By Michelle Jeffers This fog-shrouded summer has me fixing to curl up with a good San Francisco mystery. Appropriately enough, San Francisco Public Library’s bi-monthly book club selection for July and August is The Spellman Files by Lisa Lutz. The Spellman Files is the first in a series about San Francisco private investigator Isabel Spellman, [...]

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By Marcia Schneider The public library has long served as a refuge and a safe haven, fulfilling the intellectual, educational and information needs of its users while supporting the joys of reading. However, as funding and resources continue to shrink across the country, or at best, stabilize, there has been a gradual erosion or diminution [...]

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By Mary Ellen Hannibal MEH: Your tremendous book, Leaving India, chronicles your family’s diaspora – successive emigrations from India to South Africa, the United Kingdom, Canada, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand.  As well as your more immediate family’s eventual sojourn to Michigan, where you grew up. What was Michigan like for you? MH: Michigan [...]

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By Mary Ellen Hannibal If ever a book were to come along that perfectly expresses the wonderments, complexities, and future-shock of today’s library systems, it is This Book Is Overdue:  How Librarians and Cyberlibrarians Can Save Us All by Marilyn Johnson. Marilyn really loves libraries and the people who make them work – just like [...]

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By Byron Spooner Part 2 of 4-Paris (France) at Shakespeare and Co.’s literary festival, Festival & Co., Saturday, 6/19/10. After last night’s party at some fancy abandoned church (“Do they know we’re even here?”) we get up late and pad around the room for a while and head out down the Boulevard St. Germain to [...]

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bu-KBxOtJxs] We couldn’t agree more.  Thanks Old Spice Guy!

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By Mary Ellen Hannibal Do people still call it the Left Coast?  Peter Fish has put together a marvelous compendium of writings touching on subjects Californian by local writers (some of them in the top echelons of any literary ranking); the result is California’s Best:  Two Centuries of Great Writing About the Golden State.  If [...]

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By Michelle Jeffers San Francisco Public Library has a growing collection of blogs, updated by the librarians you see every day. The blogs highlight new acquisitions and longtime treasures, and share information, experience and knowledge with patrons. How can you resist a blog named What’s On the 6th Floor? This blog is created by the [...]

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By Marcia Schneider It is not unknown that the publishing industry in general reflects a bias in favor of east coast writers.  However, out here in the west the extraordinary success of San Francisco’s annual literary festival Litquake, along with publishing houses such as McSweeney’s, the burgeoning careers of those involved in the San Francisco [...]

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By Michelle Jeffers The children’s librarians at San Francisco Public Library are a funny bunch. I just had to share this story. Children’s services librarians have a lot going on during the eight weeks of the Summer Reading Club.  In addition to all the kids coming in to read during the summer, there are special [...]

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