Frog and Toad and Me--authors and illustrators reflect on what Arnold Lobel’s friendship-defining series means to them by Phillip Maciak   “The very first thing is sad,” marvels Mac Barnett about the opening story in Frog and Toad Are Friends.  Barnett, a prolific children’s book author whose work includes Sam and Dave Dig a Hole, is right about that.  Though the book series by Arnold Lobel has filled young readers with a sense of warmth and closeness for five decades, Frog and Toad opens with disappointment and desperation.  Frog and Toad, like their forebears in The Wind in the Willows, may bumble about the forest in tweed sports coats, but the accumulated weight of the tales is unexpectedly moving.  Though each short story begins with the premise of an adventure, the plot twist is that, invariably, nothing really happens.  We don’t go far with Frog and Toad, yet in story after story, we do gain a crystalline sense of their relationship.  Frog and Toad are friends, in every sustaining and stress-inducing sense of the word.  https://slate.com/culture/2020/07/frog-and-toad-anniversary-arnold-lobel.html

Homemade Ketchup  https://boulderlocavore.com/the-best-homemade-ketchup/  Homemade Mustard  https://honest-food.net/how-to-make-mustard-2/

Pilgrimage to a holy site is a core principle of almost all faiths.  The Kaaba, meaning cube in Arabic, is a square building elegantly draped in a silk and cotton veil.  Located in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, it is the holiest shrine in Islam.  In Islam, Muslims pray five times a day and after 624 CE, these prayers were directed towards Mecca and the Kaaba rather than Jerusalem; this direction—or qibla in Arabic—is marked in all mosques and enables the faithful to know in which direction they should pray.  The Qur‘an established the direction of prayer.  The numerous changes to the Kaaba and its associated mosque serve as good reminder of how often buildings, even sacred ones, are renovated and remodeled either due to damage or to the changing needs of the community.  Only Muslims may visit the holy cities of Mecca and Medina today.  essay by Dr. Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis  Read more and see pictures at

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/introduction-cultures-religions-apah/islam-apah/a/the-kaaba

Read Maxine Hong Kingston’s Genre-Defying Life and Work by Hua Hsu in the June 8 & 15, 2020  issue of The New Yorker.  See also Pursuit as Happiness, a previously unpublished story by Ernest Hemingway.

In publishing a logo is called a colophon.  Its history traces back to the times of private printers in 15th century Europe.  Not surprisingly, it is also known as a printer’s mark.  There is something talismanic about a book colophon.  A symbol, a calling.  Over the years I’ve spent a lot of time looking at those talismans on the spines of books.  Right or wrong, I  judge a book not by its cover but by the colophon on the cover.  The 3 fish of FSG.  The borzoi dog of Alfred A. Knopf.  And the Penguin. Randall Ringer  See illustrations at https://narrativebranding.wordpress.com/2010/07/25/selling-a-million-books-or-creating-the-new-touchstone-books-colophon/

Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark (1900–1958) was an English judge and crime writer under the pseudonym Cyril Hare.  Gordon Clark was born in Mickleham, Surrey, the third son of Henry Herbert Gordon Clark of Mickleham, Surrey Hall, a merchant in the wine and spirit trade, Matthew Clark & Sons being the family firm.  The socialist politician Susan Lawrence was his aunt.  He was educated at St Aubyn's, Rottingdean and Rugby.  He read History at New College, Oxford (where he heard William Archibald Spooner say in a sermon that 'now we see through a dark glassly' [sic]) and graduated with a First.  He then studied law and was called to the Bar at Middle Temple in 1924.  Gordon Clark's pseudonym was a mixture of Hare Court, where he worked in the chambers of Roland Oliver, and Cyril Mansions, Battersea, where he lived after marrying Mary Barbara Lawrence (daughter of Sir William Lawrence, 3rd Baronet) in 1933.  They had one son, Charles Philip Gordon Clark (clergyman, later dry stone waller), and two daughters, Alexandra Mary Gordon Clark (Lady Wedgwood FSA, architectural historian, see Wedgwood baronets) and Cecilia Mary Gordon Clark (Cecilia Snell, musician, who married Roderick Snell).  As a young man and during the early days of the Second World War, Gordon Clark toured as a judge's marshal, an experience he used in Tragedy at Law.  Between 1942 and 1945 he worked at the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions. At the beginning of the war he served a short time at the Ministry of Economic Warfare, and the wartime civil service with many temporary members appears in With a Bare Bodkin.  In 1950 he was appointed county court judge in Surrey. His best-known novel is Tragedy at Law, in which he drew on his legal expertise and in which he introduced Francis Pettigrew, a not very successful barrister who in this and four other novels just happens to elucidate aspects of the crime.  His professional detective (they appeared together in three novels, and only one has neither of them present) was a large and realistic police officer, Inspector Mallett, with a vast appetite.  Tragedy at Law has never been out of print, and Marcel Berlins described it in 1999 as "still among the best whodunnits set in the legal world."  P. D. James went further and wrote that it "is generally acknowledged to be the best detective story set in that fascinating world."  It appeared at no. 85 in The Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time.  Find list of works at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyril_Hare

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

Meander (mee-AN-duhr) verb intr.  1.  To follow a winding course.  2.  To move aimlessly.  3.  To speak or write without a focus.  noun:  1.  A curve or bend in a path, stream, etc.  2.  A winding path.  3.  A circuitous journey, a ramble.  After Maeander (modern name:  Büyük Menderes), a river in Turkey, known for its winding course.  Earliest documented use:  1576.  

Feedback to A.Word.A.Day  From: Walter Wade  A meander is also a running Greek Key frieze, very popular in the decorative arts of China, as well as ancient Greece and the modern Western world.
From:  Jay Florey  It is because of a meander that got cut off that the most direct route from the Omaha NE airport to downtown Omaha is through Iowa.  Most of the hotels surrounding the Omaha Nebraska airport are also in Iowa.  The border between the two states is the Missouri River.  Sometime after the border was established, the river cut off a meander leaving behind an oxbow lake called Carter Lake, and a small piece of Iowa that has no overland connection to the rest of the state.  AWADmail Issue 937

“Gullah, also called Sea Island Creole English and Geechee, is a creole language spoken by the Gullah people (also called “Geechees” within the community), an African-American population living in coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia.  The Gullah language is based on different varieties of English and languages of West and Central Africa.”  Gullah Style Red Rice is a simple dish of rice, onions and tomatoes seasoned to perfection.  Find recipe posted by Pam at https://www.biscuitsandburlap.com/red-rice-gullah-style/

Craig Rice (1908–1957); born Georgiana Ann Randolph Craig; was an American author of mystery novels and short stories, sometimes described as "the Dorothy Parker of detective fiction."  She was the first mystery writer to appear on the cover of Time Magazine, on January 28, 1946.  Craig Rice’s first steps in publishing were as a writer for The Milwaukee Journal and The Chicago American.  In 1930 she started working for radio stations, first WCLO and then the Beacon Syndicate in 1931.  Her first fictional character, Professor Silvernail, was created for WCLO Syndicate Serials (1933).  For a number of years she tried unsuccessfully to write novels, poetry and music, but it was not until her first story of John J. Malone, which she published under her birth surname and adopted surname Craig Rice, that she enjoyed some hard-won success."  Gritty but humorous, Rice's stories uniquely combine the hardboiled detective tradition with no-holds-barred, screwball comedy.  Most of her output features a memorable trio of protagonists:  Jake Justus, a handsome but none too bright press agent with his heart in the right place; Helene Brand, a rich heiress and hard-drinking party animal par excellence (to become Mrs. Justus in the later novels); and John Joseph Malone, a hard-drinking, small-time lawyer (though both his cryptic conversation and sartorial habits are more reminiscent of such official or private gumshoes as Lieutenant Columbo).  Against the odds and often apparently more by luck than skill, these three manage to solve crimes whose details are often burlesque and surreal, sometimes to the point of grand guignol, and all involving the perpetually exasperated Captain Daniel Von Flanagan of the Homicide Squad.  A few stories feature the team of Bingo Riggs and Handsome Kusak, small-time grifters who become involved in criminal situations and have to dig themselves free by solving the mystery.  Craig Rice also ghostwrote for George Sanders.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Rice_(author)

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2296  July 8, 2020