Free admission to the Peabody Museum!

The Peabody Museum of Natural History will be offering free admission all day on on Saturday, September 4th. Stop by between 10 and 5 for Summer's Last Roar! There will be plenty of hands-on activities in the galleries, so be sure to visit.

Geraldine Brooks wins Dayton Literary Peace Prize

The author Geraldine Brooks is the recipient of the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Lifetime Achievement. Brooks, 54, covered conflicts in the Balkans, the Middle East, and Africa. She received the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2006 for her novel "March".

Books by Geraldine Brooks in our library

Article by Julie Bosman, published in the New York Times, Aug. 19, 2010

The World of Coffee

Now on view at the Peabody Museum in New Haven until September 19, 2010:
Coffee: The World in Your Cup.

If you are a Hamden resident and have a valid Hamden Library Card, you can check out our library's museum pass to the Peabody
museum. It offers a $5 admissions discount for up to four people. Starting September 1 until June 30, the Peabody museum offers again free admission on Thursday afternoons from 2 pm to 5 pm.

Books on Coffee in our Library

Books on Coffee Cakes, Coffee Habit and other related subjects

Library Museum Passes

Free eBooks

There are dozens of sites that offer free ebooks for download. Here are a few of our favorites:

Project Gutenberg
Over 33,000 free ebooks to read on your PC, iPad, Kindle, Sony Reader, iPhone, Android or other portable device. Choose between ePub, Mobipocket, HTML and simple text formats.

ManyBooks.net
More than 28,000 eBooks. Browse through the most popular titles, recommendations, or recent reviews from other visitors. Register on the site to create your own bookshelf to keep track of books you've read, and to share your list with others. The site's Help page offers instructions for downloading your ebook to a variety of mobile devices.

Commercial Sites

Barnes and Noble
The site offers numerous free titles for the Nook reader. If you don't own a Nook, you can download a free Nook app to your computer or mobile device.

Kobo
Free downloads for the Kobo reader. You can also downoad the Kobo app for your computer of mobile device.

Do you have a favorite site for downloading free eBooks? Please let us know!

Picasso is still popular

The exhibition "Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum of Art" was the museum's best attended show since 2001. It drew 703,256 visitors during a 17 week run, from April 19 to August 15.


Check out the exhibition catalog

Books/videos about Picasso

Article in the New York Times - find out about the most popular art exhibits at the Met

2010 Sales Tax Holiday, Aug. 15-21

Connecticut shoppers will have one week to buy items of clothing and footwear costing under $300 without paying Connecticut sales tax. This year, the tax free week will run from Sunday, August 15 through Saturday, August 21, 2010. More information about the rules that apply to the sales tax free week are found in SN 2006(10), One-Week Sales and Use Tax Exclusion in August for Clothing and Footwear Under $300.

August Literary Birthdays

Literary birthdays for August include James Baldwin, Annie Proulx, John Galsworthy, Ted, Huges, Jonathan Franzen, Isabel Allende, Ray Bradbury, Alex Haley, and Dorothy Parker .

August 1 - Herman Melville
August 2 - James Baldwin
August 2 - Isabel Allende
August 3 - Leon Uris
August 4 - Percy Shelley
August 6 - Alfred Lord Tennyson
August 9 - P. L. (Pamela Lyndon) Travers
August 11 - Alex Haley
August 14 - John Galsworthy
August 14 - Russell Baker
August 15 - Sir Walter Scott
August 16 - Charles Bukowski
August 17 - Ted Hughes
August 17 - V. S. Naipaul
August 17 - Jonathan Franzen
August 19 - Ogden Nash
August 20 - H.P. Lovecraft
August 20 - Jacqueline Susann
August 22 - Annie Proulx
August 22 - Colm Tóibín
August 22 - Ray Bradbury
August 22 - Dorothy Parker
August 24 - Orson Scott Card
August 24 - A. S. Byatt
August 24 - Jorge Luis Borges
August 26 - Christopher Isherwood
August 28 - Leo Tolstoy
August 28 - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
August 30 - Mary Shelley