Altamont Library Notes for Thursday, September 20, 2018
— Photo by Ron Ginsburg
Betty Spadaro, a long-time Altamont resident, turned 100 on Sept. 18. “We’d like to wish her a happy birthday,” said Joe Burke, director of the Altamont Free Library. Spadaro is shown here in August at the Altamont Fair in the Bozenkill schoolhouse where she once taught. She is featured in an Enterprise podcast.
Believe it or not, it’s time again for us to begin planning for the I Love My Library Gala we hold every February. Our annual gala is not only the social event of every Altamont winter, it’s also an incredibly important fundraiser for our library.
Our most recent gala raised just over 10 percent of our annual budget. A successful gala means that we can continue to be open every day of the week, and to provide the programs, materials, and services you rely on us for.
But, of course, the gala doesn’t organize itself. We have a great group of supporters who volunteer their time, energy, and creativity to making sure that we have a fantastic gala every single year, but we need more help. Specifically, we need your help.
If you love our library, joining the gala team is a wonderful (and fun!) way to show your support. We need folks to help make invitations and stuff invitations, to design centerpieces, to collect things for our live and silent auctions, and much more! There’s much to do and many hands make light work.
If you’d be interested in helping out, we’d be very grateful if you’d send us an email at phone call us at 518-861-7239. Thank you!
Climate Change Talk
For anyone feeling powerless and uncertain about our planet’s future, author, and researcher, University at Albany Professor Maia Boswell-Penc has a message of hope and empowerment, stressing self-care and environmental justice in the face of a changing climate. Listen to her at the library on Wednesday, Sept. 19 at 7 p.m.
This talk, called Healthy You, Healthy Earth will discuss the ways that you as an individual can have a positive impact on the climate.
Upstate Potluck
As you may know, every month we hold a very popular potluck dinner where we focus on a different national or regional cuisine every month. Since the early fall is gives us such wonderful food here in the Capital District, we’ll be coming back home this month.
At 6 p.m. on Monday, Sept. 24, we’ll be sampling the foods (and drinks!) of Upstate New York! If you’ve never joined us for a potluck before but have always wanted to, this is the month to do it! Please call the library to register in advance and bring a dish to share. If you need inspiration, check out one of our upstate-focused cookbooks.
Mystery Book Club
On Thursday, Oct. 18 at 7 p.m., we’ll be holding the first meeting of a new book club dedicated to mysteries! Our inaugural book up for discussion will be “In the Woods” by Tana French.
This Edgar Award-winning novel is full of psychological suspense, action, and mystery, and is sure to provoke a great deal of amateur sleuthing! Come pick up a copy today and join us if
YA Book Bingo
Even though the kids summer reading program has ended, the young adult book bingo contest is just getting going. Stop in for a BINGO card, read the books on the squares to get BINGO, and get entered to win cool prizes.
And these prizes are something else: We’ve gotten swag packages from some of the top YA authors in the country including Julie Murphy and Brendan Reichs and we’re giving them away to our top readers! For further questions and rules email us at or stop in the library and ask a staff member. Happy reading!
Library Expedition
Altamont Free Library is incredibly lucky to belong to a community of spectacular libraries throughout Albany and Rensselaer Counties. Each library is unique, as are the communities they serve. Some lend out drones and have high tech maker spaces. Some have life-sized mastodons, or paintings by Grandma Moses. Some even are former train stations!
If you’d like to learn more about the community of local libraries, try your hand at the 2018 Upper Hudson Library System Library Expedition! Think of it as a kind of Cannonball Run for nerds. The idea is for folks, either as individuals, families, or teams, to visit every single one of the 36 library locations in our two-county library system between the beginning of September and the end of November. Prizes will be awarded for visiting 5, 15, 25, and all 36 libraries.
It’s a fun challenge for folks who love libraries and want to explore parts of the Capital District they may have passed by or passed through but never stopped to smell the books. If you would like to be a 36er — and who wouldn’t? — stop by the library and pick up your official map and get your official Altamont Free Library stamp on your passport! All aboard for adventure!