Wednesday, March 11, 2015

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (from Greek hýpnos, ‘sleep’, éros, ‘love’, and máchē, ‘fight’), called in English Poliphilo's Strife of Love in a Dream or The Dream of Poliphilus, is a romance said to be by Francesco Colonna and a famous example of early printing.  First published in Venice in 1499, in an elegant page layout, with refined woodcut illustrations in an Early Renaissance style,  Hypnerotomachia Poliphili presents a mysterious arcane allegory in which Poliphilo pursues his love Polia through a dreamlike landscape, and is, seemingly, at last reconciled with her by the Fountain of Venus.  The book was printed by Aldus Manutius in Venice in December 1499.  The book is anonymous, but an acrostic formed by the first, elaborately decorated letter in each chapter in the original Italian reads POLIAM FRATER FRANCISCVS COLVMNA PERAMAVIT, "Brother Francesco Colonna has dearly loved Polia."  Despite this, scholars have also attributed the book to Leon Battista Alberti, and earlier, to Lorenzo de Medici.  The latest contribution in this respect was the attribution to Aldus Manutius, and a different Francesco Colonna, this one a wealthy Roman Governor.  The author of the illustrations is even less certain.  Find history, plot summary and allusions/references in other works at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnerotomachia_Poliphili

"The Hypnerotomachia is an encyclopedia masquerading as a novel, a dissertation on everything from architecture to zoology, written in a style that even a tortoise would find slow.  It is the world’s longest book about a man having a dream, and it makes Marcel Proust, who wrote the world’s longest book about a man eating a piece of cake, look like Ernest Hemingway."  http://www.any-read.com/read/The_Rule_of_Four/Pages_10.html

On Dec. 18, 2014, the Ohio Development Services Agency awarded $41.8 million in Ohio Historic Preservation Tax Credits to 31 applicants planning to rehabilitate 35 historic buildings.   Together, the projects are expected to leverage approximately $600 million in private investments in 12 communities.  Find the Round 13 recipients including Hensville in Toledo, Cincinnati Music Hall and Granville Inn, at http://development.ohio.gov/files/media/pressrelease/12.18.14%20-%20Release%20-%2035%20Historic%20Buildings%20Rehabilitated%20with%20Help%20from%20State.pdf

The Ohio Historic Preservation Tax Credit Program provides a tax credit in order to leverage the private redevelopment of historic buildings.  The program is highly competitive and receives applications bi-annually in March and September.  The application period for Round 14 of the Ohio Historic Preservation Tax Credit program is now open.  The application form can be downloaded under ‘Application Information’.  A total of $27.5 million in tax credit allocation is currently available for Round 14 applicants.  All applicants are required to schedule pre-application meetings with both the Ohio Development Services Agency and the State Historic Preservation Office prior to March 16, 2015.  Please contact the Office of Strategic Business Investments at historic@development.ohio.gov or 614-728-0995 and the State Historic Preservation Office at lbrownell@ohiohistory.org or 614-298-2000.  http://development.ohio.gov/cs/cs_ohptc.htm

The 11 eating clubs on Prospect Avenue are institutions unique to Princeton University.  They are private organizations, independently owned and operated.  The members of eating clubs are second-semester sophomores, juniors and seniors at Princeton.  While classes are in session, the clubs offer breakfast, lunch and dinner.  Each club determines its own membership, five of them by lottery called "sign-in," and six by way of "bicker," a selective membership process.  http://www.princeton.edu/odus/living/clubs/  To get into Ivy, the oldest, most expensive and most patrician eating club at Princeton University, candidates must sit for 10 one-on-one interviews with members, whose attempts to plumb their souls touch on what their parents do, where they spend summers and who their friends are.  Then the entire century-old club votes on prospects in all-night sessions.  Like an English men's club, there is a blackball rule:  if one of 130 members vetoes a candidate, he or she is rejected -- ''hosed'' in the tart campus vernacular.  http://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/16/style/at-ivy-club-a-trip-back-to-elitism.html

A league is a unit of length (or, in various regions, area).  It was long common in Europe and Latin America, but it is no longer an official unit in any nation.  The word originally meant the distance a person could walk in an hour.  In the English-speaking world, on land, the league was most commonly defined as three miles, though the length of a mile could vary from place to place and depending on the era.  At sea, a league was three nautical miles (6,100 yards; 5.6 kilometres).  English usage also included any of the other leagues mentioned below (for example, in discussing the Treaty of Tordesillas).  The league was used in Ancient Rome, defined as 1.5 Roman miles (7,500 Roman feet, 2.2 km, 1.4 mi.).  As used in Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, a league is four kilometres.  In Yucatán and other parts of rural Mexico, the league is still commonly used in the original sense of the distance that can be covered on foot in an hour, so that a league along a good road on level ground is a greater distance than a league on a difficult path over rough terrain.  Find a  comparison table of the different lengths for a "league", in different countries and at different times in history at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_%28unit%29

The phrase on tenterhooks  comes from one of the processes of making woollen cloth.  After it had been woven, the cloth still contained oil from the fleece, mixed with dirt.  It was cleaned in a fulling mill, but then it had to be dried carefully or it would shrink and crease.  So the lengths of wet cloth were stretched on wooden frames, and left out in the open for some time.  This allowed them to dry and straightened their weave.  These frames were the tenters, and the tenter hooks were the metal hooks used to fix the cloth to the frame.  
At one time, it would have been common in manufacturing areas to see fields full of these frames (older English maps sometimes marked an area as a tenter-field).  So it was not a huge leap of the imagination to think of somebody on tenterhooks as being in an state of anxious suspense, stretched like the cloth on the tenter.  The tenters have gone, but the meaning has survived.  Tenter comes from the Latin tendere, to stretch, via a French intermediate.  The word has been in the language since the fourteenth century, and on tenters soon after became a phrase meaning painful anxiety.  The exact phrase on tenterhooks seems first to have been used by Tobias Smollett in Roderick Random in 1748.  http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-ont1.htm

Farmer's Flap-Jacks adapted from Alfred Brumley's All-Day Singin' and Dinner on the Ground  Mix together 2 c. flour, 2 tsp. baking soda, and 1/4 tsp. salt.  When ready to cook, mix in 1 1/2 c. sour milk.  Drop from large spoon onto greased grill.  Brown on both sides.  Serve with butter and syrup.

The terms "a.m." and "p.m." are abbreviations of the Latin ante meridiem (before midday) and post meridiem (after midday).  Depending on the style guide referenced, the abbreviations "AM" and "PM" are variously written in small capitals ("am" and "pm"), uppercase letters ("AM" and "PM"), or lowercase letters ("am" and "pm").  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12-hour_clock

DIRECTORATE GENERAL FOR INTERNAL POLICIES POLICY DEPARTMENT A:  ECONOMIC AND SCIENTIFIC POLICY – Network Neutrality Revisited:  Challenges and Responses in the EU and in the US, December 2014.  This document was requested by the European Parliament’s Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection.  Authored by J. Scott Marcus.  See 122-page report at


http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1267  March 11, 2015  On this date in 1702, The Daily Courant, England's first national daily newspaper was published for the first time.  On this date in 1897, Henry Cowell, American pianist and composer, was born.

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