Friends of the Santa Rosa Libraries

05/31/2026

We picked our first ripe tomatoes yesterday. Inspired this collage of garden lit.

05/30/2026

“Song of the Kitchen Clock”
Tick-tock! Tick-tock!
To and fro the pendulum swings,
Loud and clear the brass gong rings:
One — two — three — four!
Clear is its voice as in days of yore.
Five — six — seven — eught!
Its face is bright and its hands point straight.
Nine — ten — eleven — twelve!
Noon has come with the hour of twelve.
Tick-tock! Tick-tock!
Hear the sound of the kitchen clock.
— Harry Eugene Flynn and Chester Benford Lund, “Tick Tock: A Story of Time,” 1938

05/29/2026

Sojourner Truth delivers her famous “Ain’t I a Woman” speech at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron (May 29, 1851)

05/29/2026

“All of these declarations of what writing ought to be, which I had myself—though, thank god I had never committed them to paper—I think are nonsense. You write what you write, and then either it holds up or it doesn’t hold up. There are no rules or particular sensibilities. I don’t believe in that at all anymore.”
— Jamaica Kincaid (Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson)

05/28/2026

“Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.”
— John Cheever, b. May 27, 1912

05/27/2026

For hundreds of years, hardbacks have been published as the first edition of a book. They have been hailed by some as things of "great beauty" that help to keep the publishing industry alive financially. However, others believe the hardback has had its day and should be scrapped.
Earlier this month, newspaper columnist Larry Ryan declared hardbacks should be ditched.
"The simple fact is that hardbacks are too expensive," he said, arguing that, when you know a cheaper version of the book will arrive in a matter of months, it is easy to postpone purchasing it. . . .
So how about you? When did you last buy a hardback and what was it – a cookbook, a coffee table book or fiction?
— Jasmine Ketibuah-Foley & David Smith, “Are hardback books things of 'great beauty' or a dying art?,” BBC Books, 24 May 2026, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9weyrwn08lo

05/25/2026

05/25/2026

Sarah Josepha Hale’s Poems for Our Children, which includes the origins of “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” is published (May 24, 1830)

05/24/2026

Sales from the more than 1,416 publishers who report revenue to the Association of American Publishers’ StatShot program rose 0.9% in the first quarter of 2026 compared to a year ago. Sales from reporting publishers hit $2.9 billion.
Every category except for adult books and religion had sales increases in the quarter, with professional/scholarly books and university press titles both posting increases of 5.7% in the quarter.
— Jim Milliot, “Publishers Saw Small Sales Gains in Q1,” Publishers Weekly. May 18, 2026

05/23/2026

Public libraries in 2025 navigated a year that saw the challenging, and banning, of thousands of books, stiffer budgetary limits and federal threats to funding.
Then the country’s primary distributor of print books to public libraries went bankrupt after nearly 200 years, dissolving early this year.
Many libraries’ orders went unfulfilled, and all but the largest ones were left struggling to get popular titles to their patrons.
This could be why you experienced a longer wait for a physical copy of a book this year.
— Adeel Hassan, “Waiting for the Best Seller: Inside the Pipeline that Stocks the Stacks,” The New York Times, May 18, 2026