🥇 Library Champion Newsletter #58 | 🤝 Be a Friend of the Library – Join today!
Library Champion,
đź‘‹ Welcome to our new subscribers! Glad to have you aboard
We are so excited to announce that we have new, more expanded hours:
Monday - 9:00 AM - 7:00 PM
Tuesday - 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Wednesday - 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Thursday - 9:00 AM - 7:00 PM
Friday - 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Saturday - 9:00 AM - 3:00 PM
Sunday - Closed
Online - 24/7/365 - visit our website.
The Juniata County Library will be closed Thursday, November 11 in observance of Veterans Day.
We will reopen at 9:00 AM on Friday, November 12.
It's great to have Friends 🤝
There are many ways to support your local library. One special way to do that is to join the Friends of the Library. But what are the Friends of the Library?
The Friends are a group of great people who support special causes at the library. If you want your support for the library to have a long-term effect, joining the Friends is for you. The Friends have helped pay for our state-of-the-art copy machine that lets you print to it from your phone, our comfy furniture, our high-demand mobile hotspots and Chromebooks, new computers, and take care of our gardens. The library is fueled by the Friends of the Library!
Don’t just take my word for it. Here is a personal testimonial for why someone is a Friend of the Library: “I believe the library is the heart of a community. Director Vince and his staff are very friendly and helpful to their patrons. I have enjoyed being a Friend of the Library member. The group organizes essential fundraising activities to help keep our library operating. It is extremely difficult to meet budget expenses without this additional community support. I am so thankful for our library.”
(Above: The 2021 Friends of the Library Officers
Back row, from left to right: Cindy Lucas, Rich Burkholder, Geraldine Gerber, Nancy Chrismer.
Front row, from left to right: Karen Haas, Pam Clark, Sally Switzer)
The Friends are also responsible for holding the kayak raffle every spring as well as our amazing book sales. They handle the processing of book donations and managing of the book sale stock. Many of those who help manage the book sale are retired librarians so that makes our book sales even more amazing!
(Above: 2021 kayak raffle winner Anne Supplee)
Membership is as low as $10 a year. Student membership and senior citizen membership is $10. For individual adults it is $15, families are $25 and individual lifetime membership is $200. You can join any time by picking up a form in the library or printing it online on our website under the Support then Friends of the Library.
New for this year is a t-short logo contest for school-aged students. The Friends will be selling t-shirts in the spring and are holding an art contest for school-age students to design the logo for the t-shirts. All students – public, private, home school – are welcome to participate. The winning design must be able to be printed in black ink on a medium/light-colored background, and should be no larger than 8 ½ x 11 inches. The design must contain the words “Friends of the Library” or “Friends of the Juniata County Library”. All entries must be submitted to the school’s art teacher and sent to Sara Sutton at JSH or directly to the library by December 1, 2021, and should include name, address, age, and phone number of the artist. The winning artist will receive $100 gift card!
I want to personally thank each of the Friends of the Library for all they do for our library. For years they have supported our library in many ways. There are many libraries I know of that either do not have an active Friends group or even one at all. The vibrancy of our Friends group is a sign of how special our community is.
Will you be a Friend of the Library? Join today!
What I'm currently reading
The Last Place by Laura Lippman.
Click here or on the image below to follow my reading on Goodreads.
The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear by Kate Moore (New adult nonfiction, history, women's rights)
The author of The Radium Girls returns with an inspiring story of the tireless 19th-century woman who fought against gender-based injustices.
The titular woman is Elizabeth Packard (1816-1897), an Illinois mother of six who took on the legal system after she was involuntarily committed to the Jacksonville Insane Asylum in 1860 by her husband’s request. Elizabeth and her husband, Theophilus, 15 years her senior, initially appeared to have a typical marriage for a mid-19th-century American couple. That all changed as Theophilus, a minister, increasingly saw his wife’s outspoken support of women’s rights as a threat. As Moore demonstrates, while he had “long been in the habit of trying to control” his wife, Theophilus became more concerned when she began to offer more liberal opinions on theology, abolition, and the role of women to parishioners at his church. That led to an ominous threat from husband to wife: “I shall put you into the asylum!” Moore details Elizabeth’s three-year involuntary confinement and the sexist system that allowed husbands to have their wives declared insane without a diagnosis or legal hearing. Despite inhumane conditions, Elizabeth was determined to be declared sane and to become an advocate for women and the mentally ill through her own writings and advocacy. The trial in which she fought to be declared mentally fit was a media sensation, and though she prevailed, “she was now homeless. Penniless. Childless. All she had to her name were the clothes she stood up in and a manuscript she’d been repeatedly told would never see the light of day.” Drawing on sources like letters, memoirs, and trial transcripts, Moore’s well-researched book paints a clear picture of the obstacles Elizabeth faced both during and after her confinement and the cruel resoluteness of both her husband and doctor, who tried to control her at all costs.
Is your library card current? If you have to think about it, it's time to renew it! Click here to get started. It's one of the most powerful things you can have.
Your support ensures that a library card is valuable and free to all!
🎅 Christmas is coming: shop for gifts at the library! 🎄
Get a head start on Christmas shopping for all the book lovers in your life. We have pre-filled and pre-wrapped book baskets with labels and gift tags ready to go! Some of these baskets even contain goodies like library mugs, slipper socks, dish towels, or are packaged in a reusable library tote. Baskets for all ages are priced between $5-$15. Stop in and check them out!
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Thank you for being a library champion. You make a difference each day!
--Vince Giordano
Librarian and Director of the Juniata County Library.
P.S.- You don't need to make an account or jump through any hoops to be a library champion. I wouldn't say this if it wasn't true. You can make this happen in less than a minute. Just click here.