine Library books with writings of the greatest physicians in history. You could pay $25 a volume plus shipping on eBay, or buy them in perfect condition here for $8 a volume. Great gift for yourself, or for a favorite physician!

Check out the medical texts in every specialty, and Apollo's Arrow, which examines the profound and enduring impact of the Coronavirus on the way we live.

-Pamela Parke

 
Computers

This month we have our heaviest book ever, at 5.5 pounds (priced below $2/lb).

Photo at fopalbooks.com.

-David Cortesi

 
Humor

On The Top Shelf

(photo at fopalbooks.com)

One of the best collections of cartoons and certainly one of the largest is the Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker. This month we have four of them in different versions, different conditions and so different prices, but all with the same cartoons!

In all we have 12 books on different topics from the New Yorker series.

On the left side you will find our British humor section with books ranging from Myles, Muir, Monte, and Milligan, as well as some guys on a boat.

The prize for most unusual book goes to a collection of 1000 engraved French cartoons published in 1884, Douze Années Comique.

-Nigel Jones

 
Philosophy

The highest value new arrivals are on the top right shelf. In most cases you will see an insert with the current online price and the Members' Early Sale FOPAL price, with a selection of very good titles to choose from.

On the lower left shelf you will see a box of journals we have never had on offer before. It is Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy, all in very good condition. The Member Special price is $15 for 36 volumes; it is only on sale as a series.

And lastly, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, four volumes, for the unbeatable price of $4.

Photos at fopalbooks.com.

-Nigel Jones

 
Health

Once again, the Health Section is full of information to help us investigate healthy living practices. This month, two very interesting books: Caffeinated; How our daily habit helps, hurts, and hooks us, by Murray Carpenter, and The Caffeine Advantage; How to sharpen your mind, improve your physical performance and achieve your goals by Weinberg and Bealer.

Also, an intriguing kit arrived: Memory Boot Camp by Tony Buzan. Tony Buzan was an English writer, and educational consultant who popularized "mental literacy, radiant thinking and the mind-mapping technique." Get your coffee cup, and let's try this mind-mapping!

-Suzanne Cholko

 
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.

New this month - The Choice: Escaping the Past and Embracing the Possible; The Super Achievers: The Remarkable Jewish Contribution to Science and Human Well-being Highlighted by Nobel Prize Winners; Talmud vol. 17: The Steinsaltz Edition; A Bookshop in Berlin: The Rediscovered Memoir of One Woman's Harrowing Escape from the Nazis; Before Golda; Manya Shochat.

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.

-Charlotte Epstein, Section manager for Judaica

 
Donations

We have made it past Drop-off Donations 3.0 and have returned to accepting donations without the need to make an appointment.

HOWEVER....

We are closed for donations from Sunday June 4 through Sunday June 11 to prepare the Main Room for this weekend's sale. Please hold your donations until Monday June 12.

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

All that said, our normal hours for drop-off donations are Monday through Saturday, 3pm-5pm. (But not the week before the sale.)

 
Suggestions?

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