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CUBBERLEY
USED BOOK SALES
Saturday,
July 8
10 am - 4 pm
Main Room opens at 11 am
Sunday,
July 9
1 pm - 4 pm
Featured topics for July:
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 $1.00 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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Thank You Piazza's |
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You may know Piazza Supermarket as the grocery store just to the north of our
booksale, where you can get coffee or something from their deli counter.
They are also a great supporter of our sale, providing us with grocery bags for
customers' purchases, especially for the Sunday bag sale at the Bargain Room.
More than once, they've even helped us out in the middle of a sale when we found
ourselves running out of bags. |
Name Those Books |
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Win a $25 gift certificate for Hobee's Restaurant by submitting the best (funniest,
cleverest, or most appropriate) pair of names for the two books in our Friends of
the Palo Alto Library logo. You've seen the logo many times, including at
the top of this page.
Enter below as many times as you wish, but only up
through Sunday, July 16. Our publicity committee will judge all entries, pick the winner,
and present the results in our August issue! Thanks go to
Hobee's Restaurant for their generous support
of our sale.
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Downtown Library to Close for
Construction |
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The Downtown Library will be closed on Tuesday, July 18 and Wednesday, July 18 for construction. More
information. |
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, July 9.
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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| Summertime, and the Browsin' is Easy |
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So many books have come in since our last sale that our volunteers have been
putting in many extra hours sorting and pricing. We've filled every room
and even brought in more shelves, but that still wasn't enough. So
we'll have extra tables and carts full of books for sale outside the Main Room exit ramp,
near where ephemera is sold. |
Peek at our Bookshelves |
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See some of the interesting books we've received recently and get a head start on this weekend's booksale by clicking
here. |
Booksale Hits New 12-Month Record |
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Our booksale has been going gangbusters in the last months. For the
fiscal year ending June 2006, the sale grossed more than $231,400, which is
 20% higher than the previous year. Over $22,000
of books sold in just June
alone, or more than in an entire year a decade ago. That puts us 20%
ahead of the previous year, even though we have the same hours and floor space.
Thanks go to everyone for making this a record year, including customers, donors, volunteers, members, library
staff, and the City. |
Council OKs Mitchell Park Planning |
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The Palo Alto City Council voted on June 12 to commission a study of different scenarios
for replacing or enlarging the Mitchell Park Library. At least four
options will be explored: replacing the library building, replacing just the
adjacent Community Center but adding more space to the library as well,
replacing both buildings, and putting a new library in the parking lot on
the south before removing the old library. The study will determine
how big the library needs to be and provide estimated construction costs.
Because the city's Public Works Department
will be heavily involved with the study, it requested that some
other project on its schedule be delayed. As a result, mechanical improvements to the
College Terrace Library will be deferred.
The Mitchell Park library
study is part of an overall effort to improve Palo Alto libraries, with
funding contingent on a ballot measure slated for June 2008. The
overall plan had been expected to go to the City Council in September, but
the Council deferred that until December to allow the Mitchell Park study's
results to be included. See a
range of opinions about the library proposals in our recent Foreword
newsletter and our previous coverage. |
Happy 75th for Assistant Manager |
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Happy 75th Birthday to Althea Andersen, our assistant booksale manager. Althea
is a retired library director and a longtime volunteer at our booksale.
When she's not selling ephemera outside the Main Room or pricing books on the
Sports, Transportation, "Old Books," and "Curious Books" shelves, she hauls
donated books around in her pickup truck. That inspired her cake
decoration at the surprise birthday party our booksale volunteers held for her.
Photo credit: Ed Rice.
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A Million Here, A Million There |
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We're glad to see our group covered in the July 5 Palo Alto Weekly issue noting
Palo Alto's cadre of Friends organizations. The article, unfortunately, had
some significant factual
errors. For example, it states that our endowment
fund is $1.3 million. Actually, the fund is less than $0.3 million and
represents just about one year of operations.
The article also states, "City leaders don't know why they don't receive more of
[our]
donations." We have actually given over $1,000,000 in recent years to the Palo Alto
Library and actively fund numerous programs, large and small. We have also
discussed with library officials possible funding for new initiatives, including
the Link+
interlibrary loan system and expanded collections, which was the most requested
item
by Palo Alto residents in the recent city-wide library survey.
The article goes on to state that we "withdrew funds" from a homework helper program
because we didn't like the way "it was run". The article does explain that the city hadn't
been using our past funds as promised to provide actual homework assistance, but rather to
manage the sign-up list for computer use. Unreported was that we nevertheless offered to continue the $20,000 in
annual funding but simply asked that the library consult with the school
district to help locate a qualified tutor, since the tutor was intended primarily to serve
children from the neighboring middle school. Based on that one additional request,
the library director rejected the money and the library tutoring program ceased.
Finally, the article does not mention the conscientious effort we expend to ensure
that the money we give to the libraries goes to benefit all the branches and Palo Alto's library patrons.
Grant-making organizations know that responsible giving and accountability are vital to good philanthropy. It would be
irresponsible for us to not exercise care in disbursing the funds we receive from the generosity and combined efforts of our donors, members, customers, and some 140 volunteers. |
Free Online Book Recommendations |
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If you enjoyed reading Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, you might just like
Yevgeny Yevtushenko's Don't Die before You're Dead. So says the library's new
NoveList online service, which takes any novel you enter and leads you to others similar in subject matter, time
period, genre, author, style, and so forth. In this case, both novels are
about a cast of characters struggling during a time of grim Russian
revolutionary politics. NoveList contains information
on over 135,000 fiction titles with mini-reviews of many, plus has lists of books by genre
as an alternative to searching. Perhaps you'll find your next favorite
summer read this way. Try it
right now
or go to the library's
Resources Online page, scroll down to the Literature & Reading
section, and click on NoveList. You'll need your library card to
gain access. |
Library Director Transitions |
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Library Director Paula Simpson is leaving Palo Alto to move to Seattle with
her new husband. There will be a public party for her at the Downtown
Library on Friday, July 7 at 3-5 pm, with the refreshments funded by the Friends of
the Palo Alto Library. Meanwhile, the city has hired search firm
Library Associates of Beverley Hills to find a successor. It should
come as no surprise to Palo Altans that their
job notice
stated that the position is for a "highly visible" organization. |
Online Journals List |
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Another new resource helps you find magazines and newspapers across the
library's print and online collections. So when you come across a
reference to an old article, this service will help you track down quickly
if the library has the full text and where. Often, you'll be able to
read the article immediately online. This service references some
7,621 periodicals, ranging from AAAS Report to Zoobooks. To use this
service, have your library card ready, go to library's
Resources Online page, and click on E-Journal. |
Children's Library
Construction Continues |
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 Work continues on the expansion and renovation of the Children's Library, shown here from the front
between a storage container and a dumpster
to haul away debris. The library is expected to reopen in under two
years. Photo credit: Barbara Silberling. |
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