Monica Randall was born March 14, 1944, in Oyster Bay, NY.  She attended Fashion Institute of Technology, 1964, New York University, 1965, and C.W. Post College of Long Island University, 1966.  She is an author, photographer, lecturer, historic preservationist, and location scout.  She was president of Locations, Inc., 1968-80, and director of North Shore Preservation Society, beginning 1980.  Randall's photographs have been displayed at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York, NY, and are in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY.  She is a member of the International Platform Association and the Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities.  Monica Randall is best known for her books that document the architectural heritage of Long Island's Gold Coast era.  She has also extensively researched the family histories of those who built some of the grandest homes on Long Island.  Additionally, Randall has turned her focus to some of the grand old homes of New York's Hudson River Valley.  Randall's interest in the great houses "isn't just a passion," according to Booklist's Michelle Kaske; "it has been a life's work."  Randall, who grew up on Long Island's North Shore, formed an early love for the mansions that even in the 1950s were becoming derelict and waiting for demolition.  As teenagers, she and her two sisters managed to get into some of these old houses before they were destroyed and were able to save some of the artifacts of a disappearing time.  Soon she began photographing these same estates and then started a business as a location finder for movies and advertising using these same locales as backdrop.  https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/randall-monica-1944 

“There is a world of mystery along the Hudson River, where picturesque castles perch on tiny islands, and rainbows arch across the country’s most romantic river.  Here dark, sinister fortresses brood, as great clusters of dizzying towers, Gothic spires and battlemented walls molder on hilltops overlooking the wide river.  Through the middle portion of the Hudson Valley—the part that is located along the 150 miles between New York and Albany—one finds a spectacle of ruined buildings.”  Estherwood is a palace overlooking Dobbs Ferry.  James Jennings McComb built a modest house around which he built a massive octagonal library.  It dwarfed the structure, so he commissioned the grandest manor house ever constructed in the area.  Beechwood had a huge Palladian window that rose twenty feet at the center of an extremely large library.  The library takes up most of the south wing at the Ogden Hills Mansion.  Stanford White built Ferncliff, with ping-pong court, squash courts, and paneled library for John Jacob Astor.  William Astor had an octagonal library built at the base of a four-story tower in Rokeby.  Read much more and see pictures at Phantoms of the Hudson Valley by Monica Randall. 

Anoraks are hooded jackets created to withstand frigid climates.  

"Anorak" is a British slang term which refers to a person who has a very strong interest, perhaps obsessive, in niche subjects.  This interest may be unacknowledged or not understood by the general public.  The term is sometimes used synonymously with "geek" or "nerd", the Spanish term "friki", or the Japanese term "otaku", albeit referring to different niches.  Find many examples of use at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anorak_(slang) 

Lebanese rice is known as hashweh in Arabic.  That translates literally into “stuffing”.  This rice mixture is commonly used to stuff items (like filo pockets).  Hashweh in its simplest form is made of spiced rice and spiced ground meat.  Find recipe and pictures at https://everylittlecrumb.com/lebanese-rice-hashweh/  At Christmas or Thanksgiving, serve on top of mashed potatoes, or over hummus or with pita. 

A Common Reader:  Books for Readers with Imagination was an American mail-order book catalog, established in 1986 by James Mustich Jr., a bookseller, editor, and writer.  It was notable among general-interest book catalogs for its eclecticism, with large sections of each issue given over to obscure literary classics.  The catalog was named in honor of Virginia Woolf's two-volume collection of essays, entitled The Common Reader (1925) and The Second Common Reader (1932), which collected her lectures and writings about the nature of reading and how best to approach it.  A Common Reader's in-house publishing imprint, the Akadine Press, initiated in 1996, republished over 60 out-of-print books by authors such as Lillian Beckwith, Alice Thomas Ellis, Barbara Holland, Reynolds Price, and John Ciardi.  A Common Reader was published up to 17 times a year, with a readership in the tens of thousands.  Each edition listed an average of 700 books, accompanied by editorial write-ups.  At its peak, A Common Reader sold over 300,000 titles per year.  The business closed in January 2006, to the regret of many readers who appreciated its discerning finds and well-written précis.  The Wayback Machine has snapshots of the catalogue taken between 1999–2006.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Common_Reader 

Wilbur Addison Smith (1933–13 November 2021) was a Zambian-born South African novelist specialising in historical fiction about international involvement in Southern Africa across four centuries, seen from the viewpoints of both black and white families.  An accountant by training, he gained a film contract with his first published novel When the Lion Feeds.  This encouraged him to become a full-time writer, and he developed three long chronicles of the South African experience which all became best-sellers.  He acknowledged his publisher Charles Pick's advice to "write about what you know best", and his work takes in much authentic detail of the local hunting and mining way of life, along with the romance and conflict that goes with it.  As of 2014 his 35 published novels had sold more than 120 million copies, 24 million of them in Italy.  Read bibliography at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilbur_Smith 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2456  November 15, 2021