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CUBBERLEY
USED BOOK SALES
Saturday, January 8
10 am - 4 pm
Main Room opens at 11 am
Sunday, January 9
1 pm - 4 pm
Children's Books in K6
Bargain Books in K7
Books have been piling up from all the donations made at the end
of 2004. Room K6 has children's books, including picture books,
school age fiction, award winners and books for parents and teachers,
many for under $1. Room
K7 is the bargain room, where children's books are just 25 cents each, paperbacks are 50 cents, and hardcovers
are $1.00. Prices drop by half in the bargain room at 12:30 pm on
Saturday and to just $5 for each grocery
bag you fill (we supply the bags) at 2 pm. These discounts also
apply on Sunday. Both rooms are in the K wing
(see
map).
Main Book Room Sale
In our main room,
prices are also way below what used book stores charge.
Paperbacks are 50 cents and up, and hardcovers are $1.00 and up. This
room opens at 11 am on Saturday (one hour after the other rooms), but you can
reserve your place in the line that forms by picking up one or two tickets as early as 8 am.
No ticket is needed to get in.
Featured items for January
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Books on:
American Authors
Dictionaries/Atlases/Maps
Money & Investing
Science *
Theater Arts
Vintage Children's Books
And much, much more!
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4000 Middlefield Road
Palo Alto
Near the northwest end of the Cubberley Community Center
Room
locations
More
information on the sales
Donate
your old books
All proceeds go to help Palo Alto libraries.
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Library Closes for New Catalog and
Holiday |
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| The Palo Alto City Library will be closed from Monday, January 10
through Wednesday, January 12 to install the new catalog and again on Monday, January
17 for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. |
Closure Updates |
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| The City Council is tentatively scheduled to vote on January 18 as to
whether to apply $35,000 to reopen the Downtown Library on Saturdays.
The effort to restore those hours began back in June of last year (see
previous coverage). Meanwhile, the College Terrace branch will
remain closed on Tuesdays indefinitely due to a staff absence. That
closure began on October 15. |
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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| Sunday Sales to Continue through June |
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Thanks to the many customers and volunteers who have come in on the day after our traditional Saturday sales, we will continue
those Sunday sales through at least June 2005. Many say that they find Sundays a relaxing
time to come, since there is much less crowding. The Bargain Room offers
the same low prices on Sundays as after 2 pm on Saturdays: 25 cents for
paperbacks, 50 cents for hard cover books, or $5 for each grocery bag you fill
with books. Sunday hours will remain 1 pm to 4 pm. |
Special Map Sale, Weather
Permitting |
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| Among the enormous number of donations we've received recently are about
400 maps, including ones from National Geographic and old gas company road maps.
If the rain holds off this weekend, we'll hold an outdoor clearance sale of these
near the main booksale room. |
Branch Closures Averted |
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| Palo Alto's City Council met on December 13 to consider City Manager Frank Benest's recommendations to
both close the College Terrace and Downtown library
branches no
later than June 2007 and to establish a new committee to plan and find funding for a "full-service" library somewhere in Palo Alto
that might entail closing Main or reducing service at Mitchell Park.
At the Council meeting, the Library Advisory Commission announced that it
and the board of the Friends of the Palo Alto Library opposed the branch closures.
36 members of the public then spoke against closing the branches, while five others favored the closures, and
two were ambivalent.
After much discussion, all nine City Council members voted to
reject all four of the City Manager's recommendations, and thus in effect to keep all
branches open. In addition, they voted 7 to 2 to have the Library Advisory
Commission, rather than a new committee, propose how to create an expanded
library facility, perhaps at the Mitchell Park or Main library sites, and
improve the current branch system to better meet community needs.
In particular, Councilmember Jack Morton suggested expanding the crowded
Mitchell Park branch. That facility is about one third the size of the
Main Library and yet checks out more items and has more visitors. Amid
the narrow aisles in the building, many books sit piled on carts because
there are no shelves to hold them. Long lines of people often wait for
the Internet stations. Back in November 2002, Palo Alto voters
narrowly failed to give 2/3 approval to build a larger library and community
center at Mitchell Park, so the Library Advisory Commission may try to craft
a plan that garners more votes.
Many are also intrigued by how the branch library system might evolve.
In his
recent
guest opinion in the Palo Alto Weekly,
Doug Moran described how more people are using the online catalog system to
have books, DVDs, and other items they want delivered to the most
convenient branch. This means that expanding one library facility to house
more items could also make more materials available to users of the other branches.
Meanwhile, challenges remain for the overall library system. Palo
Alto's city budget faces a several million dollar shortfall for the
2005-2006 year. City Manager Benest told the
San
Jose Mercury in mid-December that libraries will need to share in these
cuts, given that the savings from branch closure were rejected by the
Council. However, the Council had been told that closing the branches
wouldn't have generated any savings, since the staff and library materials from
closed branches would have been redistributed to the remaining ones and the
buildings would have been used for other community purposes.
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Library Catalog is Modernizing |
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| A new library catalog will be available after January 12. Among the new features are the ability to see book covers,
reviews, and tables of contents for many items in the collection.
Other improvements will be phased in later this year, such as the
ability to search among online databases and the catalog simultaneously.
The new catalog and library automation software is being installed on
January 10 through 12, so all branches will be closed during that time.
You can return any items due on those days by January 13 and incur no
overdue fines.
More
information. |
Palo Alto Library History on TV |
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| Tom Wyman's talk about the history of Palo Alto's library will be
broadcast later this
month on local cable channels 27 and 28. Tom, author of Palo Alto and Its
Libraries, recounts how a single reading room in the Downtown area in
1893 evolved over the decades into our present day library system. His
talk includes many documents and photographs, especially of the Carnegie
Library that once stood on the present Hamilton Avenue site of City Hall.
Check your cable listings for exact times, but we're told that the show will
be on at Sundays at 2 pm on channel 27 and on Wednesdays at 8 or 9 pm on
channel 28. |
Booksale on Display |
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| If you're feeling a bit nostalgic for our Cubberley booksale on the
29 days of the month when it isn't open, look for the exhibit about the sale
in the display case in the Main Library. Many interesting books are in
the display, as are other items about the sale. Reports that people have
begun lining up for hours, waiting for the case to open, remain unverified, however! |
Lots of Events at the Library |
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| You'll always find interesting events in the library's
online calendar. For example, former Children's Librarian Katy
Obringer is offering an evening of "silly stories" on Wednesday, January 5,
at 7 pm at the Mitchell Park Library. A new series of Monday
storytimes for infants 6 to 18 months old and their caregivers begins on
January 24 at 11 am, also at the Mitchell Park Library. A variety of
Bay Area storytellers will appear at the Annual Storytelling Festival at the
Children's Library between 1 pm and 5 pm on January 30. |
Board Members for 2005 |
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Here is the 2005 board of directors of the Friends of the Palo Alto
Library. Directors are elected
by our members to two-year terms at our annual meeting, and also by the
board when a vacancy arises.
Wendy Akers-Ghose, Vice President
Betsy Allyn
Althea Andersen
Rudy Batties
John Burt
Gretchen Emmons, President Emeritus
Jeff Levinsky, President
Gerry Masteller
Bob Moss, Treasurer
Bob Otnes, Assistant Treasurer
Marty Paddock, Book Sale Manager
Gloria Reade
Jim Schmidt
Martha Schmidt, Secretary
Barbara Silberling
Patricia Sohl
Steve Staiger
Ellen Wyman, President Emeritus
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