A rebus is a puzzle device that combines the use of illustrated pictures with individual letters to depict words and/or phrases.  For example:  the word "been" might be depicted by a rebus showing an illustrated bumblebee next to a plus sign (+) and the letter "n".  It was a favorite form of heraldic expression used in the Middle Ages to denote surnames.  For example, in its basic form, three salmon (fish) are used to denote the surname "Salmon".  A more sophisticated example was the rebus of Bishop Walter Lyhart (d. 1472) of Norwich, consisting of a stag (or hart) lying down in a conventional representation of water.  Find uses in popular culture, history and game shows and see graphics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebus 

The Best Seller Who Hated Best Sellers--what Edith Wharton’s library tells us about her reading habits  by Sheila Liming   For all her successes, Edith Wharton made a habit of spurning the conditions of her own fortune.  She became the first female novelist to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1921—for The Age of Innocence—only to wind up mocking the prize less than a decade later.  In her novel Hudson River Bracketed (1928), she describes the thinly veiled “Pulsifer Prize” as a sham, the product of a “half-confessed background of wire-pulling and influencing.”  By the time she was honored again by the Pulitzer committee—this time by proxy, for playwright Zoe Akins’ 1935 adaptation of one of her novellas, The Old Maid—Wharton had distanced herself from the prize and its milieu.  Her relationship with motion pictures was similarly detached, even as she received consistent financial benefit from the industry throughout the final decades of her life.  In a 1926 letter to a friend, she comments, “I have always thought ‘The Age’ would make a splendid film”—which it did many years later, in 1993, in the hands of Martin Scorsese.  But before that, it was made into a silent film by Warner Brothers in the 1920s, along with many of her other novels.  Wharton’s sale of film rights to her 1928 novel The Children fetched her $25,000 (more than $350,000 in today’s dollars).  She used the money to help maintain multiple French residences, even as she declined to enter a movie theater during her lifetime.   Indeed, she remained totally uninterested in films, even those based on stories she had invented.  In 1921 sales of The Age of Innocence placed her just below Grey, whose The Mysterious Rider ranked third overall that year.  When Wharton subsequently learned she had won the Pulitzer for that work, she dedicated the novel to Sinclair Lewis, one of the few best-selling compatriots of hers whose writing she actually deemed worthy.  The Pulitzer Prize was still new at this point, having debuted only four years earlier, in 1917, and Wharton sensed that it had not yet begun to assert “standards” or to market itself as an arbiter of quality, as opposed to popular, taste.  As she put it in a glowing letter to Lewis, “Some sort of standard is emerging from the welter of cant and sentimentality, and if two or three of us are gathered together, I believe we can still save fiction in America.”  As with Lewis, Wharton made other occasional exceptions where best-selling authors were concerned.  Among them was H.G. Wells, and here, too, Wharton and Lewis—who often bemoaned the quality of popular fiction in their letters to each other—were in agreement:  Lewis christened his son Wells in honor of the popular science fiction writer, with whom both he and Wharton were friendly.  Today one can find several of Wells’ novels in Wharton’s library, including his 1905 work Kipps, which, while it sold slowly upon publication, became one of his best-known and most admired works, selling a quarter of a million copies by 1920.  There is also Frank Norris’ best-selling naturalist epic The Pit (1903), his sequel to The Octopus (1900); Wharton’s library retains a first-edition copy of the former, which is especially intriguing given the fact that it lacks the more popular latter.  Many of the authors who, like Wharton, achieved literary stardom between 1900 and 1930 are not well remembered now.  Or else, like Zane Grey, their lingering fame is not based on estimations of literary merit.  https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/best-seller-who-hated-best-sellers 

Something wicked this way comes?   https://www.gocomics.com/joe-heller/2020/07/29
Is this the future?  https://www.gocomics.com/moderately-confused/2020/07/30
How ironic!   https://www.gocomics.com/frank-and-ernest/2020/07/30
Thank you, faithful Muse reader!  

Ann Syrdal, a psychologist and computer science researcher who helped develop synthetic voices that sounded like women, laying the groundwork for such modern digital assistants as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, died on July 24, 2020 at her home in San Jose, Calif.  She was 74.  As a researcher at AT&T, Dr. Syrdal was part of a small community of scientists who began developing synthetic speech systems in the mid-1980s.  It was not an entirely new phenomenon; AT&T had unveiled one of the first synthetic voices, developed at its Bell Labs, at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City. But more than 40 years later, despite increasingly powerful computers, speech synthesis was still relatively primitive.  “It just sounded robotic,” said Tom Gruber, who worked on synthetic speech systems in the early ’80s and went on to create the digital assistant that became Siri when Apple acquired it in 2010.  By 1990, companies like AT&T had started to deploy these new systems, allowing the hearing-impaired, for example, to generate synthetic speech for phone calls.  The voices, though, typically sounded male.  That year, at the Bell Labs research center in Naperville, Ill., Dr. Syrdal developed a voice that sounded female—a much harder result to achieve, in part because so much of the previous engineering work had been done for male voices.  A decade later, she was part of a team at another AT&T lab, in Florham Park, N.J., that developed a system called Natural Voices.  It became a standard-bearer for speech synthesis, featuring what Dr. Syrdal and others called “the first truly high quality female synthetic voice.”  http://thetodaynews.com.pk/latest/ann-syrdal-who-helped-give-computers-a-female-voice-dies-at-74/ 

Feedback to A.Word.A.Day  From: Andrew Pressburger  Subject:  Vaccinate 
Three cheers for Dr. Edward Jenner, inventor in 1796 of vaccination against the dread disease of smallpox.  Jenner noticed that milkmaids did not catch smallpox and figured their immunity may have something to do with their exposure to cowpox, a much milder form of the disease.  He withdrew extracts from pustules of people who worked with cows and inoculated others with it on an experimental basis to verify his assumption.  (CDC)  AWADmail Issue 947  

Charles Follen McKim (August 24, 1847-1909) was an American architect.  McKim became best known as an exponent of Beaux-Arts architecture in styles of the American Renaissance, exemplified by the Boston Public Library (1888–95), and several works in New York City, including the Morningside Heights campus of Columbia University (1893), the University Club of New York (1899), the Pierpont Morgan Library (1903), New York Penn Station (1904–10), and The Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio (1919).  He designed the Howard Mansion (1896) at Hyde Park, New York.  McKim, with the aid of Richard Morris Hunt, was instrumental in the formation of the American School of Architecture in Rome in 1894, which has become the American Academy in Rome, and designed the main campus buildings with his firm McKim, Mead, and White.  See awards and honors at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Follen_McKim 

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”  “I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.”  “Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.”  Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo, Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator (August 24, 1899-1986)   https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/500.Jorge_Luis_Borges 

WORD OF THE DAY FOR AUGUST 24  Sargasso noun   A brown alga, of the genus Sargassum, that forms large, floating masses.  (figurative) A confused, tangled mass or situation.  (biology, oceanography) A part of an ocean or sea characterized by floating masses of sargassos, like the Sargasso Sea.  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sargasso#English  The Dominican-born author Jean Rhys, who wrote the novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), was born August 24, 1890. 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2247  August 24, 2020