Blanco Library Awarded Texas Book Festival Grant

by Brian Fields, Deputy Library Director

               The Blanco Library is proud to announce that it was awarded a Texas Book Festival Collections Enhancement Grant in August by the Texas Book Festival’s committee for Texas Library Grants. The Blanco Library is one of 42 Texas libraries to be awarded the grant for 2020. “Since 1996, the organization has funded 1,211 grants totaling over $3 million to 600+ libraries in every corner of the state.” The Blanco Library also received TBF grants in 2015 and 2016.

               The 2020 TBF grant has enabled the Library to add 144 books to its nonfiction and literary classics sections to modernize and enhance the Dewey-classified part of the Library’s adult book collection. Titles were chosen for their subject matter, the strength of their reviews, and their copyright recency. The average copyright year for these publications is 2018, and they feature many books that either won or were shortlisted for awards, such as the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. These books are shelved opposite the new arrivals and will remain in this area for six months. Patrons can peruse the catalog specifically by Book List and search only the 144 titles added to the list “Texas Book Festival 2020.”

               Here is a short list of some of the titles, along with their subjects: Elderhood by Louise Aronson (Aging and Medical Care), Beginner’s Step-by-Step Coding Course by Craig Steele (Coding), Maus I & II by Art Spiegelman (Comic/Graphic Novel), Jubilee by Toni Tipton-Martin (Cooking), Underland by Robert MacFarlane (Geology), Grant by Ron Chernow (History), The Plague by Albert Camus (Literature), How to Bake Pi by Eugenia Cheng (Mathematics), Beastie Boys Book by Mike D. (Music), The Book of Snakes by Mark O’Shea (Nature), Warped Passages by Lisa Randall (Physics), and Faster by Neal Bascomb (Sports). Please stop by the Library to check out these new additions to our collection. The Blanco Library is open to the public for limited hours: Tuesdays, 2 PM to 6 PM; Thursdays and Fridays, 10 AM to 2 PM. Porch pickups are available 6 days a week (visit www.blancolib.org for details or call 830.833.4280).

               Please also plan to attend the Texas Book Festival which begins on October 31, 2020 and runs through November 15, 2020. This year the Texas Book Festival is celebrating its 25^th anniversary. All events will be held virtually, and most are free to the public, with the exception of fundraisers. Please visit their website for more information regarding events and author talks (https://www.texasbookfestival.org/).

(Note: This article appeared in the Blanco County News on October 28, 2020.)