A $5.00 a bag book sale will be held from 10:30 AM to 2:00 PM on Saturday, May 19th at the Bascom Community Center/Library.  This will take place to commemorate the soft opening of the Community Center.  Bags for the sale will be provided!

This month’s book for San Jose Public Library’s Online Book Club is The Man Who Loved Books Too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett. This exciting book features the author enmeshing herself in the world of rare books. The book discusses collecting, dispenses facts about rare books and details the dogged determinism of Ken Sanders in stopping a book thief. Partially set in the Bay Area, this book has a wide cross section of interest; book lovers, true crime aficionados and a dash of technology and history. Each week, we'll put forth a different question to prompt reflection on the book and its ideas.  We hope you will participate in the discussion by leaving comments below!

Question for Week 3: Should the criminal justice system take book theft more seriously?

One unfortunate fact the author brings up is that criminals who steal a little bit from a large number of people are often barely prosecuted because the crimes overlap many districts and the cost of prosecution is prohibitive. Sanders really had to cajole the authorities to get them interested. Books are not the preferred material for criminals; something small (jewelry) or high tech (laptops) is.  And all of Gilkey’s thefts were done by trickery or forgery, not force. At the Rare Book Fair the author was told by many dealers that "every rare book is a stolen book." It is very difficult to trace the ownership of books that may be centuries old and from other countries. A detective's comment on the most famous used goods selling website is quite interesting...

 To be perfectly honest, I’ve grown tired of looking at other people’s tattoos … and yet I can’t avert my gaze completely. Because in spite of my claim of disinterest, I can still recall that waitress in Portland with the dramatic Steel Bridge across her shapely arm and, of course, a lot depends on the canvas, but that’s another story.

So it wasn’t without some mild interest that I picked up this book Science Ink by Carl Zimmer to see just what separates “Tattoos of the Science Obsessed” from the rest of us, whether we have some ink on our bodies or not. It’s a somewhat predictable, yet educational visual and verbal attempt to share what individuals who occupy places in the world of Science, academia or otherwise, want to have inked on their skin. The book is broken up into chapters of scientific fields, so we gather the following: Paleontologists like dinosaurs and fossils as much as Chemistry people can appreciate molecular diagrams of, say, Diazepam. So yes, the book is predictable on that level, but it’s also a clever vehicle to ask just what is an Uffington Horse, or Buckyballs, and who would tattoo Siphonophores on their ankle for that matter?

These individuals are dedicated to their obvious interests and the concept of this book works if you appreciate skin art, the sciences, or some odd combination of both that lead to finding yourself gazing at pages of tattooed science geeks. Fun reading, now if only they’d publish more books about other self-obsessed people who want to tell you their life story via their epidermal canvas. Wait, that didn’t come out right. Anyway, I say check it out!

Relive that fateful night that took place one hundred years ago in these lavishly illustrated pages of Titanic: The Tragedy That Shook The World, published by Time Life Books.  In large format this book contains never-seen-before photographs of Franck Brown (aka Father Brown), an accomplished photographer who had been on the ship shortly before he disembarked in Ireland.  Pictures tell stories from the time of ship constructions to its discovery in 1985 and today's lasting memories in films and books. 

Captain Smith, Molly Brown, Jack Phillips, Benjamin Guggenheim, John Jacob Astor IV, Dorothy Gibson...names and faces of survivors and victims that look out from haunting portraits on these pages lend a human touch to the book.  Read the tragic story of the Titanic sinkage as if it just happened yesterday.

Check out other books on the Titanic.