Friends of the Brown Library

Thank You Book Sale Volunteers!

2012-02-15T06:48:00.000-08:00

The Annual Friends of Brown Library Book Sale took place over the weekend of January 20 - 22nd, 2012 at the Civic Center in Washington NC. We would like to THANK the many volunteers who came out to help make this event an enormous success. Many of our volunteers spent the better part of the week with us lifting boxes, unpacking and organizing books; alphabetically, by genre, by title!

Raul & Team Transported The Books

The books are donated by the community throughout the year. Our Friends help to organize the books before they are put in storage until the book sale. Raul and his team transported the books from the storage unit to the Civic Center in several truck loads.

Volunteers Worked Tirelessly Over TWO Days

Our volunteers began at 8:30 AM Tuesday moving boxes and beginning to sort and unpack books.

Volunteer & Friend of The Brown Library, Sue Fish.

By Wednesday at 5pm the room was pretty much complete! As you can see below this was no small feat.

Amazing isn't it?
20 Thousand books set up in TWO days.

Taaa Daaa! Ready To Open the Sale To The Public

On Thursday night the doors were open for a couple of hours to allow the Friends of The Brown Library MEMBERS to shop pre-sale ... this is an amazing perk of membership!

Nancy Nash, our book sale founder, is all set to greet & check out buyers.

We could NOT offer this book sale without our volunteers. The Friends of the Brown Library are so appreciative of the support of our community and the enthusiasm and hard work of the volunteers. This weekend is the ultimate proof in a belief in the good of our Library and its programs.

THANK YOU to all volunteers and to the community who join us each year to buy used books to benefit The Friends of Brown Library Programs.

Leslie Connor - GUEST AUTHOR coming to Washington NC!

2012-02-09T08:46:00.000-08:00

Leslie Connor

Author of children’s and young adult books, will be the guest author of

Friendsof the Brown Library!

WHERE?

WashingtonCivic Center, Washington NC

WHEN?

Saturday, February 18, 2012

at 2 P.M.

Grandparents, parents and children will all want to meet this award-winning and inspiring writer. Leslie will read from her books and share with us the roots of her stories. How did each story come about? Who does she draw on for character inspirations? Do any of the characters exist in real life? Plenty of time will be allowed for conversation with the author.

Leslie Connor

Leslie’s “tween” book, Waiting for Normal, is a story about one girl’s giant spirit as she seeks stability amid a broken family.

The novel won the 2009 Connecticut Book Award, the American Library’s Association’s Schneider Family Book Award, and appears on many state medal reading lists.

For upper middle graders, Leslie’s title Crunch is about childrenof today caught in a gas crunch reminiscent of the 1970’s. Dewey Marriss andhis siblings are “home alone” and trying to keep the family’s bike repairbusiness running when their parents are stranded by the fuel outage. Crunch appears on several prestigious book lists.

A picture book, Miss Bridie Chose a Shovel, also aConnecticut Book Award winner, and the International Reading Association’sprize for primary fiction, is the story of a young immigrant woman’s life inAmerica.

A young adult book, Dead on Town Line, rounds out Leslie’spublishing accomplishments.

Mark your calendars for February 18, 2012 when Leslie, from Madison, CT., will be visiting Washington, North Carolina!

The cost for the program is $5.00
or
FREE with a membership to Friends Of The Brown Library

Memberships can be purchased at the door for $15.00 per family per year and entitle the family to attend ALL of the programs offered by Friends of the Brown Library.

Bargains for the Book Bunch

2012-02-08T12:16:00.000-08:00

By Vail Stewart Rumley

Bargains for the book bunch

Published 12:32am Friday, January 20, 2012

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Spread across the Washington Civic Center floor, it’s a sea of books, table after table of hardcover books—art, history, biography galore. Tucked in odd places, on the stage and under tables are boxes of quality paperbacks—suspense, romance, mystery, chick-lit. Some are shiny new, some are gently used, but all the books at this sale have price tags just a fraction of their original cost.

: Quality paperback books sell for $1 at the Friends of the Library annual book sale. Over 25,000 books were donated to help raise funds for the Brown Library. The event runs today and Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from noon to 3 p.m. (WDN Photo/Vail Stewart Rumley)

A favorite of local bibliophiles, the Friends of the Brown Library annual book sale takes place today through Sunday at the Washington Civic Center. From 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and noon to 3 p.m. on Sunday, book lovers can browse through over 25,000 book titles donated specifically for the sale to raise funds to support the library.

“This is an event we look forward to every year,” said Washington resident Carol Smith.

Smith and her sister, Jean Williams, who lives in Swan Quarter, make a yearly date to attend the book sale together.

“We can hardly wait for it,” said Williams.

Thursday, Smith and Williams attended the Friends of the Brown Library Member’s Night, an opening event in which members of the organization get a sneak preview, and first dibs, on this year’s crop of books.

At 5:30 p.m., a line stretched out the door of the Civic Center as members waited to get in and start searching through the tables. A few patrons searched for specific titles from lists, others simply browsed. Some loaded books into sturdy bags brought from home, others made do with the plastic ones supplied by the Friends of the Brown Library.

“The quality of the donations has increased,” said Rachel Victoria Mills, one of the event’s organizers. “We have beautiful children’s books—we have whole sets. And the selection of quality paperbacks is wonderful.”

New quality paperbacks will cost anywhere between $10 and $20, but at this three day sale, the list price is $1.

Children’s books are $.25, and quality children’s books are $2.

In addition to books, the sale feature LPs, cassette tapes, videos, CDs, DVDs, and audio books.

To get it all there is a two-day affair of volunteerism.

“We had over 1300 boxes, averaging 20 books a box,” said Katie Lake, a Friend of the Brown Library and one of the organizers of the sale.

Volunteer Walt Warren orchestrated moving the books from the Coastal Mini-storage unit to the Civic Center, a task that took 10 trucks. Ginny Warren organized the sorting of the thousands of books into genres, then alphabetically.

“We could never, ever do this without the volunteers who come back year after year,” said Mills.

Friends of the Brown Library uses this annual sale to provide funds in addition to those allotted in the city-owned library’s annual budget. The proceeds are used throughout the year for new technology, special programming, and basic supplies the library might otherwise have to do without.

In addition to the Friday and Saturday event hours, Sunday is “Fill-Our-Bags for $5” day, where patrons can fill a provided bag with any of remaining books.

THANKS To:

Vail Stewart Rumley

FOR WRITING SUCH A GREAT ARTICLE!

A little linky love right HERE!

New Beginnings at the Library

2012-02-08T12:11:00.000-08:00

New beginnings at the library

Published 12:10am Friday, January 13, 2012

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January is the time for new beginnings and resolutions, so don’t let the post-holiday blues stand in your way.

Vowed to lose a few pounds this year? Stop by the library and check out a healthful cookbook or research the newest diet craze. Want to redecorate a room for spring? The library has plenty of interior-design books to help you. Whether it’s planting a garden, starting a new hobby or promising to read more classics this year, Brown Library can help you find the perfect book to get you going.

It’s finally here: The Friends of the Brown Library annual winter book sale. Every year, that organization hosts one of the biggest and best book sales in North Carolina. All proceeds help support the library, bringing you new materials and programs throughout the year. If you’re not a member already, there’s still some time left to sign up. As always, you can sign up at the door during the sale. Becoming a member of the group allows you access to the members’ exclusive sale night from 5:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Jan. 19. The sale is open to the public, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Jan. 20 and Jan. 21. On Jan. 22, from noon to 3 p.m., books will be sold by the bag.

Jan. 23 marks the beginning of the Chinese New Year, and this year is the Year of the Dragon. To celebrate, our teen section will be hosting a display featuring information about Chinese New Year and offer books with dragons as central characters to all ages. Whether you love the classic “Dragonriders of Pern” or the young-adult sensation “Eragon,” there’s sure to be a beastly tale suited for everyone.

The teen section’s lounge area has a new, colorful rug, thanks to the Friends of the Brown Library.

We welcome a new employee, Pamela Johnson, to the library family.

Brown Library will be closed Monday in observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. It reopens Tuesday under normal operating hours.

Brown Library is open from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturdays and from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. Sundays.

Be sure to bookmark our blog on your computers as your resource for news and events happening at Brown Library: http://brownsbookshelf.blogspot.com.

If you haven’t already done so, make sure you come by and get the smartest card you’ll ever have: a library card.

Elizabeth Tankard is a part-time library assistant at the Brown Library — etankard@washingtonnc.gov.

A little Linky LOVE: Check Out THIS article from the Washington NC Daily News Site!

Two Who Made FRIENDS of The BROWN LIBRARY Happen

2012-02-08T11:41:00.000-08:00

A Tribute to Dave and Nancy Nash

Ever wonder how Friends of the Brown Library got its start? If we trace its roots as near the beginning as we can get, we find ourselves at the door of the Washington Women’s Club, and Eleanor Rollins, who 23 years ago had the brilliant idea to encourage two newcomers to Washington, Dave and Nancy Nash, to get involved. Since then, for more than twenty years, the Nashes have been the keystone of the Friends. They were handed a mission and have worked hard and long to build it into the sustaining community of volunteers we are today.

“After Dave retired and we moved here from Connecticut, I looked for a way to meet people and get involved in the community,” Nancy told us one afternoon in her cozy river-view house. “Volunteering was something both Dave and I had done for years in our previous lives, and we knew it was a good way to settle into our new town.”

When Eleanor approached them, Nancy said, she simply handed her a box of paper slips, and told her it was the Friends of the Library! We’ve come pretty far out of that box since then, and we have both Nashes to thank for that progress.

“We found that people were really responsive,” Nancy continued, especially the many transplants from other places who had, like the Nashes, been charmed by Washington and Beaufort County. Public response was so high, in fact, that Howard Chapin, then our representative, got some State money to help expand the library.

The Nashes worked as a team. They threw themselves into the project, rousing enthusiasm for library needs. Dave, who always prided himself on being a writer—“he was a stickler for grammar, especially!” Nancy remembers—was also a great storyteller. He pushed Nancy to be the new president of the Friends, promising that he would keep notes, write articles, and drum up publicity for the Friends. Using his two great talents to get the word out, Dave also started this very newsletter, and he kept it lively until just a few years ago, when health problems nudged him to the side. This spring he sadly passed away, but his enthusiasm is still felt among the Friends. The Annual Book Sale is a shining case in point. Even last January, we found Dave walking among the aisles of books talking to his many friends.

When we consider the thousand cases of books we have stored for sale this year, it’s a shock to listen to Nancy talk about their first book sales.

“We began by setting up two tables between the stacks in the old library and offering discarded library books to patrons for small change. We made $40 the first year! Our next space was the old mall on Fifteenth Street, where there was an empty shoe store with nice shelves; our take from that was $400.”

Eventually, they grew into the Civic Center, filling it more and more until there have been as many as 25,000 donated books, making as much as $20,000 for Brown’s necessities, from furnishings, shelving and materials to children’s programs and computer equipment. Nancy still takes charge of organizing the volunteers who set up the sale and act as cashiers and helpers—over 100 willing workers in all.

But that wasn’t their only project. Nancy had also gotten involved in Garden Club—“I don’t know how I got that bug, but I did!”—and even there put forth her own ideas of how to improve life for the library and those who use it. She had seen June Nance build the quiet garden at the hospital, and went to work trying to convince the library trustees to accept a similar garden for the library.

“Persuading them was a struggle!” Nancy laughs, but finally they agreed, and Clay Carter drew up a plan for it. The Garden Club, she says, was really excited to have this good project to work on. Celeste Wood, a great gardener, works on it now, with help from others, keeping the lovely landscape a welcoming place for reading, thinking, resting. Friends of the Library have appropriately named the garden after the Nashes.

Nancy is so pleased to see how their successes have carried on, and how both the Friends and the Brown Library have grown and flourished because of continued community effort. She loves the way the Friends generate ideas and work hard at them. Supporting the library is essential for the welfare of Washington, but it’s also the spirit of fun and togetherness that brings so many out for Friends programs and projects.

Nancy and Dave Nash continue to be our inspirations. Our work is a tribute to their leadership, one with such a long and sustaining vision.

Written By:Rachel V. Mills