A written word is the choicest of relics.  Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.  http://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper/WALDEN/hdt03.html

Concord Museum’s Henry David Thoreau Collection, the world’s largest collection of objects related to Concord’s native son, numbers over 250 artifacts—furniture, ceramics, glass, metalwork, books, photographs, manuscripts, and textiles.  Most of the household and personal objects that can reliably be associated with Henry Thoreau (1817–1862) and his family are in the Concord Museum in Concord, Massachusetts.  Remarkably, half of the 250 objects in the Thoreau collection came to the Museum, directly or indirectly, through one source, Sophia Thoreau.  Sophia Thoreau helped manage her brother’s literary legacy in the years immediately following his death, and she is largely responsible for the preservation of his material legacy as well.  https://concordmuseum.org/collections/the-henry-david-thoreau-collection/ 

"The Grapes of Wrath," a Pulitzer-prize winning book written by John Steinbeck and published in 1939, tells the story of the Joads, a poor family of tenant farmers driven out of Depression-era Oklahoma--also referred to as "Oakies--by drought and economic factors, who migrate to Californa in search of a better life.  Steinbeck had trouble coming up with the title for the novel, a classic in American literature, and his wife actually suggested using the phrase.  The title, itself, is a reference to lyrics from "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," written in 1861 by Julia Ward Howe, and first published in "The Atlantic Monthly" in 1862: 

"Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on." 

The words have some important resonance in American culture.  For example, Martin Luther King Jr, in his address at the conclusion of the Selma-to-Montgomery, Alabama, civil rights march in 1965, quoted these very words from the hymn.  Esther Lombardi  https://www.thoughtco.com/the-grapes-of-wrath-title-importance-739934  See also Ten Things You Might Not Know about The Grapes of Wrath by Rebecca Sutton  https://www.arts.gov/stories/blog/2020/ten-things-you-might-not-know-about-grapes-wrath 

A round robin is a sequence or series that involves the participation of everyone in a group.  The term round robin is currently most often used to refer to a tournament in which every participant has the opportunity to play every other participant in the tournament.  However, a round robin may also refer to a letter or document sent sequentially to a certain group of people.  In this type of round robin, each person adds information to the document.  If it is a perpetual round robin, each participant removes his old information when the document returns to him, and adds new information before sending the document to the next person in sequence.  Originally a round robin referred to a petition or letter of protest in which the people who signed the letter applied their signatures one after another in the shape of a circle, so the recipient would not know who signed the petition first.  This type of round robin appeared in the 1730s.  The definition for round robin meaning a certain type of tournament was first used in the United States in the late 1800s.  When used as an adjective before a noun, the term is hyphenated as in round-robin.   https://grammarist.com/usage/round-robin/ 

Shirley Hardie Jackson (1916–1965) was an American writer known primarily for her works of horror and mystery.  Over the duration of her writing career, which spanned over two decades, she composed six novels, two memoirs, and more than 200 short stories.  Born in San Francisco, California, Jackson attended Syracuse University in New York, where she became involved with the university's literary magazine and met her future husband Stanley Edgar Hyman.  After they graduated, the couple moved to New York and began contributing to The New Yorker, with Jackson as a fiction writer and Hyman as a contributor to "Talk of the Town".  The couple settled in North Bennington, Vermont, in 1945, after the birth of their first child, when Hyman joined the faculty of Bennington College.  After publishing her debut novel The Road Through the Wall (1948), a semi-autobiographical account of her childhood in California, Jackson gained significant public attention for her short story "The Lottery", which presents the sinister underside of a bucolic American village.  She continued to publish numerous short stories in literary journals and magazines throughout the 1950s, some of which were assembled and reissued in her 1953 memoir Life Among the Savages.  In 1959, she published The Haunting of Hill House, a supernatural horror novel widely considered to be one of the best ghost stories ever written.  In an era when women were not encouraged to work outside the home, Jackson became the chief breadwinner while also raising the couple's four children.  Jackson has been cited as an influence on a diverse set of authors, including Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Sarah Waters, Nigel Kneale, Claire Fuller, Joanne Harris, and Richard Matheson.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Jackson

August 2, 2022  Water levels on the Rhine River are set to fall perilously close to the point at which it would effectively close, putting the trade of huge quantities of goods at risk as the continent seeks to stave off an economic crisis.  Jack Wittels, Kwaku Gyasi, and Laura Malsch  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-02/europe-s-vital-rhine-river-is-on-brink-of-effectively-closing

On a recent, scorching afternoon in Albuquerque, off-road vehicles cruised up and down a stretch of dry riverbed where normally the Rio Grande River flows. The drivers weren’t thrill-seekers, but biologists hoping to save as many endangered fish as they could before the sun turned shrinking pools of water into dust.  For the first time in four decades, America’s fifth-longest river went dry in Albuquerque in July, 2022.  Habitat for the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow—a shimmery, pinky-sized native fish—went with it.  Although summer storms have made the river wet again, experts warn the drying this far north is a sign of an increasingly fragile water supply, and that current conservation measures may not be enough to save the minnow and still provide water to nearby farms, backyards and parks.  The minnow inhabits only about 7% of its historic range and has withstood a century of habitat loss as the nearly 1,900 mile-long (3,058-kilometer) river was dammed, diverted and channeled from Colorado to New Mexico, Texas and northern Mexico  Brittany Peterson and Suman Naishadham  https://apnews.com/article/storms-science-health-weather-climate-and-environment-ecca8f1daba96b781db1e8ab7b27f900

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2548  August  5, 2002