Aluminium (aluminum in American and Canadian English) is a chemical element with the symbol Al and atomic number 13.  Aluminium has a density lower than those of other common metals, at approximately one third that of steel.  It has a great affinity towards oxygen, and forms a protective layer of oxide on the surface when exposed to air.  Aluminium visually resembles silver, both in its color and in its great ability to reflect light.  It is soft, non-magnetic and ductile.  It has one stable isotope, Al; this isotope is very common, making aluminium the twelfth most common element in the Universe.  The radioactivity of Al is used in radiodating.  The strong affinity towards oxygen leads to aluminium's common association with oxygen in nature in the form of oxides; for this reason, aluminium is found on Earth primarily in rocks in the crust, where it is the third most abundant element after oxygen and silicon, rather than in the mantle, and virtually never as the free metal.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium   

Platinum is a chemical element with the symbol Pt and atomic number 78.  It is a dense, malleable, ductile, highly unreactive, precious, silverish-white transition metal.  Its name originates from Spanish platina, a diminutive of plata "silver".  Platinum is a member of the platinum group of elements and group 10 of the periodic table of elements.  It has six naturally occurring isotopes.  It is one of the rarer elements in Earth's crust.  It occurs in some nickel and copper ores along with some native deposits, mostly in South Africa, which accounts for 80% of the world production.  Because of its scarcity in Earth's crust, only a few hundred tonnes are produced annually, and given its important uses, it is highly valuable and is a major precious metal commodity.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platinum  See also a list of named alloys grouped alphabetically by base metal at   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_named_alloys  

Abraham Stoker (1847–1912) was an Irish author who is celebrated for his 1897 Gothic horror novel Dracula.  During his lifetime, he was better known as the personal assistant of actor Sir Henry Irving and business manager of the Lyceum Theatre, which Irving owned.  In his early years, Stoker worked as a theatre critic for an Irish newspaper, and wrote stories as well as commentaries.  Stoker visited the English coastal town of Whitby in 1890, and that visit was said to be part of the inspiration for Dracula.  He began writing novels while working as manager for Irving and secretary and director of London's Lyceum Theatre, beginning with The Snake's Pass in 1890 and Dracula in 1897.  During this period, Stoker was part of the literary staff of The Daily Telegraph in London, and he wrote other fiction, including the horror novels The Lady of the Shroud (1909) and The Lair of the White Worm (1911).  He published his Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving in 1906, after Irving's death, which proved successful,  and managed productions at the Prince of Wales Theatre.  Before writing Dracula, Stoker met Ármin Vámbéry, a Hungarian-Jewish writer and traveller (born in Szent-György, Kingdom of Hungary now Svätý Jur, Slovakia).  Dracula likely emerged from Vámbéry's dark stories of the Carpathian mountains.  However this claim has been challenged by many including Elizabeth Miller, a professor who, since 1990, has had as her major field of research and writing Dracula, and its author, sources, and influences.  She has stated, “The only comment about the subject matter of the talk was that Vambery 'spoke loudly against Russian aggression.'"  There had been nothing in their conversations about the "tales of the terrible Dracula" that are supposed to have "inspired Stoker to equate his vampire-protagonist with the long-dead tyrant."  At any rate, by this time, Stoker's novel was well underway, and he was already using the name Dracula for his vampire.  Stoker then spent several years researching Central and East European folklore and mythological stories of vampires.  The 1972 book In Search of Dracula by Radu Florescu and Raymond McNally claimed that the Count in Stoker's novel was based on Vlad III Dracula.  However, according to Elizabeth Miller, Stoker borrowed only the name and "scraps of miscellaneous information" about Romanian history; further, there are no comments about Vlad III in the author's working notes.  Dracula is an epistolary novel, written as a collection of realistic but completely fictional diary entries, telegrams, letters, ship's logs, and newspaper clippings, all of which added a level of detailed realism to the story, a skill which Stoker had developed as a newspaper writer.  At the time of its publication, Dracula was considered a "straightforward horror novel" based on imaginary creations of supernatural life.  According to the Encyclopedia of World Biography, Stoker's stories are today included in the categories of horror fiction, romanticized Gothic stories, and melodrama.  They are classified alongside other works of popular fiction, such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which also used the myth-making and story-telling method of having multiple narrators telling the same tale from different perspectives.  According to historian Jules Zanger, this leads the reader to the assumption that "they can't all be lying".  The original 541-page typescript of Dracula was believed to have been lost until it was found in a barn in northwestern Pennsylvania in the early 1980s.  It consisted of typed sheets with many emendations, and handwritten on the title page was "THE UN-DEAD."   The author's name was shown at the bottom as Bram Stoker.  Author Robert Latham remarked:  "the most famous horror novel ever published, its title changed at the last minute."  The typescript was purchased by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.  Stoker's inspirations for the story, in addition to Whitby, may have included a visit to Slains Castle in Aberdeenshire, a visit to the crypts of St. Michan's Church in Dublin, and the novella Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu.   Stoker's original research notes for the novel are kept by the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia.  A facsimile edition of the notes was created by Elizabeth Miller and Robert Eighteen-Bisang in 1998.  Stoker was a member of The London Library and it is here that he conducted much of the research for Dracula.  In 2018, the Library discovered some of the books that Stoker used for his research, complete with notes and marginalia.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_Stoker   

Agatha Christie was born on September 15 in 1890.  Christie is judged by many sources to be the most widely read novelist of all time, “outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare,” as her estate’s Web site claims.  The New Yorker  September 15, 2022 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com   Issue 2565  September 16, 2022