New Year's Weekend hours

The Library is open from 9-5 Saturday. We will be closed Sunday and Monday. Happy New Year to you all!

What We Are Reading Now

American Skin by Ken Bruen "an overlooked author, quite Irish, quite noir"
Wild Fire by Nelson DeMille
The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
Just Listen by Sarah Dressen
The Boleyn Inheritance by Philippa Gregory "Jane Boleyn, Katherine Howard, and Anne of Cleves have their stories told by the incomparable Philippa Gregory"
The Uses of Enchantment by Heidi Julavits "The best writing I have read in a long time, this book has everything; abduction, amnesia and witchcraft"
The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr

Holiday Hours

The Library will be closed Sunday, December 24 and Monday, December 25.

Librarians' Favorites of 2006

Make sure to check the Library's wiki- The Rabid Reader for a list of your Librarians' favorite books, audiobooks, and DVDs of 2006.

The Final Harry Potter Book has a Title

The title of the last book in the Harry Potter series has been released by J.K. Rowling. It will be called Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The author has said two characters will die in this book. There is no publication date for the novel yet. You won't get your next Harry Potter fix until this July when the movie Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is released.

Best of the Web

U.S. News has chosen 30 web sites to represent the best of the web and organized them into the following catagories; Shopping, Photo & Video sharing, Travel, Entertainment, and Health. Take a look, you may find something useful.

Looking for unique Dover gifts?

Finish your Christmas shopping at the Library. We offer an assortment of gifts unique to Dover.

Dover Public Library Bookback. The latest design of our popular bookbags has a zippered pocket inside, handy for keys and library cards, as well as a pocket on the front of the bag. $15.00

Birds Eye View of Dover 1888, a poster sized map from the Friends of the Library.$5.00

Notepaper featuring five historic scenes of Dover. $4.00

The Port of Dover: Two Centuries of Shipping on the Cochecho by Robert Whitehouse and Cathleen Beaudoin. $25.00

Factory on Fire! Cocheco Mill Blaze of 1907 Revealed DVD. $20.00

The Great Blaze: A Look Back at Dover's Deadly Mill Fire DVD. 12.95

2007 Dover Desk Calendar featuring historic Central Avenue photographs. $10.00

Come on in and see what else we have to offer!

Eragon in Theaters Dec. 15th!

I am very excited to see the movie Eragon based on the book of the same name by Christopher Paolini. I loved the book (epic fantasy including dragons), but I also love the author's story. He grew up in Montana and was home-schooled by his parents. One of his favorite pastimes was reading, and he spent much of his time at the local public library (I did not make that up!). At the ripe old age of 15 he started writing what would become Eragon. In 2002 his family decided to self-publish Eragon, and visited 135 public libraries, schools, & bookstores to do promotion. Did I mention that he attended these events in medieval costume? In the summer of 2002 Carl Hiaasen, whose step-son had read the book, brought the book to the attention of publisher Alfred A. Knopf. Knopf published Eragon and book two in the Inheritance Trilogy, Eldest. These books have been New York Times #1 bestsellers, New Hampshire 7th & 8th graders gave Eragon the Isinglass Award in 2005, and Eldest won a Quill Award. So by all means see the movie, but don't forget to also read the books.

Are libraries at the bottom of the food chain?

An article entitled "Book donations made easier" appeared in our local paper recently. Three Rockingham County towns have signed on with a bookseller called Got Books. The company, a for-profit business based in Massachusetts, places containers for donated books near landfills or recycling centers. Their trucks collect the contents weekly. A used book sale is then held every Friday and Saturday at their warehouse in North Reading. 50% of each weekend's sale profits go to a variety of non-profit organizations in the area. I congratulate the Got Books people for an innovative, and apparently successful, business endeavor.

What bothered me in the article was the sentence that said, "Books not sold in the book sales are given away to schools and libraries ..." So in Step 1, the book was so used, so outdated, or so unwanted that the original owner dropped it in the Got Books bin to get rid of it. In Step 2, the book was not even interesting enough to sell for a discount at a warehouse sale! So, its next evolution is to offer it to schools and libraries? Since when did we become the book home of last resort? Why would anyone think that we would want third-hand leftovers? Why would anyone assume that a library would be happy to accept scraps? Our customers want new titles, the hot DVDs, current music, and the latest bestsellers on audio and tape.

Here in Dover, we encourage you to donate your used books directly to the library. Yes, we do get plenty of clunkers (like the four boxes of '80s management textbooks that came on Monday) that go directly to our next booksale or to the recycling center, but on Saturday we also got a wonderful donation of the two brand new novels by Robert Parker and Michael Connelly! We have about a dozen people waiting to read these two books, so we will gratefully add them to our collection.

Twice a year we have fantastic booksales, sponsored by the Friends of the Library. By the time of the next sale in April, those two Parker and Connelly novels will probably be past their height of popularity and we can take those extra copies and put them in the sale. $4.00 for the Friends! The Friends of the Library make thousands of dollars at our sales; funds that go right back into programs and services and equipment for the library. Did you know that all of our family museum passes are purchased for us by the Friends? That service alone costs over $2000 annually.

So while I wish Got Books the best of luck in their business--- they've seen a niche and are acting on it, I still prefer the direct-to-the-library route for your book (and media) donations.

Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled volumes yearning to breathe free...! We'll keep what we need, sell the rest, and use the profits to purchase more library stuff you really want. Let's not use the middleman!