Books written by librarians   Authors include Madeleine L’Engle, Marianne Moore, Archibald MacLeish, Beverly Cleary, Dee Brown, Jorge Luis Borges, August Strindberg and Anne Tyler.  See list of titles at:  http://www.abebooks.com/blog/index.php/2013/03/18/literature-from-librarians-great-reads-written-by-the-experts/   

Black, white, and green peppercorns are all the same seed of the same plant in various stages of development and processing.   Black Peppercorns:  They have reached their full size, but are not quite ripe.  They are picked and allowed to dry in the sun.  White Peppercorns:  These are mature berries which ripen to a red color before being picked.  After harvesting, they are soaked and rubbed free of the outer skin down to the smooth white underlayer, then dried and bleached by the sun.  Green Peppercorns:  This is the unripe version, picked while green and usually pickled in vinegar or brine.  Pink Peppercorns:  In spite of its moniker, these are unrelated to the black peppercorn.  They come from the Baies rose plant (Euonymus phellomanus), imported from Madagascar.  Read about red peppercorns and pink berries at:  http://homecooking.about.com/od/spices/a/peppervarieties.htm

Abraham Lincoln was nominated at the Republican convention in Chicago in May 1860.  He did not attend the convention and remained at home in Springfield through the long months of the presidential campaign as was the custom.  During his final days in Springfield, Lincoln and his family moved into a two-dollar-a-day hotel suite.  Most of the family furniture had been sold, and the house had been rented.  The extra cash would be needed, as the government at that time did not underwrite a president-elect's travel expenses.  The Hour of Peril:  the Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War by Daniel Stashower,   2013.

The Inaugural Address of Jefferson Davis  February 18, 1861

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=DavInau.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=1&division=div1

The First Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln  March 4, 1861  http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres31.html

A popular myth suggests that a Chicago carpenter, George W. Snow, invented the balloon frame in 1832 and revolutionized construction practice.  Chicago architect John M. Van Osdel erroneously attributed the invention to Snow in 1883, and subsequent histories accepted the story.  But they did so without examining physical evidence.  The oldest buildings that remain in metropolitan Chicago suggest that the balloon frame was not a revolutionary idea; nor was it invented by Snow or any other Chicagoan.  During the colonial period, carpenters simplified the timber frame to allow for rapid construction with standardized materials.  The frame employed smaller, standardized timbers.  All mortises and tenons were very simple. The roof was a system of small common rafters held in place by nails.  Heated by stoves, the building had no need for a large, central fireplace.  The idea was not original. Carpenters in seventeenth-century Virginia employed a similar method when confronted with pressures to build rapidly.  But no matter the type of frame, carpenters could not reduce substantially the handwork necessary for building a house until the 1880s.  The balloon frame evolved slowly over the course of the nineteenth century.  It resulted from modest shifts in the practice of many carpenters over time.  Most likely, Chicago gained a reputation for the invention owing to factories like the Lyman Bridges Company that produced ready-made houses with balloon frames that were sold to various Western cities attempting to meet the needs of rapidly expanding populations.  Joseph C. Bigott   http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/105.html

EASY  When mashing a small amount of cooked potatoes or ripe avocados, you can use a fork instead of a masher or processor.

The Selected Letters of Willa Cather  on sale April 16, 2013 

Willa Cather, wanting to be judged on her work alone, clearly forbade the publication of her letters in her will.  But now, more than sixty-five years after her death, with her literary reputation as secure as a reputation can be, the letters have become available for publication.  The 566 letters collected here, nearly 20 percent of the total, range from the funny (and mostly misspelled) reports of life in Red Cloud in the 1880s that Cather wrote as a teenager, through those from her college years at the University of Nebraska, her time as a journalist in Pittsburgh and New York, and during her growing eminence as a novelist.  Postcards and letters describe her many travels around the United States and abroad, and they record her last years in the 1940s, when the loss of loved ones and the disasters of World War II brought her near to despair.  Written to family and close friends and to such luminaries as Sarah Orne Jewett, Robert Frost, Yehudi Menuhin, Sinclair Lewis, and the president of Czechoslovakia, Thomas Masaryk, they reveal her in her daily life as a woman and writer passionately interested in people, literature, and the arts in general.  http://www.randomhouse.com/book/217597/the-selected-letters-of-willa-cather-by-willa-cather

On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected sixteenth president of the United States.  He won as “The Railsplitter” candidate, a nickname acquired the previous May when Illinois Republicans convened at Decatur to endorse a favorite son for president.  Lincoln was the likely choice but his supporters felt he needed a catchier nickname than “Old Abe” or “Honest Abe.”  Thus, Richard J. Oglesby and John Hanks, a first cousin of Lincoln’s mother, located a split-rail fence supposedly built by Lincoln in 1830.  When they walked into the hall carrying two of the rails—decorated with flags, streamers, and a sign that read, “Abraham Lincoln/The Rail Candidate”—the crowd went wild.  Although Lincoln claimed he could not say for certain that he had split those particular rails, he said that “he had mauled many and many better ones since he had grown to manhood.”  Several days after the state convention, the Republican Party held its national convention in Chicago and nominated Lincoln for president.  Lincoln did not actively campaign for office (as was the custom), but his supporters staged a lively campaign. 

http://blog.chicagohistory.org/index.php/2009/11/the-railsplitter/

"In the digital world, the traditional print functions of a librarian are still needed, since most would agree that full-text search is not a substitute for a skilled research librarian who adds value through context, experience, and personal interaction with the searcher." 

Vinton G. Cerf, ACM President  56 Communications of the ACM  7  April 2013