Friends of the Santa Rosa Libraries

“The single most famous baseball poem ever written,” Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat,” is published in The San Francisco Examiner (June 3, 1888)

Did you miss the 4th National Baseball Poetry Festival in Thayer’s hometown? We did, too.

It is a long and winding road from here in the earliest days of June to the Forum Room’s door and the Friends’ Summer Sale in August. We’ll get there. Together. Just you wait and see.
Shop the branch book carts until then.

We picked our first ripe tomatoes yesterday. Inspired this collage of garden lit.

“Song of the Kitchen Clock”
Tick-tock! Tick-tock!
To and fro the pendulum swings,
Loud and clear the brass gong rings:
One — two — three — four!
Clear is its voice as in days of yore.
Five — six — seven — eught!
Its face is bright and its hands point straight.
Nine — ten — eleven — twelve!
Noon has come with the hour of twelve.
Tick-tock! Tick-tock!
Hear the sound of the kitchen clock.
— Harry Eugene Flynn and Chester Benford Lund, “Tick Tock: A Story of Time,” 1938

Sojourner Truth delivers her famous “Ain’t I a Woman” speech at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron (May 29, 1851)

“All of these declarations of what writing ought to be, which I had myself—though, thank god I had never committed them to paper—I think are nonsense. You write what you write, and then either it holds up or it doesn’t hold up. There are no rules or particular sensibilities. I don’t believe in that at all anymore.”
— Jamaica Kincaid (Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson)