Library party to celebrate book week

MORE BOOKS, PLEASE! is the theme for the 87th Children’s Book Week. To celebrate children’s books and more, the Bangor Public Library will hold a party at 3:30 p.m. Friday, Nov. 17, and the public is invited. Festivities will include games, skits, food, door prizes and all-around silliness. All the ideas for the day will come from what readers glean from books.

It’s entirely fitting that the Bangor Public Library hold this party, since its children’s department collection is nearing 100,000 volumes and this is the children’s department 100th anniversary.

Annually, the children’s department hosts a scavenger hunt with a shorter version for children age 6 and younger and a longer version for those 7 through 12. All the answers for the hunt are in the library’s children’s department. The hunt takes place Monday through Friday, Nov. 13-17, with the winners’ names drawn at the party on Nov. 17. One need not be present to win.

Children’s Book Week has been celebrated since 1919 during the week before Thanksgiving. More Books in the Home was the theme of the first Children’s Book Week. Nationally known illustrator Jessie Willcox Smith was commissioned to prepare publicity for the celebration, including a poster.

There has been a theme and a poster every year since, and the Bangor Public Library has a collection of most of the posters from 1919 to the present.

Library staff said that Children’s Book Week is as important today as it was in 1919, and the task remains the same as early proponent Frederic Melcher said: “Book Week brings us together to talk about books and reading, and out of our knowledge and love of books, to put the cause of children’s reading squarely before the whole community – for a great nation is a reading nation.”