Deuki Hong still remembers the day he discovered what kimchi really was.  As is true for most Koreans, "there was never a time in my life when kimchi wasn't in my refrigerator," says Hong, the chef at Korean fried chicken shop Sunday Bird in San Francisco and coauthor of the cookbook Koreatown.  But when he started learning to cook in middle school, he was always more interested in watching Jacques Pépin reruns on the weekend than in the fiery red fermented cabbage that was always in the kitchen, which, to him, symbolized his inherited knowledge of everything about Korean cuisine.  Then his mother took him to the grocery store in New York where she'd been buying their kimchi.  "There was this whole section of red and green and white," he says—jars of heart-shaped perilla leaves and soybeans, and, traumatically, little quart containers of shucked oysters and julienned carrots.  "It was a culture shock to me, even though it was my own culture," Hong remembers.  "I thought [kimchi] was just one dish."  But kimchi is a lot more than cabbage. The term "is actually more of an active verb," says Lauryn Chun, the founder of Mother-in-Law's Kimchi and the author of an excellent primer on the subject, The Kimchi Cookbook.  "You can 'kimchi' just about anything."  JOSHUA SCHENKKAN   https://www.seriouseats.com/2017/11/guide-to-kimchi.html  Find location of H Mart stores selling Korean food at https://www.hmart.com/ourstores

It sounds like something from Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind and his The Cemetery of Forgotten Books:  a huge volume containing thousands of summaries of books from 500 years ago, many of which no longer exist.  But the real deal has been found in Copenhagen, where it has lain untouched for more than 350 years.  The Libro de los Epítomes manuscript, which is more than a foot thick, contains more than 2,000 pages and summaries from the library of Hernando Colón, the illegitimate son of Christopher Columbus who made it his life’s work to create the biggest library the world had ever known in the early part of the 16th century.  Running to around 15,000 volumes, the library was put together during Colón’s extensive travels.  Today, only around a quarter of the books in the collection survive and have been housed in Seville Cathedral since 1552.  The discovery in the Arnamagnæan Collection in Copenhagen is “extraordinary”, and a window into a “lost world of 16th-century books”, said Cambridge academic Dr Edward Wilson-Lee, author of the biography of Colón, The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books.  The manuscript was found in the collection of Árni Magnússon, an Icelandic scholar born in 1663, who donated his books to the University of Copenhagen on his death in 1730.  The majority of the some 3,000 items are in Icelandic or Scandinavian languages, with only around 20 Spanish manuscripts, which is probably why the Libro de los Epítomes went unnoticed for hundreds of years.  It was Guy Lazure at the University of Windsor in Canada who first spotted the connection to Colón.  The Arnamagnæan Institute then contacted Mark McDonald at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, who passed it on to Wilson-Lee and his co-author José María Pérez Fernández, of the University of Granada, for verification.  After amassing his collection, Colón employed a team of writers to read every book in the library and distill each into a little summary in Libro de los Epítomes, ranging from a couple of lines long for very short texts to about 30 pages for the complete works of Plato, which Wilson-Lee dubbed the “miracle of compression”.  Because Colón collected everything he could lay his hands on, the catalogue is a real record of what people were reading 500 years ago, rather than just the classics.  “The important part of Hernando’s library is it’s not just Plato and Cortez, he’s summarising everything from almanacs to news pamphlets.  This is really giving us a window into the entirety of early print, much of which has gone missing, and how people read it--a world that is largely lost to us,” said Wilson-Lee.  Wilson-Lee and Pérez Fernández are currently working on a comprehensive account of the library, which will be published in 2020.  They are also working to digitise the manuscript, in collaboration with the Arnamagnæan Institute.  Alison Flood  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/10/extraordinary-500-year-old-library-catalogue-reveals-books-lost-to-time-libro-de-los-epitomes

Maybe it was part of President Donald Trump's ongoing campaign to end the "war on Christmas," freeing up believers to openly extol the virtues of stollen bread without fear of running afoul of fruitcake hate groups.  Whatever the case, Trump on May 5, 2019 was responding to a tweet from Jerry Falwell Jr., son of the famous Southern Baptist pastor and president of Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, who suggested the president should have two years added to his first term as "pay back for time stolen by this corrupt failed coup."  The term "failed coup" was a reference to special counsel Robert Mueller's two-year investigation.  An excerpt from the tweet:  "they have stollen two years of my (our) Presidency"  The misspelling sent readers back to 14th-century Germany, where stollen bread was reportedly created around Dresden in 1329.  Despite its inclusion of raisins, citron and butter, stollen apparently assumed a more ascetic persona during Lent, the 40 days when Christians may fast or make other sacrifices.  During Lent, bakers, it seems, were required to use only flour, oats and water to make stollen.  But as the treat became associated with the Christmas holidays, stollen reverted to its original form as a yeasted bread laced with candied fruit and spices.  The term "stollen" is derived from the German word for "tunnel," specifically to the type of man-made tunnels carved into the earth.  The area around Dresden has historically been mining country.  Tim Carman  https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/donald-trump-a-single-typo-turns-a-german-holiday-bread-into-a-twitter-star-2033906

Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio was created by a remarkable American family.  Inspired by viewing Audubon’s lithographs at the 1876 World’s Fair, twenty-nine year old artist Genevieve Jones began work on a companion to Birds of America, but this time illustrating the nests and eggs that Audubon left out.  Her brother collected the nests and eggs, her father paid all publishing costs, and Genevieve and her girlhood friend learned lithography and undertook the work of a lifetime.  Ninety copies were originally printed in 1886, and only about twenty-five copies exist as of 2012.  Originally the Jones family took subscriptions for the eventual publication of the book.  Among the original subscribers:  President Rutherford B. Hayes, and a young Harvard college student by the name of Theodore Roosevelt.  “If Audubon is the Robinson Crusoe of nature art, then the Jones are the Swiss Family Robinson."  Jonathan Rosen, author of The Life of the Skies

See pictures at https://landlibrary.wordpress.com/2012/05/09/a-young-artists-vision-and-the-family-that-saw-it-through/  See also https://www.sil.si.edu/ondisplay/nestsandeggs/essay.htm

The First Transcontinental Railroad (known originally as the "Pacific Railroad" and later as the "Overland Route") was a 1,912-mile (3,077 km) continuous railroad line constructed between 1863 and 1869 that connected the existing eastern U.S. rail network at Omaha, Nebraska/Council Bluffs, Iowa with the Pacific coast at the Oakland Long Wharf on San Francisco Bay.  The rail line was built by three private companies over public lands provided by extensive US land grants.  Construction was financed by both state and US government subsidy bonds as well as by company issued mortgage bonds.  The railroad opened for through traffic when CPRR President Leland Stanford ceremonially drove the gold "Last Spike" (later often referred to as the "Golden Spike") with a silver hammer at Promontory Summit.  See picture of the Last Spike ceremony on May 10, 1869 at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Transcontinental_Railroad

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2095  May 10, 2019