Mercer County Library Blog

Sure, summer is its own season. But, in my mind, it’s broken up into four “seasons”: strawberry, blueberry, peach, and apple. Around here, we are lucky to have a huge abundance of you-pick farms and roadside stands selling great local produce; it’s spoiled me to the point where it feels just plain weird to eat flown-in peaches or blueberries in December from a grocery store. Those fruits pale in comparison (both literally and figuratively) to what we can get in July and August in New Jersey. Apples and pumpkin spice: stay in your lane. We’ll get to you in fall. Right now, it’s all about enjoying local peaches! After you’ve filled that basket with ripe fruit, the question is what to do with it? Here are some suggestions from great books you can get at your library: Almond and Fresh Peach Coffee Cake from The Harvest Baker by Ken Haedrich. I might have recommended this book in a previous blog post, but it bears repeating. So many great recipes for seasonal baking-- and not just dess...

This year, the West Windsor Branch was provided with a set of these wonderful, squiggly shelves for our board book collection, thanks to the generosity of the Friends of the West Windsor Library. The books in our board book collection circulate a lot. We can barely keep them on the shelves half the time! It only felt fitting to highlight them while also making the collection more accessible for smaller children. Board books are quickly becoming a library staple. According to Gail Cornwall at the School Library Journal, sales have been skyrocketing since 2010, and board books are “a solid hit with tots and sturdy sellers in the publishing industry” (Cornwall, 2023). Over 630 original board books were published in 2022 by just Penguin and their subsidiaries alone (Cornwall, 2023)! Now, that’s a lot of cardboard!  But what makes board books so popular? Board books are a reliable, fun, and colorful way for early readers to be introduced to the realm of books! Many board books incor...

Books, DVDs, passes to museums, computer classes. Story times, programs for adults, copiers, scanners, eBooks and audiobooks. The list of what the Mercer County Library System provides goes on and on; it’s almost a struggle to keep up with it all. And whether you are a new member or have been coming here for 30 years, odds are there are some services you may have missed.  For example, did you know that the Mercer County Library System has notary publics on staff? That’s right – the library system offers notary public services for the benefit of the residents of Mercer County- all for free! A Notary at Work by Max Volkhart Since the days of the ancient Roman Republic, notary publics - sometimes called scribes, tabelliones forenses , or personae publicae - have acted as witnesses, administered oaths and affirmations and, perhaps what they are most commonly known for, validated the signatures of those signing documents. All o...