Andrea at the North Dakota Library Association conference

“And for a long time, it seemed to me, North Dakota looked best only when glanced at briefly while adjusting the rearview mirror,” wrote Debra Marquart in a memoir of her childhood in North Dakota, entitled The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere. Perhaps […]

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Today was another one of those days where I am reminded of how great it is to work with First Book and how amazing it is to be in regular contact with our heroic volunteers. I got an e-mail from Orange County, NY where Cheryl Jackson is the Chair of a fantastic Advisory Board. […]

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Back in August, First Book was asked to write brief synopses on a selection of 90 children’s books. What a fun project! There we were, reclining in our chairs with our feet on our desks, enjoying a good book in the afternoon. Well, not really, but it did have a certain elementary school, reading-corner kind […]

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Here at the First Book office in Washington, D.C., we get a bit confused sometimes. You’ve heard all the terms before — Book Relief, National Book Bank, Literacy Site — and now there’s one more for you to remember: “Learning Libraries.” But wait… Learning Libraries don’t come with books? What’s going on here?
Two weeks ago, […]

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The dog I live with refuses to read.
He will not pick-up a copy of See Spot Run, Go Dog Go, Lassie, or anything written by Snoopy, Snoop Dog, or Zane Grey-Hound. He does not salivate at the thought of reading Ivan Pavlov, and believe it or not has refused to read anything by […]

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On September 17, a voice recital was held at Central Lutheran Church in Eugene, Oregon, to benefit First Book-Eugene/Springfield. The concert was performed by Samuel Lowry, Tenor, (formerly of Eugene) and Andrea Edith Moore, Soprano, now both of New York City.
For 90 minutes Sam and Andrea lifted their voices to the music of Handel, Verdi, […]

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During the week of September 25th, staff and volunteers worked together to distribute over 170,000 new children’s and adult books to more than 110 organizations throughout Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida and Texas as part of our Book Relief initiative.
This distribution was conducted out of Merchants Cold Storage warehouse in Hattiesburg, Mississippi — many thanks […]

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We volunteered at a Nature Conservancy workday recently and ran into a retired feller — ended up in the same truck and started to talk. When he heard about First Book, he said “Oh, you’re just the person I need to talk to.”
Xavier [not his real name :)] has been working with a […]

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