Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder:  Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology by Lawrence Weschler  EBOOK  Finalist for Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction  Finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction   Pronged ants, horned humans, a landscape carved on a fruit pit—some of the displays in David Wilson's Museum of Jurassic Technology are hoaxes.  But which ones?  As he guides readers through an intellectual hall of mirrors, Lawrence Weschler revisits the 16th-century "wonder cabinets" that were the first museums and compels readers to examine the imaginative origins of both art and science.  https://nypl.overdrive.com/library/worldlanguages/media/1238706 

July 31, 2002  The New York Public Library has recreated a Renaissance-style "cabinet of curiosities" in an unusual display of objects from its vast trove of rarely seen oddities and treasures donated by collectors over a period of 150 years.  The exhibition was inspired by the Wunderkammerns (Wonder Cabinets) that proliferated in royal and noble palaces throughout Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries.  These cabinets were reborn in the U.S. in the 19th century as the curio museums established in Philadelphia by Charles Willson Peale, who exhibited a mastodon fossil, and in New York by P.T. Barnum, who displayed an "authentic" preserved mermaid.  Frederick M. Winship  https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2002/07/31/Library-opens-door-to-curiosity-cabinets/45491028127871/ 

In France, galette des rois translates literally as “cake of kings,” and is a flaky pastry cake made from puff pastry that is typically filled with a frangipane almond cream (or occasionally fruit or chocolate).  A decorative pattern is scored into the top of it before baking, and sometimes the finished cake is topped with a paper crown.  Traditionally, there is a “fève,” or bean, hidden inside.  The king cakes of New Orleans more closely resemble those of Spanish-speaking countries rather than the king cake that originated in France.  Dana Hatic  Link to recipes at https://www.eater.com/22268353/king-cake-history-tradition-mardi-gras 

December 28, 2021  The New York Public Library Cabinet of Wonders  contains an oversize handwritten copy of the Bill of Rights, one of 14 that George Washington ordered made during the debate over ratification.  It lists 12 amendments, rather than the 10 that were approved.  “This shows that history isn’t set in stone,” said Anthony Marx, the library’s president.  “It’s something that’s always being debated and argued, even as it’s being imagined.”  The exhibition, which is free but requires timed admission tickets, includes cases dedicated to exploration, religion, performance, childhood, visual arts, social activism and other themes, whose contents will rotate regularly.  There are striking juxtapositions and surprising sightlines, and objects that tell different stories depending on the angle you look from.  Look through a display of the conductor Arturo Toscanini’s batons, suspended in space, and you catch a glimpse of a spotlighted case across the room holding “Political Prisoner,” a 1971 cedar sculpture by the African American artist Elizabeth Catlett.  From the front, the figure—a woman with a Pan-African flag cut into her torso—looks exhilarated, regal.  From behind, you see that her hands are chained.  The library is really a “collections of collections,” whose own history is traced through the show.  The core sections are heavy on treasures donated by the 19th-century philanthropist James Lenox, like an early 16th-century copper globe that includes one of the earliest cartographic representations of the Americas.  (It’s also one of only two surviving Renaissance or medieval maps with the inscription “Here be dragons.”)  https://theindiestimes.com/2021/12/28/the-new-york-public-library-opens-its-cabinet-of-wonders/ 

Carl Sagan (1934-1996), astronomer and book lover:  “What an astonishing thing a book is.  It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles.  But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years.  Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you.  Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs.  Books break the shackles of time.  A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”  excerpt from the 11th episode of Carl Sagan’s 1980s Cosmos series, titled “The Persistence of Memory”  https://lostandfoundbooks.wordpress.com/2013/01/12/a-book-is-proof-that-humans-are-capable-of-working-magic/ 

The Lincoln–Douglas debates (also known as The Great Debates of 1858) were a series of seven debates between Abraham Lincoln, the Republican Party candidate for the United States Senate from Illinois, and incumbent Senator Stephen Douglas, the Democratic Party candidate.  Until the 17th Constitutional Amendment of 1913, senators were elected by their respective state legislatures, so Lincoln and Douglas were trying to win control of the Illinois General Assembly for their respective parties.  The debates were designed to generate publicity:  the first examples of what later would be called media events.  For Lincoln, they were an opportunity to raise both his national profile and the burgeoning Republican Party, while Douglas sought to defend his record—especially his leading role in the doctrine of popular sovereignty and its incarnation in the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854.  The candidates spoke in each of Illinois's nine congressional districts.  Both candidates had already spoken in Springfield and Chicago within a day of each other, so they decided that their joint appearances would be held in the remaining seven districts.  Each debate lasted around three hours; one candidate spoke for 60 minutes, followed by a 90-minute response and a final 30-minute rejoinder by the first candidate.  The candidates alternated speaking first.  As the incumbent, Douglas spoke first in four of the debates.  They were held outdoors, weather permitting, from about 2 to 5 p.m.  There were fields full of listeners.  The debates focused on slavery:  specifically, whether it would be allowed in the new states to be formed from the territory acquired through the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican Cession.  Douglas, as part of the Democratic party, held that the decision should be made by the residents of the new states themselves rather than by the federal government (popular sovereignty).  Lincoln argued against the expansion of slavery, yet stressed that he was not advocating its abolition where it already existed.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln%E2%80%93Douglas_debates 

On January 24, 1862, Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones in a brownstone in New York City.  (As you may have inferred from her novels, her parents were quite well off—some even say the expression “keeping up with the Joneses” referred to her family.)  Wharton would not publish her first novel until 1902, when she was 40—though by that time she had published two short story collections, a book of poems, a novella, and the seminal The Decoration of Houses, an anti-Victorian interior design manual she wrote with architect Ogden Codman. However, it was The House of Mirth—“a devastating examination of life in a terribly unequal society not so different from our own”—which was serialized in Scribner’s Magazine and then published as a single volume in 1905, that made Wharton into a literary star—140,000 copies were in print by the end of the year, reflecting, as Charles Scribner himself wrote, “the most rapid sale of any book ever published by Scribner.” She would go on to have a long and illustrious literary career, writing novels, novellas, plays, poems, short stories, and nonfiction, including the publication, in 1920, of The Age of Innocence, which was the first book by a woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  Literary Hub  January 23, 2022 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2486  January 24, 2022