Nearly 80 years after her death, Beatrix Potter (1866–1943) remains among the world’s most beloved and popular children’s book authors, having sold 250 million copies of books such as The Tale of Peter Rabbit.  But a new show dedicated to the artist at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum aims to paint a much fuller picture of her life, highlighting Potter’s work in the natural sciences, her stewardship of the English landscape, and her accomplishments as a sheep farmer, as well as her literary success.  Potter often based her drawings on her real-life pets. During her lifetime, she had 92 of them, including rabbits Peter Piper and Benjamin Bouncer, who became Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny, perhaps her best-known characters.  “Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature” is on view at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Cromwell Road, London February 12, 2022–January 8, 2023.  Sarah Cascone,  See many illustrations at https://news.artnet.com/art-world/beatrix-potter-drawn-to-nature-2085667   

Andrew Pettegree, co-author of “The Library:  A Fragile History,” discusses the centuries-long development of libraries as a civic necessity.  We think of the public library as a constant through history.  But in fact, it's not.  They tended to be kept in chests with all the other valuables.  One of the major revolutions in the development of the library, the idea of storing books vertically on specially made shelves, was actually very late in coming and only became the general way of doing it in the 17th century.  Supporters promoted libraries as civilizing:  People would go to the library instead of down to the tavern for their recreation, and they’d become good citizens through reading.  Andrew Carnegie is the real hero of this story.  He offered around $10,000 each to communities to build simple local libraries, and in return they had to commit to maintaining the library.  By 1914, he supplied something like 2,000 libraries to Britain, the U.S., and Canada.  It was really only in the 1970s that public libraries came to terms with the paperback and started stocking books like romances, which they previously thought were rather demeaning for the public, because they were so desperate for customers.  Libraries also started presenting themselves as a sort of branch of social services with meeting rooms and spaces for classes, and now--computer access.  The death of the book has been proclaimed for 80 years, but people still like print.  Randy Dotinga  https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Author-Q-As/2022/0224/Q-A-with-Andrew-Pettegree-author-of-The-Library-A-Fragile-History 

The Real Life and Times of the Scientist Who Inspired Dr. Strangelove--Ananyo Bhattacharya on the Brilliance of John von Neumann   Call me Johnny, he urged the Americans invited to the wild parties he threw at his grand house in Princeton.  Though he never shed his thick Hungarian accent, von Neumann felt that János—his real name—sounded altogether too foreign in his new home.  Beneath the bonhomie and the sharp suit was a mind of unimaginable brilliance.  Von Neumann laid the foundations of quantum mechanics, founded modern game theory, helped design the atom bomb, drafted the blueprint for every modern computer from smartphone to laptop, and with Klári Dan, his second wife, wrote the first truly useful, complex programs ever to have been executed.  Von Neumann’s machine at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton would spawn the first generation of modern computers worldwide including the IBM 701, the company’s first commercial model, and his refusal to patent anything helped birth the open source movement.  But not content with computers that merely calculated, he proved during a lecture in 1948 that these information-processing machines could, under certain circumstances, reproduce, grow, and evolve.  Even on his deathbed, he wrote lectures comparing computers and brains that built a bridge between neuroscience and computer science for the first time.  Fearing a catastrophic third world war, von Neumann supported a pre-emptive strike against Stalin’s Soviet Union.  He changed his mind but not before becoming one of a handful of scientists who inspired Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove.  The caricature has overshadowed his astonishing achievements, prescience and impact, which have been all but forgotten.  Literary Hub  February 23, 2022 

thingamajig/thingumajig  noun  Etymology  unknown.  Compare thingum, thingamabob, etc.  thingamajig (plural thingamajigs)  (informal) Something that one does not know the name of.  See Thesaurus:  thingy  See also placeholder name on Wikipedia.  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/thingamajig 

As Anne Franck wrote about her own hopes and dreamed of a better future, she often looked out upon a large horse chestnut tree in the garden behind the Secret Annex.  For her, the tree symbolized freedom as well as nature, which she longed to enjoy once again.  Sadly, the aging chestnut tree behind the Secret Annex collapsed from disease in 2010.  However, in the few years before the tree’s demise, the stewards at the Anne Frank House created saplings that have since been distributed to numerous locations around the world.  Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect has received several of the saplings to donate to worthy educational organizations across the US.  Following a three-year safeguard quarantine, they were cleared for planting in January 2013.  Currently there are a dozen sites that host the saplings.  Find a list of organizations that are the recipients of Anne Frank Tree saplings, and a form to inquire if your site or institution would like to be considered for a future Anne Franck garden or sapling at https://www.annefrank.com/sapling-project  On April 29, 2022, the 13^th Anne Franck tree in the U.S. will be planted at the University of Iowa. 

breadfruit, (Artocarpus altilis), tree of the mulberry family (Moraceae) and its large fruits that are a staple food of the South Pacific and other tropical areas.  Breadfruit contains considerable amounts of starch and is seldom eaten raw.  It may be roasted, baked, boiled, fried, or dried and ground into flour.  In the South Seas, cloth is made from the fibrous inner bark, the wood is used for canoes and furniture, and glue and caulking material are obtained from the milky juice.  African breadfruit (Treculia africana), native to tropical Africa, is a related species that is less important as a food crop.  The breadfruit has been cultivated in the Malay Archipelago (where the species is held to be indigenous) since remote antiquity.  From this region it spread throughout the tropical South Pacific region in prehistoric times.  Its introduction into the New World was connected with the memorable voyage of Capt. William Bligh in HMS Bounty.  See pictures at https://www.britannica.com/plant/breadfruit 

Moscow 2042 is a 1986 satirical novel (translated into English from Russian in 1987) by Vladimir Voinovich.  In this book, the alter ego of the author travels to the future, where he sees how communism has been successfully built in the single city of Moscow.  It soon becomes clear that the political system in the country is not a utopia and that Russia is ruled by the "Communist Party of State Security" which combines the KGB, the Communist Party, and the Russian Orthodox Church.  The party is led by former KGB general Bukashin (name literally meaning "the insect") who met previously with the main character of the novel in Germany.  An extreme slavophile Sim Karnavalov (apparently a parody of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) enters Moscow on a white horse as the savior.  Voinovich wrote this book in 1982.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_2042 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com   Issue 2512  March 25, 2022