Happy (Belated) Birthday, Ginter Park!

Pictured (probably): 

Margaret Williams, Margaret Worsham and Burgess Collins

Did you know that the Ginter Park Branch turned 50 this year? The doors were first opened in May of 1964. If you haven't seen it, check out the image of Ginter Park's grand opening preparations in Wednesday's Times-Dispatch. To celebrate this milestone just as we begin preparing for renovations scheduled to take place next year I'm sharing this list of 50 books published in 1964. Perhaps you would have found a few of these on the new books shelf. Some I've read, many I haven't, but I discovered quite a few to add to my to-read list. Any familiar favorites?

1. The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein

2. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (still creepy and gross after 50 years) by Roald Dahl

3. A Moveable Fest by Ernest Hemingway

4. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and other Pieces by James Thurber

5. Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby, Jr.

6. Harriett the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh

7. Herzog by Saul Bellow

8. A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe

9. Arrow of God by Chinua Achebe

10. The Penultimate Truth by Phillip K. Dick

11. Why We Can't Wait by Martin Luther King, Jr.

12. Bread and Jam for Frances by Russell Hoban (Frances is still adorable after all these years)

13. A Nation of Immigrants by John F. Kennedy

14. The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead by Timothy Leary

15. Flowers for Hitler by Leonard Cohen

16. Apocalypse Postponed by Umberto Eco

17. The Face of Another by Kobo Abe

18. The Wind's Twelve Quarters by Ursula K. LeGuin

19. You Only Live Twice by Ian Fleming

20. The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber

21. The Phantom of Pine Hill (Nancy Drew #42) by Carolyn Keene

22. Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey

23. Colonialism and Neocolonialism by Jean-Paul Sartre

24. Nerve by Dick Francis

25. Ribsy by Beverly Cleary

26. The Fortunate Pilgrim by Mario Puzo

27. The Gathering of Zion: The Story of the Mormon Trail by Wallace Stegner

28. Across Five Aprils by Irene Hunt

29. Fiddler on the Roof by Joseph Stein

30. A Little Learning: the first volume of an autobiography by Evelyn Waugh

31. One Fat Englishman by Kingsley Amis

32. The Ravishing of Lol Stein by Marguerite Duras

33. Gantenbein by Max Frisch

34. The Duchess of Jermyn Street by Daphne Feilding

35. My Years at General Motors by Alfred P. Sloan

36. Hard to be a God by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (The Strugatsky brothers are a favorite of mine. Roadside Picnic is newly re-translated and highly recommended)

37. My Autobiography by Charles Chaplin

38. Shadow Of A Bull by Maia Wojciechowska

39. I Have a Horse of My Own by Charlotte Zolotow

40. This Rough Magic by Mary Stewart

41. The Character of Physical Law by Richard P. Feynman

42. The Nova Express by William S. Burroughs

43. Asterix and the Big Fight (Asterix, #7) by René Goscinny

44. May I Bring a Friend by Beatrice Schenk De Regniers

45. Flat Stanley by Jeff Brown

46. Whistle for Willie by Ezra Jack Keats

47. The Raw and the Cooked by Claude Levi-Strauss

48. A Cellarful of Noise by Brian Epstein

49. Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung

50. An Area of Darkness by V.S. Naipaul