Thomaston Public Library, Thomaston Maine

We're very fortunate in having the carved and painted duck and shorebird decoys of Paul Perkins of Thomaston on display again this year, through the month of March. Paul learned his craft from his father, Percy Perkins of Seabrook, New Hampshire, and has been carving and painting these replicas of working decoys since his teens. Working decoys were used by market hunters along the eastern seaboard during the nineteenth century.

Most hunters designed, carved, and painted their own decoys. Paul's and Percy’s decoys were used on the ocean and marshes in and around Seabrook. Neither Paul nor Percy ever dreamed that someday these decoys would become collector's items.

Please scroll down for the latest news and for information on upcoming events. Check the Catalog & ILL page for a list of our new materials and the Book Clubs page for the scoop on March's Intergenerational Book Club selection.

Story Hour happens every Thursday morning at 11 in the Children's Department. Bring your pre-school child in to hear stories, do crafts, browse the shelves, and play! During the month of March, we will celebrate famous authors' birthdays.

March 6th

March 13th

Celebrate Ezra Jack Keats’s birthday with snowflakes, marshmallow-coconut cookies, and the book Snowy Day.

March 20th

Celebrate Louis Sachar’s birthday as we read Monkey Soup.

March 27th

Celebrate our librarian Joanna’s birthday and read a book by one of her favorite authors, Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are.

Join us for a fun month of birthday celebrations!

This Week: Who Killed the Electric Car?

The Friends of the Thomaston Public Library's Friday night films turn from romance to reality this month, with a quartet of fine documentaries. The first is 2006's award-winning Who Killed the Electric Car, which examines the development, limited marketing, and abrupt disappearance of a highly-efficient battery-electric vehicle in the 1990s. The New York Times called this film a "murder mystery."

2011's Hot Coffee, our second film, takes a look at how the infamous McDonald's hot-coffee lawsuit and similar cases were used in a crusade to weaken civil justice. The third in the series is 2005's Why We Fight, which focuses our attention on the great beast Eisenhower labeled "the military-industrial complex." Does it drive America's foreign policy? Finally, 2008's America Betrayed takes a grim look at America's crumbling infrastructure: its bridges, dams, highways, and levees.

This line-up may leave us longing for a light-hearted rom-com, but it should also leave us a little bit more aware.

The Friday Night Films are open to the public and free, although donations are gratefully accepted. The location is Room 200 of the Academy Building and films start promptly at 6:30 PM. Light refreshments are served.

In his wise little essay "Misery Loves a Memoir," writer Benjamin Kunkel asks, "Where is the contemporary writer reporting honestly, ambitiously, and without therapeutic cant or smug self-help recipes on his or her effort to live a proud and decent life? Contemporary memoirists have taught us mostly how to survive. They haven't begun to teach us how to live." Although some of the recent memoirs of misery and dysfunction are affecting, absorbing, and well-written, one does wish, from time to time, for a more positive sort of life-examination, one that might reveal how better to live.

Well, here are three new memoirs that fit the bill. My Bright Abyss, by poet Christian Wiman, chronicles the author's return to faith after a life-upending event. To say that Wiman writes like a bright angel wielding a diamond-point pen is no hyperbole. Each sentence is basically flawless, its idea perfectly and precisely expressed. The poetry he includes, his own and that of other poets, is superlative. It's the wisest book I've read in ages.

On a less ethereal plane, journalist Lynn Darling's Out of the Woods follows Darling's move, at age 56, from New York City to the backwoods of Vermont, where, in her newly empty nest, she confronts the challenges of inhabiting a house that's more a shambles, navigating the woods alone, and figuring out what to do with the rest of her life. Less profound and more practical than My Bright Abyss, Out of the Woods is as compelling as a good novel and Darling is one fine writer.

The third work, My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead, a staff writer for the New Yorker, is a biblio-memoir, a book that examines aspects of the author's own life through the lens of a book, in this case George Eliot's masterpiece Middlemarch, a novel Mead found hugely influential. This memoir's an English major's delight and will please anyone who loves good books and understands "a young woman's desire for a substantial, rewarding, meaningful life."

All three memoirs are available at the library and you can read Benjamin Kunkel's essay, "Misery Loves a Memoir," here.

Tim English leads his Qi Gong sessions at Thomaston Public Library every Saturday at 11 AM in the Thomaston Academy gym.

According to the National Qi Gong Association, "The word Qigong (Chi Kung) is made up of two Chinese words. Qi is pronounced chee and is usually translated to mean the life force or vital energy that flows through all things in the universe. The second word, Gong, pronounced gung, means accomplishment or skill that is cultivated through steady practice. Together, Qigong (Chi Kung) means cultivating energy. It is a system practiced for health maintenance, healing, and increasing vitality."

The Qi Gong sessions are open to people of any age and skill level. No experience is necessary. Non-restricting, comfortable clothes are advisable for the gentle, graceful exercises of Qi Gong.

When no Pulitzer Prize was awarded in 2012 for fiction, the Maine Library Association, in conjunction with the Maine State Library, created the Maine Readers' Choice award. The criteria are as follows: the book must be a work of fiction, published in the United States the previous year, with a well-written, compelling story that appeals to a wide audience. The short-list of 2014's 10 finalists can be found below. You can find 2014's sizeable long-list on the Maine Readers' Choice website.

Benediction by Kent Haruf
Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger
Tenth of December by George Saunders
The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope by Rhonda Riley
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker
The Hired Man by Aminatta Forna
The Silver Star by Jeannette Walls
TransAtlantic by Colum McCann
Visitation Street by Ivy Pochoda

The three finalists will be unveiled to the Maine reading community in May for their summer-time reading pleasure and voting.

Thomaston Public Library has installed the artwork gifted to us by the estate of Bernard Langlais, via The Kohler Foundation. In 2010, Helen Langlais, Bernard Langlais's widow, bequeathed a large number of Langlais's pieces, along with ninety acres of their Cushing property, to Colby College, a gift that has allowed Colby College Museum of Art to become the largest holder of Langlais's work.

After making their own selections, Colby made a gift of nearly 3,000 Langlais artworks to the Kohler Foundation, an organization committed to the preservation of art environments and important collections, who preserved and then gifted these works to non-profit institutions throughout Maine and the United States. Thomaston Public Library was one of those lucky recipients.

Bernard “Blackie” Langlais was born in 1921 in Old Town, Maine. After briefly working as a commercial artist, he studied art at the Corcoran School of Art, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the Brooklyn Museum School. He received a Fulbright Fellowship to Oslo, Norway, and while there married Helen Friend of Skowhegan, who was his partner and muse until he died in 1977. The pair lived half the year in Manhattan and summered in Cushing, Maine, from 1956 until 1966, when they decided to live in Maine year-round.

A portion of the Langlais estate will be preserved as a sculpture park, with public access, and will be named in honor of Bernard and Helen Langlais. The Georges River Land Trust of Rockland, Maine, now owns the property and will collaborate with the Colby Museum of Art on programming at the site.

Thomaston Public Library's acquisition includes five pieces of Langlais's art, all wood-relief wall hangings, two abstract and three figurative. The five pieces will be on permanent display at the library and available for viewing during all open hours.