The American Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, is one of the most prominent museums and scientific research centers in the world.  It encompasses four city blocks and consists of 27 interconnected buildings with 45 permanent exhibit halls.  It also has over 200 working scientists and sponsors over 100 annual field exhibitions.  According to Sci-tech Libraries in Museums and Aquariums, there was no official library at the museum’s initial home in the Arsenal Building.  Albert S. Bickmore donated the museum’s first official volume, Travels in the East Indian Archipelago, which marked the beginning of its library collection and is now in the museum’s Rare Book Section.  Eventually, Bickmore handed over his whole collection and worked towards soliciting more donations (rather than purchasing books).  Over the years, the library accumulated impressive amounts of works, partially due to its merging with the Department of Maps and Charts and the addition of the Photographic Collection.  By 1916, it encompassed five rooms.  In 1961, it moved to its current location, and now has over 550,000 volumes.  On October 29, 1964, Jack Roland Murphy and Allan Dale Kuhn jumped a fence, climbed a fire escape, crawled along a ledge and swung down to the fourth floor with a rope.  Beforehand, to plan such an elaborate entrance, they spent a week visiting the museum to familiarize themselves with its layout.  They then took $410,000 worth of jewels (worth $3 million today), including one of the world’s largest sapphires.  However, the burglars were soon caught.  Three important jewels, the Midnight Star and De Long Star Ruby, and the Star of India were found in Miami.  However, another priceless jewel, the Eagle Diamond, was never found.  Stephanie Geier    https://untappedcities.com/2015/12/09/the-top-12-secrets-of-nycs-museum-of-natural-history/

In modern English we expect the word you to take a numerically ambiguous role, since it is used regardless of whether the speaker is addressing a single person or many.  This was not always the case.  Formerly we used thou as the second person singular pronoun (which simply means that we would use thou to address another single person).  Thee was used in the objective or oblique case (when referring to the object of a verb or preposition), and thou was used in the nominative (when indicating the subject of a verb).  As Old English began to grow up a little, finally getting a job and moving out of its parents’ house, the singular use of thou began to change.  The pronoun that had previously been restricted to addressing more than one person (ye or you) started to see service as a singular pronoun.  Initially you was used to refer to a person of high social standing (such as royalty, who would be addressed as “your majesty”) but soon came to be used as well when speaking with a social equal.  As a result, poor thou was downgraded, and was used primarily when referring to a person of lower social standing, such as a servant.  However, this pronoun did not disappear, as it also functioned as an indicator of familiarity or intimacy, and retained its function as a singular form of address for God in many cases in ecclesiastical writings.  We still see thou in some forms of modern use, such as in discussions of the “I and Thou” concept of Martin Buber’s philosophy, or in colloquial phrases such as “holier-than-thou.”  For the most part, at least in normal linguistic use, thou has been largely supplanted in modern times by you, although it does exist still in certain dialects in Northern England and Scotland, as well as in the community of the Religious Society of Friends (commonly referred to as Quakers).  Read more at https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/why-did-we-stop-using-thou

Robert Thomas Pattinson was born on May 13, 1986, in London, England.  Pattinson's performances drew notice and in 2003, at the age of 17, he jumped from the stage to the screen, nabbing a role in the TV movie Ring of the Nibelungs.  The work required him to move to South Africa for several months, where the movie was being filmed.  An unaccredited role in Vanity Fair (2004) followed.  Around the same time that he was finishing up work on those two projects, Pattinson met with Mike Newell, the eventual director of 2005's Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.  The meeting and subsequent audition earned Pattinson the role of Cedric Diggory, Harry Potter's friend and a fellow wizard.  What followed was a shot at the film Twilight.  His audition for the role of Edward Cullen, a century-old vampire in love, took place in the bedroom of the movie's director, Catherine Hardwicke.  Pattinson wowed both Hardwicke and his future co-star, Kristen Stewart, with his performance.  "Everybody came in doing something empty and shallow and thoughtless," Stewart told GQ.  "But Rob understood that it wasn't a frivolous role."  And yet, for the legions of Twilight readers, who had waited breathlessly for the movie adaptation, Pattinson's casting as the perfectly gorgeous Cullen struck a nerve:  There were calls for a boycott of the film and 75,000 fans signed a petition asking he be removed from the cast.  To live up to the expectations, Pattinson poured himself into his character.  He showed up in Oregon, one of the locations where the movie was filmed, months in advance of the shooting to work out with a trainer and dissect the script and other work from Twilight's author, Stephenie Meyer.  In the end, the hard work and the original choice to go with Pattinson paid off.  In the movie's first weekend, box office receipts totaled nearly $70 million and its leading man was catapulted to heartthrob status among the film's most adoring fans.  The film also served as a reminder that Pattinson, a guitar and keyboard player who loves Van Morrison, retained his music aspirations, as the Twilight soundtrack includes two songs by the actor.  https://www.biography.com/actor/robert-pattinson

Feedback to A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg  From:  Harold MacCaughey   Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. - Dwight D. Eisenhower, US general and 34th president (1890-1969)  From:  Don Fearn  George Carlin once observed that the descriptive term for the emotional damage to those who fight in the wars keeps getting more complex.  First it was called “shell shock”, then “battle fatigue”, and now it’s “PTSD” (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder).  From two syllables to four syllables to eight.

During the tender youth of international copyright law, the wildly popular Charles Dickens was constantly trying to get ahead of unscrupulous publishers, on both sides of the Atlantic.  When Lee and Haddock’s London twopenny weekly, Parley’s Illuminated Library, published a pirated version of A Christmas Carol under the byline of Hewitt, Dickens had had enough.  He sued.  When he eventually won in court, he wrote in celebration: “ [T]he pirates are beaten flat.  They are bruised, bloody, battered, smashed, squelched, and utterly undone.”  Not quite.  Parley’s never did publish the next installment of their version, called simply “Christmas Ghost Story,” but the pirate crew got out of any damages by claiming bankruptcy.  The experience ended up costing Dickens’s hundreds of pounds and much aggravation.  His unhappy engagement with the law would inform his novel Bleak House, written a few years later.  Matthew Wills  https://daily.jstor.org/pirating-charles-dickens-a-christmas-carol-in-the-1840s/

Troy: myth and reality at the British Museum is the first major Troy exhibition in the UK.  While it concentrates on pottery, weaponry, and sculpture to tell the story of the Trojan War and its legacy in around 300 objects, the show also features a wealth of literary treasures associated with the well known legends as well as the discoveries made by archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann in Turkey in the 1870s.  There are parts of the Odyssey and the Iliad.  On display too is the Townley Homer from 1059 which not only includes the text of the Iliad, but also has many marginal notes and interlinear glosses.  Among other early volumes in the exhibition are John Lydate’s Troy Book from around 1457-60, telling the story of Troy in Middle English thanks to a commission from the Prince of Wales, later Henry V; the first book ever printed in English, Recuyell of the historyes of Troye, published by William Caxton around 1474, possibly an inspiration for Shakespeare’s "Troilus and Cressida"; and Chapman’s Homer c. 1616, which John Keats memorably first looked into.  Also of interest is the English translation by John Dryden of the Aeneid from 1697.  This was a very personal approach in which he made additions and changes, claiming optimistically that these expansions of Virgil’s work were “not stuck into him, but growing out of him.”  The exhibition runs to March 8, 2020.  Visitors should remember to take their reading glasses as the signage is rather small and frequently at ankle height.  https://www.finebooksmagazine.com/blog/literary-treasures-troy

The Odyssey is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer.  It is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad, the other Homeric epic.  The Odyssey is fundamental to the modern Western canon; it is the second-oldest extant work of Western literature, while the Iliad is the oldest.  Scholars believe the Odyssey was composed near the end of the 8th century BC, somewhere in Ionia, the Greek coastal region of Anatolia.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey

Nearly 25 years ago, when Gary Larson retired from drawing his single-panel cartoon that ran daily in newspapers from 1980 to 1995, he didn't think much about what the budding internet might have to do with his work.  "I never once foresaw any connection between this emergent technology and my cartoons," Larson said in a letter posted to TheFarSide.com, the official website of the cartoon which launched December 16, 2019 with a selection of classic cartoons, never-before-seen sketches from inside Larson's sketchbooks, and a letter from the cartoonist explaining why all these years later, his offbeat characters and comics have a home online.  And to celebrate 2020, the fortieth anniversary of "The Far Side," the site will occasionally premier brand new work from Larson.  Larson said changes in technology eventually convinced him the time had come for his cartoon creations to go digital.  At the time of Larson's retirement from daily syndication in 1995, The Far Side appeared in nearly two thousand newspapers, forty million books and seventy-seven million calendars sold and been translated into more than seventeen languages, according to The Far Side's long-time publisher and host of the website, Andrews McMeel Universal.  Chris Boyette  https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/18/entertainment/gary-larson-far-side-return-trnd/index.html

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY  If we would have new knowledge, we must get us a whole world of new questions. - Susanne Langer, philosopher (20 Dec 1895-1985)

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2199  December 20, 2019