Julia Morgan was a Bay Area native, born in San Francisco on January 20, 1872 and raised in Oakland.  Julia attended Oakland High School, graduating in 1890.  With a strong mathematical interest she enrolled at U. C. Berkeley, in the College of Engineering.  In her senior year Bernard Maybeck, then 32, was hired to teach descriptive geometry and he initiated a series of informal architectural seminars for his favorite students.  Maybeck became a positive influence on Julia and others, encouraging them to study at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in Paris which he had attended ten years earlier.  Julia went to Paris in 1896, learned French, and passed her entrance exams in the fall of 1898, becoming the first woman ever admitted to the architectural division within the École.  After three years hard work Julia earned her diploma in February 1902.  Morgan returned to the Bay Area in 1902 and worked initially for John Galen Howard at U. C. Berkeley, assisting him on the construction of the Greek Theater.  But her ambition was to open her own practice.  She took the state licensing exam and was certified to practice as an architect in her own right in 1904.  She opened her first office at 456 Montgomery, a building demolished in the earthquake of 1906.  In 1907 she moved into the Merchants Exchange Building (465 California) initially with Ira Wilson Hoover as a junior partner, but from 1910 listed simply as Julia Morgan, Architect.  Her first major project after the April 18, 1906 earthquake was the reconstruction of the badly damaged Fairmont Hotel, which had been designed by the Reid Brothers and was very close to opening at the time of the earthquake.  Morgan supervised its repair for owners Herbert and Hartland Law so that it reopened on the one-year anniversary of the earthquake.  Morgan designed over 700 buildings in her 50-year career, many of which were Arts and Crafts houses, particularly in Berkeley, Oakland and Piedmont.  She was highly regarded, especially by women, which led to many commissions for women's clubs, residence halls, and YWCA's (five in San Francisco alone, including the interior of the YWCA for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition).  From two existing structures she very creatively removed upper stories.  The first was at 1055 Green Street on Russian Hill where she did so for a client in 1916.  The second was her own property in Pacific Heights.  Morgan enjoyed a career-long association with three generations of the Hearst family. Phoebe Apperson Hearst was a patron and an early client.  Phoebe's son, William Randolph Hearst, commissioned Morgan for many residential and commercial projects, the most famous of which were his estates at San Simeon and Wyntoon, and W. R.'s son George had Julia convert his house in Hillsborough to a Western model of the White House.  Morgan closed her office in the Merchants Exchange Building in 1951 requesting that her files and blueprints be destroyed, on the grounds that her clients had their own copies.  She would never have anticipated that 40 years later a lawsuit would develop as a result of the lack of documentation that she designed a particular house in Oakland.  A suit was filed, however, and an initial summary judgment in favor of the sellers and agents was overturned at the Court of Appeal in 1994, significantly extending the State's real estate case law.  David Parry  http://www.sfhistoryencyclopedia.com/articles/m/morganJulia.html

Julia Morgan Posthumously Awarded the AIA 2014 Gold Medal by Karrie Jacobs   Her buildings live on in part because Julia Morgan—little known fact—was a pioneer in the use of reinforced concrete, a material that turned out to be remarkably resilient in earthquakes.  See pictures at http://www.architectmagazine.com/awards/julia-morgan-posthumously-awarded-the-aia-2014-gold-medal_o

George W. Wilson House -- Vallejo, California  In 1907, Julia Morgan designed the George W. Wilson House.  Blending elements of the Swiss Chalet style and neoclassical Beaux-Arts style, Morgan created a house that, after its completion in 1909, became one of her finest examples of a residence designed in the First Bay Tradition.  Morgan’s design prowess is demonstrated in the expansive butterfly floor plan of the house, the Arts and Crafts-style finishes, and the tiled-faced fireplaces handcrafted by the Grueby Faience Company.

The Frank Applegate House -- Santa Fe, New Mexico  Designed in 1921 by Frank Applegate as a private residence, the Frank Applegate House meshes both the Spanish Colonial style and the Pueblo style to create among the first of many Pueblo Revival, or Santa Fe style, houses.  The house, built with adobe brick, has two stories with two bedrooms on each level. 

Frank Lloyd Wright's Penfield House -- Willoughby, Ohio  Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1955, the Louis Penfield House is nestled on 30 acres of heavily wooded property, creating an atmosphere of solace and solitude.  The house features three bedrooms, one-and-a-half baths, and a 12-foot floor-to-ceiling glass walled living room that offers a panoramic view of the bluffs on the Chagrin River.  Included on the Penfield House property is a historic century home with two rental units, a cottage, and the construction site for Frank Lloyd Wright’s last residential commission, dubbed Riverrock, which was designed by Wright for the Penfield family in 1959.  See pictures of all three houses at http://blog.preservationnation.org/2015/03/13/historic-real-estate-houses-by-famous-artists-and-architects-edition/#.VZWcB_lVhBc

John Dunning (born 1942) is an American writer of non-fiction and detective fiction.   He is known for his reference books on old-time radio and his series of mysteries featuring Denver bookseller and ex-policeman Cliff Janeway.  Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1942, Dunning moved to his father's hometown of Charleston, South Carolina, at the age of three.  In 1964 he left his parents' home and moved to Denver, Colorado, where, after a time working as a stable hand at a horse racing track, he got a job at The Denver Post.  In 1970 he left the newspaper and took up writing novels, while pursuing a variety of jobs.  Partly because of trouble with his publishers, in 1984 he stopped writing and opened a store specializing in second-hand and rare books called the Old Algonquin Bookstore.  At the urging of fellow authors, he returned to the world of novels in 1992 with his first Cliff Janeway novel, Booked to Die.  In 1994 he closed the store and continued it as an internet and mail order business called Old Algonquin Books.  Find lists of John Dunning's fiction, non-fiction and awards at ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dunning_(writer)%20

Doorstopper  "The covers of this book are too far apart." — Ambrose Bierce   A common literary term that refers to a book being so thick and heavy that it can be used as a doorstopper.  Or a literary weapon.  Or a substitute for barbells.  Or a method with which to give a chiropractor a job.  Proper Door Stoppers (also known as Tree Killers) should be over 500 pages.  If one book is over 1,000 pages, it is probably a Door Stopper.  This goes double if the typeface is smaller than 10 point.  Oftentimes, publishers will turn an ordinary trilogy, tetralogy, or series into one huge book.  This is not strictly a Door Stopper but an "Omnibus".  http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Doorstopper

The early braking systems to be used in vehicles with steel rimmed wheels consisted of nothing more than a block of wood and a lever system.  The driver had to pull the lever located next to him and make the wooden block bear against the wheel.  The man largely credited with the development of the modern day drum brake is French manufacturer Louis Renault, in 1902.  Still, crude concepts of the drum existed before that.  Wilhelm Maybach had used a similar, yet simpler design a year earlier.  Even prior to that, in 1899, Gottlieb Daimler came up with the idea to wrap a cable around a drum and anchor it to the vehicles chassis.  The forward motion of the car tightened the cable, making it easier for the driver to pull the lever and get the wood block to do its work.  These types of braking systems were all external, a feature which soon turned into a problem.  Dust, heat and even water rendered them less effective.  It was time for the internal expanding shoe brake.  By placing the shoes inside the drum brake, dust and water were kept out, allowing the braking process to remain effective.  Hydraulic drum based brakes were effective, but they had a tendency to ineffectively distribute heat.  This feature made room for the creation of the disc braking system.  First patented in 1902 by William Lanchester, the disc became popular in the 1950s.  http://www.autoevolution.com/news/braking-systems-history-6933.html  See also http://www.carhistory4u.com/the-early-history/other-parts-of-the-car/disc-brakes

July 2, 2015  Pearl Thompson was a student at Shaw University in 1942 when she was told she couldn’t check out a book from Raleigh, North Carolina’s public library because she was black.  She was sent to the library’s basement, where she had to wait for a staff member to bring her the book she was assigned to read for a history class.  Blacks weren’t issued library cards, so she had to stay in the basement to read it.  Seventy-three years later, Thompson finally has her library card.  She entered the Cameron Village Regional Library on Thursday, aided by a walker, to attend a ceremony in her honor.  Thompson, 92, grew up on Lenoir Street in Raleigh, the oldest of four children.  Thompson can’t remember which book she was assigned to read for that class.  But Shaw didn’t have it, so she went to the Olivia Raney Library, although she knew it was only for whites.  The Olivia Raney Library was Raleigh’s first public library.  A separate library was established in 1935 on Hargett Street to serve blacks.  That library eventually became the Richard B. Harrison Library on New Bern Avenue, said librarian Wanda Cox-Bailey.  The Harrison library merged with the white libraries in the 1960s, Cox-Bailey said.  Sarah Nagem  http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/community/midtown-raleigh-news/mrn-community/article26148442.html

Fifty-five years after “To Kill a Mockingbird” published, Harper Lee’s highly anticipated second novel, “Go Set a Watchman,” is coming to bookstores July 14, 2015.  See  http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/10/listen-to-reese-witherspoon-reading-the-first-chapter-of-harper-lees-go-set-a-watchman and http://www.wsj.com/articles/harper-lees-go-set-a-watchman-read-the-first-chapter-1436500861

July 9, 2015   “I never expected any sort of success with Mockingbird,” Harper Lee said in 1964 in her last published interview.  The book had been her debut novel; she’d assumed that, like most debuts, no one would read it.  Instead, it spent 98 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and earned Lee a profile in Life magazine.  “Public encouragement, I hoped for a little … but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening,” Lee said at the time.  She stopped granting interviews and would sometimes skip town for a few days when she learned that a reporter was trying to track her down.  For years she insisted she’d never publish again.   Go Set a Watchman is the most preordered book in HarperCollins’s history.  Its first print run is two-thirds larger than the final Hunger Gamesbook and more than twice that of the last Game of Thrones installment.  The novel’s topped Amazon.com’s best-seller list since its release was announced in February and is the website’s most preordered book of any genre in the last four years.   Claire Suddath  Read more and see pictures at http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-harper-lee-go-set-a-watchman/

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1322  July 10, 2015  On this date in 1212, the most severe of several early fires of London burned most of the city to the ground.  On this date in 1499, the Portuguese explorer Nicolau Coelho returned to Lisbon, after discovering the sea route to India as a companion of Vasco da Gama.