On June 1, 2016 Bordeaux opened its newest museum, a one-of-a-kind institution devoted to the French city’s most popular export:  wine.  Aptly dubbed La Cité du Vin, the $92 million, 144,000-square-foot complex is a premier destination for learning about, tasting, drinking, and buying wine.  While Bordeaux’s vineyards date from Roman times, nearly 2,000 years ago, La Cité du Vin has been in the works since 2008.  The museum’s endowment fund followed in 2011, and construction began in 2013.  The shimmering, curvaceous structure, which took 80,000 hours and more than 1,000 tons of steel to build, is the brainchild of Parisian firm XTU and English museum design firm Casson Mann.  Its bowing shape was inspired by the swirl of wine in a glass and the coils of a grapevine.  Stephanie Strasnick  https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/wine-museum-bordeaux-france



Lucy Mangan (born 1974) is a British journalist and author.  She is a columnist, features writer and TV critic for The Guardian.  Her writing revolves around feminism.  Mangan writes a regular column, TV reviews and occasional features at The Guardian.  Her book My Family and other Disasters (2009) is a collection of her newspaper columns.  She has also written books about her childhood and her wedding.  Mangan has a regular column for Stylist magazine and has been a judge for the BookTrust Roald Dahl Funny Prize.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_Mangan#cite_note-12



The Book Cover Creative Process:  Bookworm by Lucy Mangan  See gorgeous graphics by Laura Barrett at https://medium.com/@laurabarrettuk/the-book-cover-creative-process-bookworm-by-lucy-mangan-80661e246fe6



Yeah, devious minds think alike.  *  ‘We’re a peace-loving people, we love peace.’  I guess that’s why we spend more on our military than the rest of the world combined, why we have over seven hundred overseas military bases in a hundred and thirty countries, and why we’ve been at war pretty much continuously since we were just a bunch of colonies.  *  People will eagerly twist facts into wholly unrecognizable shapes to fit them into existing suppositions.  The Last Assassin by Barry Eisler 



The Gothic Quarter (Catalan:  Barri Gòtic/El Gòtic, Spanish:  Barrio Gótico) is the centre of the old city of Barcelona.  It stretches from La Rambla to Via Laietana, and from the Mediterranean seafront to the Ronda de Sant Pere.  It is a part of Ciutat Vella district.  The quarter encompasses the oldest parts of the city of Barcelona, and includes the remains of the city's Roman wall and several notable medieval landmarks.  The Barri Gòtic retains a labyrinthine street plan, with many small streets opening out into squares.  Most of the quarter is closed to regular traffic although open to service vehicles and taxis.  Despite its name, a number of landmark Gothic buildings in the neighborhood do not date to the Middle Ages.  Rather, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the quarter was completely transformed from a sombre neighborhood to a tourist attraction through a massive restoration project, timed to be completed for the 1929 International Exhibition.  This allowed the city and the surrounding region of Catalonia to portray itself in a positive light to the world's media.  Further restoration of existing buildings and the creation of brand new neo-Gothic structures continued as late as the 1960s.  See many pictures at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_Quarter,_Barcelona



The names of John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood are forever linked to the Maya and Mayan studies as the two great explorers who documented the ruins from Copan in the south to Chichen Itza in the north.   Frederick Catherwood was born 27 February 1799 in north London and, by his twenties, was already well known as an architect, artist and traveler.  He had already published his drawings of structures in Egypt, Palestine, Asia Minor, and Greece and, in 1833, was the first westerner to survey and draw the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.  The two men met in London in 1836 where Catherwood's panorama `The Ruins of Jerusalem' was on display.  Both men were interested in exploring the region so vividly depicted in the published accounts of Mesoamerica by earlier explorers like Antonio del Rio and Juan Galindo and the drawings of Mayan sites by Jean-Frederic Maximilien, Comte de Waldek.  They agreed to travel together to the region at the first opportunity.  Stephens was famous enough as a world traveler and writer to have President Van Buren appoint him Ambassador to Central America from the United States and he and Catherwood left New York for British Honduras (modern day Belize) on 3 October 1839.  Catherwood used a device called the camera lucida which would project the image from the lens onto paper so that the artist could draw it more accurately.  It is because of the use of this device that Catherwood's depictions of the Mayan sites are so precise right down to the intricate scroll work and inscriptions on the buildings.  They mapped, surveyed, drew and wrote about 44 distinct Maya sites all of which have become national treasures and, some, world famous attractions.  Joshua J. Mark  Read more and see graphics at https://www.ancient.eu/article/419/early-explorers-of-the-maya-civilization-john-lloy/



Rose water is a popular ingredient in Middle Eastern cooking.  Unfortunately, it is not a commonly used ingredient in Western cooking, so it may be difficult to find for some people.  First, try health food stores or natural grocers.  People use rose water in at-home facials, and these stores are usually reliable suppliers.  Try Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, and other local stores that are similar to these.  Try your supermarket.  Rose water is usually stocked in the ethnic food section.  If you can't find it, ask your store manager.  The store might carry it but have it shelved in an odd location.  If your store doesn't stock it, ask that the staff considers offering it.  Ordering online is also an easy way to get rose water.  Saad Fayed  https://www.thespruceeats.com/where-to-buy-rose-water-2355850



Simplicity is king in this make-ahead, fresh-tasting pizza sauce.  Just four ingredients go into the food processor:  garlic, canned tomatoes, olive oil, and salt.  Use this recipe in our Classic Margherita Pizza or Skillet Pizza Diavola.  Martha Stewart Living, May 2018  https://www.marthastewart.com/1528963/no-cook-pizza-sauce  May be frozen up to three months. 



In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite by David Streitfeld   In George Orwell’s “1984,” the classics of literature are rewritten into Newspeak, a revision and reduction of the language meant to make bad thoughts literally unthinkable.  “It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words,” one true believer exults.  Now some of the writer’s own words are getting reworked in Amazon’s vast virtual bookstore, a place where copyright laws hold remarkably little sway.  Orwell’s reputation may be secure, but his sentences are not.  Over the last few weeks I got a close-up view of this process when I bought a dozen fake and illegitimate Orwell books from Amazon.  Some of them were printed in India, where the writer is in the public domain, and sold to me in the United States, where he is under copyright.  Others were straightforward counterfeits, like the edition of his memoir “Down and Out in Paris and London” that was edited for high school students.  The author’s estate said it did not give permission for the book, printed by Amazon’s self-publishing subsidiary.  Some counterfeiters are going as far as to claim Orwell’s classics as their own property, copyrighting them with their own names.  One reader discovered, to his surprise, that his new copy of “1984” had passages that were “worded slightly different.” Another offered photographic proof that her edition was near gibberish.  A third said the word “faces” was replaced in his copy with “feces.”  Getting Orwell books that skip a chunk of pages seemed to be a routine experience.  Even the titles changed. One edition of “Animal Farm:  A Fairy Story” referred to itself on the back cover as “Animals Farm:  A Fair Story.”  The preface referred to another great Orwell work, “Homage to Catalonia,” as “Homepage to Catalonia.”  The Authors Guild said that in the last two years, the number of piracy and counterfeiting issues referred to its legal department has increased tenfold. Counterfeit editions are a blow against the authority of the book and accelerate a dangerous trend toward misinformation.  Read much more and see pictures at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/technology/amazon-orwell-1984.html



http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue  1241  August 20, 2019