Completely Booked - Official Podcast of the Jacksonville Public Library

Happy New Year's Eve from all of us at the Jacksonville Public Library! Our guest, Justin Tichy, joins us today to talk about something wildly popular for NYE festivities: Champagne. We talk about the history of the Champagne region in France, how to decode labels on a bottle, misconceptions people have about popular Champagnes, the best places to find a good bottle of bubbles in Jax, and more.

Gayle Hart is the VP of Marketing for the Greater Jacksonville Agricultural Fair. She joins us on today's episode of Completely Booked to chat about the wonderful things her team does for the community and how she first became involved with the fair.

TubaChristmas is a free concert that's presented around the world where tuba and euphonium players get together and play Christmas music for one hour every year. Today, we chat with Marc Dickman and Suna Hall, the conductor and coordinator of Jacksonville's TubaChristmas performance, about the upcoming show on December 14, 2019 in Jacksonville Beach at 1:30 p.m. Our producer, Justin, guest hosts this episode as he is a longtime player in TubaChristmas.

Hello book friends! This segment is for you. Welcome to our first Wednesday podcast episode highlighting new releases to look out for this month! We sit down with Shawn Norton from our Readers' Advisory Committee to chat about materials coming to the library in December 2019.

Local author and historian Tim Gilmore returns to Completely Booked this week to chat about his recently published book, Channeling Anna Fletcher: On Seances and Women's Rights. We also talk about Tim's website, Jax Psycho Geo, that contains nearly 500 unique, unusual, and macabre stories on local Jacksonville history.

The holiday season is here, so we have preschool teacher Rebecca McNeil back on Completely Booked to help you get your family ready. We go over tips for handling holiday traditions and gift-giving with your children, fun activities you can do with your family over the break, and, of course, her top holiday book recommendations for the little ones.

Anna Claire Hodge is a writer and professor based in Jacksonville, Florida, and holds a Ph.D in creative writing from Florida State University. We chat about everything from her greatest literary inspirations to the hidden world behind beauty blogging and Instagram influencing, which ultimately led to how she found her voice as a writer.

Today is Monday, November 11, which is Veterans Day. So on this episode of Completely Booked, we interview Joe Tillman, President of the Buffalo Soldiers Historical Society here in Jacksonville, Fl. We explore ways to go beyond the uniform and express appreciation for veterans on Veterans Day.

Each year JaxbyJax hosts a literary arts festival highlighting Jacksonville stories and settings, and this year one of its main venues is the Main Library! On this week's episode of Completely Booked, we chat with the driving forces behind JaxbyJax, Darlyn and Brad Kuhn, about everything you need to know for the upcoming festival on Saturday, November 16.

Halloween is right around the corner, so this episode is a spooky special edition of Completely Booked. We teamed up with PFC Paranormal to investigate the Willowbranch Library. Located in Riverside, the Willowbranch Library opened in 1930, making it the oldest existing library branch in Jacksonville. This episode includes our interview with Misty Darnell, the founder of PFC Paranormal, and one of her team members, Bree– plus a bit of audio from our paranormal investigation.