The sushi industry in this country has grown into a $22 billion industry in 2019, a 4.8 percent increase since 2014, according to the industry market research website IBISWorld.  Sushi originated in Asia centuries ago as a way to preserve fish for up to a year’s time through the fermentation of rice.  Individuals at first just ate the fish and discarded the rice.  Sushi is a Japanese word that means sour rice, not raw fish as many believe.  Roberta Gedert  https://www.toledoblade.com/a-e/toledo-magazine/2019/05/04/foodology-teaches-commoners-the-art-sushi/stories/20190504097

“We all know that books burn, yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire.  People die, but books never die."  Franklin D. Roosevelt  https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1487137-we-all-know-that-books-burn-yet-we-have-the

Free and open to the public since 1887, the Newberry is an independent research library whose world-famous collection is available to scholars, genealogists, and lifelong learners alike.  Anyone who is at least 14 years old can sign up for a reader’s card and, in just minutes, have history right at their fingertips--whether it’s in the form of a medieval manuscript, an atlas of hand-colored maps, or a selection of letters between two American authors.  These unique primary sources are part of a vast collection of more than 1.6 million books, 5 million manuscript pages, and 600,000 maps that the Newberry continually preserves, augments, and makes accessible in a variety of ways.  https://www.newberry.org/about  The Newberry 60 West Walton Street  Chicago, Illinois 60610  (312) 943-9090

The Newberry Library, Chicago,  awarded Mara R. Wade a long-term fellowship for 2016-2017 to research the new monograph"Early Modern Intellectual Networks: Emblems as Open Sources,” a social history of the emblem.  She is the 2016 recipient of the Patricia Labalme Grant from the Renaissance Society of America for research at the Centro Vittore Branca at Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice, Italy.  Her research there focuses on “Emblems and the Self” and portraits of Hapsburg ambassadors to the Ottoman empire.  She has been for over a decade the principle investigator (PI) for Emblematica Online, an NEH funded multi-year, international digital humanities research project.  She has published Gender Matters (2014); The Palatine Wedding of 1613.  Context, Celebration and Consequence of An Anglo-German Alliance.  Wolfenbütteler Abhandlungen zur Renaissanceforschung (with Sara Smart, Exeter University, 2013), which earned the Weiss/Brown award in Renaissance Studies, Newberry Library, Chicago; and Emblem Digitization:  Conducting Digital Research with Renaissance Texts and Images 2012 (= Early Modern Literary Studies, Special Issue 20).  Mara Wade is the managing editor of the peer-reviewed scholarly journal Emblematica.  In addition to the multi-year NEH funding for Humanities Collections and Reference Resources for Emblematica Online, other recent individual grants include a research visit supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2015), a faculty fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2014-2015), NEH/DFG Bilateral Digital Humanities Grant (2009-2013), and being named a “Senior Fellow des Landes Niedersachsens” at the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel (2012-2013).   She served as Chair of the International Society for Emblem Studies from 2008-2014.  By appointment of the State of Lower Saxony, she serves as member of the academic advisory council (akademischer Beirat) of the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel (2014-2019).  Her teaching ranges from early modern German literature and book history to cinema studies, Jewish studies, and gender studies.  She teaches regularly an undergraduate seminar, “Books Matter, Book Matters,” for the Campus Honors Program at the University of Illinois.  She currently serves on board of the American Friends of the Herzog August Bibliothek and she is the library’s representative to the Renaissance Society of America.  https://germanic.illinois.edu/directory/profile/mwade  Thank you, Muse reader! 

Italo Calvino  born in Santiago de Las Vegas, Cuba October 15, 1923 died September 19, 1985  Italo Calvino was born in Cuba and grew up in Italy.  He was a journalist and writer of short stories and novels.  His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities(1972) and If On a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979).  His style is not easy to classify; much of his writing has an air reminiscent to that of fantastical fairy tales (Our Ancestors, Cosmicomics), although sometimes his writing is more "realistic" and in the scenic mode of observation (Difficult Loves, for example).  Some of his writing has been called postmodern, reflecting on literature and the act of reading, while some has been labeled magical realist, others fables, others simply "modern".  He wrote:  "My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight.  I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language."  https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/155517.Italo_Calvino  Calvino's Restaurant and Wine Bar in Toledo, Ohio is named for Italo Calvino.

Cookbook author and “Queen of Cake” Maida Heatter died June 6, 2019 at her home in Miami Beach, the Washington Post reports.  She was 102 years old.  Over the course of her decades-long career, Heatter published nearly two dozen cookbooks.  She earned a reputation for reliable recipes that went on to become classics, like the “Best Damn Lemon Cake” and “Pecan Squares Americana.”  Heatter had a particular fondness for chocolate desserts and wrote three separate books devoted to chocolate.  She was eventually inducted into Chocolatier Magazine’s hall of fame.  Heatter began her cookbook career in the 1970s, and as the Washington Post describes it, former New York Times food critic Craig Claiborne had a hand in her breakthrough.  The critic visited the Miami Beach restaurant owned by Heatter’s husband, where Heatter handled desserts.  Claiborne encouraged her to write a cookbook and the two became lifelong friends.  Heatter’s first cookbook, Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Desserts, was published in 1974.  Heatter seemingly never stopped working.  She published her last cookbook in April, 2019:  Happiness is Baking, a compilation of more than 100 of her hit recipes for cakes, pies, tarts, muffins, brownies, and cookies.  She won three James Beard Awards and was inducted to the James Beard Foundation’s Cookbook Hall of Fame in 1980 and again in 1998.  She was an influence for prominent food world figures like Martha Stewart and baker Dorie Greenspan.  Monica Burton  https://www.eater.com/2019/6/7/18656395/maida-heatter-queen-of-cake-cookbook-author-dies

Palm Beach Brownies from Maida Heatter courtesy of Valentina  Find recipe and pictures at https://cookingontheweekends.com/palm-beach-brownies-maida-heatter/

Sagrada Familia gets building permit after 137 years  The Catholic temple's designer, Catalan modernist Antoni Gaudí, had asked for a permit in 1885 from the city council of Sant Martí de Provençals, which is currently one of Barcelona's neighborhoods, but never received an answer, according to a Friday blog post from the church.  Gaudí, whose idiosyncratic works are found across the Spanish coastal city, dedicated his life to building the Sagrada Familia until he was killed by a tram in 1926.  Since then a string of architects have worked to finish the church according to Gaudí's original design and work is scheduled to end in 2026, marking 100 years since his death.  Tara John  https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/spain-sagrada-familia-permit-intl/index.html

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2108  June 10, 2019