BOOK LOVERS Pregnancy costs could be split under bill

In the John M. Parker Agricultural Coliseum, a bazaar sprung from the red dirt floor.

The stands were empty, but the pit was full. Tens of thousands of books lined banquet tables, arranged into rows, organized into sections like mystery, medicine and west. Among the spiral bounds, staple bounds, leather bounds and paperbacks, collections of people sifted through unknown volumes, searching for—exactly what they couldn’t tell you—though often finding something of themselves in the sea of pages.

This is the Book Bazaar: a fundraiser held each spring for the benefit of LSU’s libraries.

Organized by non-profit “Friends of the LSU Libraries,” this year the bazaar opened its doors from April 13-16, seeing hundreds of visitors, raising tens of thousands of dollars and selling upwards of 60,000 volumes— all of which were donated by the community.

“It’s pretty amazing because every year we think we won’t be able to find any more books,” said Bazaar Chairman Anita Adams on the fundraiser’s second day. Yet each year, the donations come en masse.

“It’s avid readers who just

Administration

have a whole lot of books that they need to clear out. It’s professors who retired, and we get their entire libraries from their offices at LSU. It’s generational book collectors who’ve kept them through the decades, and years and years, and then something happens and they have to downsize,” Adams said.

The community donates its books. Then it returns for them. Avid readers, professors and col- lectors give to The Friends, then The Friends give the same books back, this time to new readers, professors and collectors. It’s a cycle.

And this year, the cycle out was bigger than usual.

“We had people lined up at the front door, all the way around the building, before 9 o’clock,” Adams said. A video on her phone showed the crowd on Thursday morning. They waved at the camera, hooting and smiling in anticipation.

Each year, the bazaar connects books with people and often in serendipitous fashion.

“You don’t know what’s on that table,” Adams said. “I had a man bring this book to me—very nondescript—he said, ‘I have been looking for this book for 15 years’. . .He was so happy.”

BY GABBY JIMENEZ & CLAIRE SULLIVAN LSU MANSHIP NEWS SEVICE

BATON ROUGE–The House Civil Law and Procedure Committee moved forward a bill that would allow mothers to recuperate half of out-of-pocket, pregnancyrelated medical expenses from the father of their child.

After the baby is born, the mother would have two years to recover these expenses, which would not include costs covered by insurance. Under present law, women have no avenue for this action.

“I think this is a very good bill to really help the pregnant women in our state who have no way to recover these medical expenses,” said Rep. Lawrence “Larry” Frieman, R-Abita Springs, the bill’s author.

The bill requires that paternity be proved by clear and convincing evidence, with the burden of proof requiring paternity to be more likely true than untrue.

The proposed law, House Bill 5, garnered support from both anti-abortion and abortion rights groups, including Louisiana Right