Visit the Virtual Reference Shelf at the Library of Congress and find online resources for 30 subjects.  You may also link to "ask a librarian" or search the catalog at:  http://www.loc.gov/rr/askalib/virtualref.html

Francis Eustis was a world-famous artist reknowned for his beautiful, life-like horse sculptures.  His work is on display at many museums around the world.  http://www.modelhorsegallery.info/E/eustis/FEhome.html   Note:  Francis Eustis is the great-uncle of former Toledoan Brit Eaton.   See International Museum of the Horse at:  http://imh.org/

Recommended author:  James Herriot is the pen name of James Alfred Wight, OBE, FRCVS also known as Alf Wight, an English veterinary surgeon and writer.  Wight is best known for his semi-autobiographical stories, often referred to collectively as All Creatures Great and Small, a title used in some editions and in film and television adaptations.  In 1939, at the age of 23, he qualified as a veterinary surgeon with Glasgow Veterinary College.  In January 1940, he took a brief job at a veterinary practice in Sunderland, but moved in July to work in a rural practice based in the town of Thirsk, Yorkshire, close to the Yorkshire Dales and North York Moors, where he was to remain for the rest of his life.  The original practice is now a museum, "The World of James Herriot".  Wight intended for years to write a book, but with most of his time consumed by veterinary practice and family, his writing ambition went nowhere.  Challenged by his wife, in 1966 (at the age of 50), he began writing.  In 1969 Wight wrote If Only They Could Talk, the first of the now-famous series based on his life working as a vet and his training in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War.  Owing in part to professional etiquette which at that time frowned on veterinary surgeons and other professionals from advertising their services, he took a pen name, choosing "James Herriot".  If Only They Could Talk was published in the United Kingdom in 1970 by Michael Joseph Ltd, but sales were slow until Thomas McCormack, of St. Martin's Press in New York City, received a copy and arranged to have the first two books published as a single volume in the United States.  The resulting book, titled All Creatures Great and Small, was an overnight success, spawning numerous sequels, movies, and a successful television adaptation.  See list of his books at:  http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/18062.James_Herriot 

Verbs named for people

Eastwooding--gesturing to an empty chair
Tebowing--praying during a football game
Borking--sinking a Supreme Court nomination
Nestoring--driving in the left lane, usually a few miles below the speed limit

In her four decades as America’s cooking teacher, Julia Child had a hard and fast rule about commercial endorsements:  She didn’t do them.  It didn’t matter whether it was the butter that made her beurre blanc sauce sing, the pot in which she slow-cooked her cassoulet or even the cookbooks penned by chef friends; her praise was not for sale.  “It was sort of a life philosophy that she had,” her great nephew, Alex Prud’homme, said, recalling how she frequently remarked, “Your name is your most valuable asset, and you should be very careful how it’s used.”  Eight years after her death, Child’s disdain for commercial endorsements is being aired anew in a legal battle pitting her heirs against the makers of what might be described as her occupational right hand--her oven.  At issue in dueling lawsuits filed in recent days is a marketing campaign, launched without the permission of Child’s estate, that touts her use of Thermador appliances decades ago in her home and television kitchens.  The campaign rolled out this year by Thermador, a 96-year-old brand based in Irvine, ranged from a Facebook “like” of its products by “Julia Child, chef” to glossy magazine ads that showed photos of Child and two of the brand’s ovens with the caption, “An American Icon and Her American Icons.”  Both sides agree that there were Thermador appliances on the Boston set where Child filmed “The French Chef” in the 1960s and 1970s and that she had a Thermador oven in the kitchen of her Cambridge, Mass., residence--a room now displayed as a national treasure at the Smithsonian Institution.  But the sides part on whether Thermador required the approval of the Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts, the Santa Barbara charitable foundation to which she left her intellectual property, including trademarks, copyrights and the use of her likeness.  http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/08/julia-childs-family-outraged-over-thermador-ads-featuring-chef.html 

The Modernist architect Frank Lloyd Wright wasn’t a hoarder.  But he did save just about everything — whether a doodle on a Plaza Hotel cocktail napkin of an imagined city on Ellis Island, his earliest pencil sketch of the spiraling Guggenheim Museum or a model of Broadacre City, his utopian metropolis.  Since Wright’s death in 1959 those relics have been locked in storage at his former headquarters — Taliesin, in Spring Green, Wis., and Taliesin West, in Scottsdale, Ariz.  Now that entire archive is moving permanently to New York in an unusual joint partnership between the Museum of Modern Art and Columbia University’s Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, where it will become more accessible to the public for viewing and scholarship.  The collection includes more than 23,000 architectural drawings, about 40 large-scale, architectural models, some 44,000 photographs, 600 manuscripts and more than 300,000 pieces of office and personal correspondence.  Acquiring the archive of a seminal 20th-century architect is a boon for both the museum and the library.  “It’s just astounding as primary source material,” said Carole Ann Fabian, the Avery Library’s director.  “I keep thinking of it as a national treasure.”  The institutions will share equally in stewardship of the collection.  The models will live at MoMA, which has extensive conservation and exhibition experience.  The museum will display them in periodic presentations and special exhibitions.  The papers will be housed at Avery, whose librarians will make them available to researchers and educators starting at the end of next year.  “Fallingwater is arguably the best piece of residential architecture,” said Ms. Fabian of Avery Library.  “We have a blueprint set from the Kaufmann family that commissioned the work.  Now we will get the original construction drawings, photography and correspondence.  They saved every piece of evidence.”  The archive’s architectural models include notable Wright projects like the unrealized St. Mark’s Tower, an East Village apartment complex; the Broadacre City model; Wingspread, a house near Racine, Wis.; and a version of the Guggenheim. Most of these models were not made for clients; they were constructed for MoMA’s retrospective of Wright in 1940.  “So in a certain sense,” Mr. Bergdoll said, “they’re coming home.”   Robin Pogrebin  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/arts/design/frank-lloyd-wright-collection-moves-to-moma-and-columbia.html?_r=1