When one thinks of the almighty New York Literary Scene, it is usually Manhattan and Brooklyn they are imagining, not Queens, New York City’s largest borough and the most diverse place in the world.  To get into a bookish mood, begin at the Paper Factory Hotel, a 100-year-old building where an impressive multi-story tower of books sits inside the entrance.  The affordable hotel, located in Long Island City, was at one time a printing press and radio station.  Much of the interior retains the original architecture of the factory, and you’ll find old typewriters, printing machines, and books inside the rooms, lobby, and co-working space of the hotel.  Little bookstores have been popping up and thriving all over the borough, including Long Island City’s Book Culture.  The LIC location hosts a number of readings and story times a month.  LIC BAR is also set in a one-hundred-year-old building with an original bar and tin ceilings, fireplace in winter, and a sweet outdoor garden in summer.  There’s music or a reading on most nights, and the bar serves as host to one of Queens’ most well-known reading series, LIC Reading Series.  Sara Finnerty  Read more and see pictures at https://lithub.com/how-to-spend-a-literary-long-weekend-in-queens-ny/   

The face that launched a thousand ships refers to Helen of Troy, describing the fact that a massive war was mounted on her behalf.  Helen of Troy might also be called Helen of Sparta, as she was the wife of King Menelaus of Mycenaean Sparta.  Paris, Prince of Troy, stole her.  As a result Menelaus led a war against Troy, resulting in Paris’ death and the rescue of Helen.  Whether Helen wanted to be rescued is a matter for debate.  Where history ends and mythology begins in this story is uncertain.  It is widely believed that the Trojan War actually occurred, but the existence of Helen of Troy is less certain.  In any case, the romance of a stolen and retrieved bride has endured for centuries, as the term the face that launched a thousand ships was not coined until the turn of the seventeenth century.  Christopher Marlowe referred to Helen of Troy this way in his The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus:  “Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?”  Today, the face that launched a thousand ships is still most often used to describe the unsurpassed beauty of Helen of Troy, though it may be used to describe the beauty of any woman.  The term is also often parodied.  https://grammarist.com/phrase/the-face-that-launched-a-thousand-ships/

Sloppy Jane Sliders  https://kelseynixon.com/sloppy-janes/   

The BEST Sloppy Joe Recipe  https://natashaskitchen.com/sloppy-joe-recipe/   

Unsloppy Joes  https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/13893/unsloppy-joes/   

Easy bbq sandwiches shared by Amanda Brown  https://www.amandajanebrown.com/2012/09/easy-bbq-sandwiches-2.html   

Fount of knowledge or wisdom vs font of knowledge or wisdom   A fount of knowledge is a term used to describe something, but usually someone, who contains all the answers, something or someone that has a large aggregate of information.  A fount of wisdom is also a term used to describe something, but usually someone, who contains all the answers or has a large aggregate of information.  While the phrases are interchangeable, fount of wisdom may also be used in a sarcastic manner.  Fount is a shortened form of the word fountain, just as mount is a shortened form of the word mountain.  Font of knowledge and font of wisdom are mondegreens, which are phrases rendered by misinterpreting the proper terms.  https://grammarist.com/phrase/fount-of-knowledge-or-wisdom-vs-font-of-knowledge-or-wisdom/   

When Time magazine selected the British artist Banksy—graffiti master, painter, activist, filmmaker and all-purpose provocateur—for its list of the world’s 100 most influential people in 2010, he found himself in the company of Barack Obama, Steve Jobs and Lady Gaga.  He supplied a picture of himself with a paper bag (recyclable, naturally) over his head.  Most of his fans don’t really want to know who he is (and have loudly protested Fleet Street attempts to unmask him).  But they do want to follow his upward tra­jectory from the outlaw spraying—or, as the argot has it, “bombing”—walls in Bristol, England, during the 1990s to the artist whose work commands hundreds of thousands of dollars in the auction houses of Britain and America.  Today, he has bombed cities from Vienna to San Francisco, Barcelona to Paris and Detroit.  And he has moved from graffiti on gritty urban walls to paint on canvas, conceptual sculpture and even film, with the guileful documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop, which was nominated for an Academy Award.  Will Ellsworth-Jones  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-story-behind-banksy-4310304/   

Gary Paulsen, whose books taught generations of kids how to survive in the woods with only a hatchet, died October 13, 2021 at the age of 82.  Paulsen was best known for those wilderness survival stories, though he wrote more than 200 books during his lifetime, and three of his novels, Hatchet, Dogsong and The Winter Room, were Newbery Honor books.  When he was 5 years old, Paulsen's mother put him on a train, alone, with nothing but a $5 bill and a suitcase, and sent him to live with his aunt and uncle on their farm in Northern Minnesota.  There he learned how to catch and cook fish over a campfire, and use the smoke to keep the mosquitoes away at night—skills that characters in his later novels would use to survive.  The woods were a sanctuary to him.  The other place Paulsen sought refuge during those cold Minnesota winters was in the library, where a watchful librarian took notice of him and gave him a library card, and then books, and then a Scripto notebook and a number two pencil, to write down his thoughts.  "She said, 'You should write down some of your thought pictures,' which I called them," Paulsen said.  "I said, 'For who?' and she said 'For me.'  I would not be a writer.  None of this would have happened except for that."  Gary Paulsen is survived by his wife and son, and one final novel.  Northwind, a historical adventure about a young person's battle to stay alive against the odds, will be published in January 2022.  Samantha Balaban  https://www.npr.org/2021/10/14/1045981769/gary-paulsen-hatchet-author-obituary   

On October 18, 1851, Herman Melville’s sixth novel, Moby-Dick, was published in London in three volumes under the title The Whale.  (It was common at the time, before international copyright laws, for American writers to publish in England first as a way to avoid pirated books.)  By that time, Melville’s fortunes had been declining for some time; though his debut Typee—based on his experiences in the South Pacific—had been a critical and commercial success, his next few books were less favorably received, and his American publisher Harper & Brothers had not only refused to pay him an advance for Moby-Dick but had claimed that he owed them $700 in unsold books.  However, English publisher Richard Bentley offered Melville £150 and “half profits” to publish the novel.  Melville paid for the typesetting himself, and sent over proofs with his own revisions and edits geared toward British readers.  But when Bentley published the book, a month before the American edition in a printing of only 500 copies, it looked very different from what Melville had intended.  According to the Melville Electronic Library, the British text was expurgated in over 200 places, the Epilogue (in which Ishmael’s fate is revealed) was missing, the Etymology and Extracts were in the wrong place, and of course, there’s the title—which simply Melville hadn’t decided to change in time.  He did, however, manage to get Bentley to include one late addition:  the book’s dedication to his beloved Nathaniel Hawthorne.  It was not a hit.  We may consider Moby-Dick to be one of the Great American Novels (whale chapters and all) now, but at the time, Melville’s total earnings from the book came to a mere $556.37, and when he died in 1891—not just a failed novelist but a failed poet as well—the New York Times spelled the title of his magnum opus wrong.  https://newsletterest.com/message/74707/This-Week-in-Literary-History-MobyDick-Is-Published-for-the-First-Time-as-The-Whale-in-a-Printing-of-Only-500-Copies   

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2440  October 18, 2021