Over 16,000 gently used books, audio books, CDs, and DVDs, in 36 categories for easy browsing. Unbelievably great bargain prices. Admission is FREE ($5 donation during the Preview Period on Friday, July 12, between 9 a.m. and 12 noon.)

You can also donate your gently used books, CDs, and DVDs for the sale. Bring them to the front desk of the Stockbridge Library or for a large quantity pickup, call 413-298-5501.

All proceeds benefit the Stockbridge Library, Museum & Archives. For more information contact the Library at 413-298-5501.

Join the book club for a discussion of this month’s featured book: Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Copies available at the main desk. New members always welcome!

Dig Into Reading! – A Song & Story Celebration with Davis Bates

Come celebrate this year’s Summer Reading Theme, Dig Into Reading!  This program will include songs and stories about gardening, nature, family, and much more.  Instruments played include spoons, limberjack, and other ethnic percussion instruments.

About Davis Bates: Davis has, since 1979, shared over 8,500 performances at schools, libraries and community settings throughout the northeast.  He is known for his humor, his professionalism, and for his ability to adapt his program on the fly to fit the needs of his audience. Pete Seeger has called Davis “thoughtful, creative, human, and a fantastic storyteller.”

He has been telling stories for over twenty-seven years, in schools, libraries, and community settings around New England and across the country.  His first storytelling recording, Family Stories, won a prestigious Parents Choice Magazine Gold Award, and was named one of best  audio recordings of 1996 by the American Library Association’s Booklist Magazine.

Dig Into Reading is sponsored by the Stockbridge Library, the Massachusetts Library System, the Boston Bruins, and the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners.

Abigail Williams (1721-1791) will receive callers for tea in the Library’s Bement Room.  Nineteenth and early twentieth century Stockbridge ladies (all in period costumes) will stop by for tea and local gossip of their times.

Tables will be set up so guests may partake of refreshments as well as listen to and join in the conversation. Tickets will be $5 (available at the Library).

Reservations are suggested as space is limited. For more information contact the library at 413-298-5501 or ballen[at]cwmars.org.

About the book: In June of 1870, seventy-five Chinese laborers arrived in North Adams, Massachusetts, to work for Calvin Sampson, a shoe manufacturer and one of the biggest industrialists in that busy factory town. Except for the foreman, the Chinese didn’t speak English. They didn’t know they were strikebreakers. The eldest of them was twenty-two.

Despite threats from the fired union workers, there were no major incidents of violence. Within days, the Chinese were at work. Within weeks, they were studying with local volunteers. The fired workers opened a cooperative factory, but The Knights of St. Crispin, the biggest union in the country, was broken. North Adams wouldn’t have another union strike—in any industry—for a decade.

The Celestials follows several characters but is centrally focused on the relationships between Sampson and his wife, Julia, who has had several miscarriages over the course of their childless marriage; Sampson and his new workers, whom he comes to look upon as “sons”; and the townspeople and the Celestials, who are regarded as both threatening and exotic. When Julia gives birth to a clearly mixed-race baby, the infant becomes a lightning rod for the novel’s questions concerning identity, alienation, and exile.

The Celestials is a historical novel of immigration, multiculturalism, labor, community and exclusion, alienation and reinvention, and our country’s peculiar history and relationship with all those things. It’s about our shared sense that we’re all aliens of some kind—at home in no place. The book asks us to think about how we make ourselves into the people we want to be, and what gets sacrificed along the way.

About the author: Karen Shepard is a Chinese-American born and raised in New York City. She is the author of three novels, An Empire of Women, The Bad Boy’s Wife, Don’t I Know You?, and the forthcoming The Celestials. Her short fiction has been published in the Atlantic Monthly, Tin House, and Ploughshares, among others. Her nonfiction has appeared in More, Self, USA Today, and the Boston Globe, among others. She teaches writing and literature at Williams College in Williamstown, MA, where she lives with her husband, novelist Jim Shepard, and their three children.

Join the book club for a discussion of this month’s featured book: Snapper by Brian Kimberling.  Copies available at the main desk. New members always welcome!

Join us on Saturday, June 8, 2013 from 4:00 – 5:00 p.m. for the second monthly cemetery tour of 2013, staffed by our Museum & Archives.  This month’s tour is Where Do I Get That? Stockbridge Work and Business, 1875.

This is the second of 6 monthly tours of the Stockbridge Cemetery, May through October. Each monthly tour has a different theme. All tours take place on Saturdays, from 4:00 – 5:00 p.m. Parking is available at the Old Town Hall on Main Street. A suggested donation of $5.00 is welcome.

For more information, contact the Stockbridge Library at 413-298-5501 or karensmarshall [at] yahoo.com.

About the artist: Anne Rose was born in the Berkshires and is the sister of Vicky Cooper, Youth Librarian at the Stockbridge Library.   Anne lived in Pittsfield, Stockbridge and Alford for many  years and now lives in Thetford, Vermont and Nevis, West Indies.

In her own words: I love to paint outdoors and am most interested in plant life. I am also a gardener and have been all my life. 5 years ago I joined a pastel painting class taught by my husband, Jonathan.  This was in Nevis, West Indies where we spend the winter.  That was the birth of a “new” passion for me: painting.

It was not completely “new”, because  I had majored in design and painting in college and pursued a brief career of tapestry weaving. But then the art got waylaid.

Since starting  up again with Jonathan’s painting class I have  participated in 4 group shows.  And now I am experimenting in different media, most recently oil paints and oil sticks. Best of all, I have peer critique sessions from a group of other dedicated and wonderful artist friends.

You will recognize the paintings I did in Nevis which are smaller and had to come back in my suitcase. The paintings I have done here in the Upper Valley normally are larger and have been painted inside my studio. in Lebanon, New Hampshire.

Hopefully, my art is developing and changing. Recently I did a painting in my studio of a humorous Nevis scene, something out of my head,  titled,  ”Moonlight” and I want to do more of this.