LIBRARY COMMITTEE: Co-Chairs – Carol Van Why and BJ Zander; Members – Mary Abbe Hintz, Joanne Kendall, Mary Lynn Kittelson, Gretchen Kreuter, Jenny Rajput, Agnes Tan, Robert Tapp, Katie Weiblen, Catherine Wengler, and Barbara Woshinsky.

The purpose of the committee is:

• To manage the 1666 Coffman Library.
• To add to the collection through purchases and gifts.
• To promote the use of the library via a page on the Coffman website, newsletter articles, e-News posts and bulletin board posters.

The Library Committee meets at least bi-monthly and more frequently as needed.  Members contribute 1666 Coffman News articles on a rotating basis.  Items are posted in the e-News to advertise new books and other timely news.  Bulletin board displays are refreshed to remind residents to stop in and browse the collection.
Books are added each year, either as gifts from residents or as purchases paid for from one of the library’s budgets. To keep the collection fresh, less popular books are regularly weeded from the collection.  These are offered for sale via our Book Cart sales.  Proceeds are returned to the treasury and used to purchase more books or supplies.  Unsold books are offered to the AAUW and the St Paul Public Library for their book sales.  Others are used to support the Little Free Library in neighboring Grove Park.
Once again anonymous financial gifts from 4 residents boosted the total library budget by nearly $550 allowing the Committee to purchase more new books than in any previous year.   For the second year Catherine Wengler coordinated an exhibit of new books following August’s Book Night.  Residents were able to check out books at the event and take home a copy of the companion booklist.
Read Aloud made its debut in early 2015.  Coordinated by BJ Zander, Read Aloud is library story hour for residents.   Over the course of 7 winter Mondays, 5 readers read portions of Ian Frazier’s Great Plains to assembled residents.
166SIX PICKS is a Library Committee initiative designed to encourage residents to explore more of the Library’s collection than just the newest books.  Favorite reads representing all genres and subject areas were identified and marked with neon yellow spine labels.  A poster at the Library’s entrance, eNews mentions and an article in the 1666 Coffman News promoted the initiative’s fall debut.
With technical assistance from Mike O’Connor, Robert Tapp continues to maintain the Library’s page on the 1666 Coffman website.

By Joanne Kendall
Originally published in the December 2015 issue of 1666 Coffman Newsletter

While 1666 library readers continue to explore books marked with neon yellow-labeled “166Six Picks,” a stop on the second level of the library to examine the books in Section XII, Shelf 4 is certain to surprise the curious. Here is what you will discover.

Books on this shelf, a beginning collection labeled “Sacred Texts” and “Writings on Sacred Texts,” represent several of the world’s religious traditions. Perhaps for the first time ever, a reader can hold and read an edition of the Torah. The black-bound copy is edited by a widely recognized scholar and former Rabbi at Mount Zion Temple on Summit Avenue in Saint Paul.

A curious reader can also find a translation of the Bhagavad Gita edited by Eknath Easwaran. This edition of the central work of the Hindu spiritual tradition has been highly praised by Huston White, a respected scholar of world religions. Included in this edition are two other works of Hindu scripture, the Upanishads and the Dhammapada.

Our own biblical scholar and newer 1666 neighbor, Fred Gaiser, reminds us that
sacred texts have a long, long historical tradition, worth exploring for reasons few of  us think about. Fred’s comments below and your own explorations of Section XII will categorize you as an intrepid, curious reader.

Fred writes: “Many, if not most of the earliest writings we know are sacred texts. Hieroglyphics means “god’s words”—a later designation, of course, but a recognition of the nature of these writings (or characters). And what about the pre-writing pictographs, many of which are clearly religious icons of some sort? If we go back far enough, we find cave paintings that most regard as having ‘religiousa significance (homeopathic magic?)—not texts, of course (or are they, in a world that has no written language?). In the ancient Near East, there are many writings of religious significance, including the Cyrus Cylinder, of great importance for biblical and world history. Just for fun, poke around on the Internet for ‘ancient writing,’ ‘history of writing,’ and similar terms. It’s a fascinating journey.

Why do we care? These early sacred texts provide insight into ancient human history and art for all people. We don’t need to be Druids to marvel at the wonders of Stonehenge or, later in history, Roman Catholics to appreciate the beauty of a Gothic cathedral. Many World Heritage Sites are religious in nature. Similarly, we don’t have to profess a particular religion to be interested in its texts. It’s not all beauty, of course. We can find difficult stuff in sacred texts, even ugly or violent stuff—including in the Bible and the Qur’an. All the more reason to understand these texts, whether as believers or not, to put them in their proper place. In his book Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can’t Ignore the Bible’s Violent Verses—written primarily for Christians—church historian Richard Jenkins does not try to rehabilitate such verses, but he argues that religions, knowing their past, have to “mature” in order to survive.

While there are no cave paintings in the Coffman library, there are other materials of great cultural and religious significance. We can find the context and background, for example, of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s famous quotation from the Bhagavad Gita when he saw the explosion of the first atomic bomb in the Nevada desert, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”; or similarly of the Bible’s “Love your neighbor as yourself.” In the present world, the Qur’an has become culturally and politically important. What does it actually say? We can find it in its entirety in the two-volume Norton Anthology of World Religions, along with helpful commentary. A wealth of other resources are to be found in those volumes, including significant classical devotional writings and material from the early Rabbis that are the basis for the Rabbinical Judaism of today’s Jewish communities.

So, yes, take a look at these sacred texts. There are rich treasures in our 1666
Coffman Library collection.