There was nothing evil in bad taste, unless you tried to pass yourself off as a connoisseur.  Come Sunday, a novel by Bradford Morrow

For more than a hundred years, Karl Baedeker was Europe’s ideal parent.  In his “Handbooks for Travellers,” which by 1914 described all of Europe and North America, and much of Asia and Africa, he did more for his readers than guide their way to agreeable hotels, picturesque churches, and sublime vistas.  He also set an example of private and public virtues ranging from thrift to patriotism, comforted the timid and encouraged the daring, taught the proper response to courtesy or cunning, combined moral probity with practical wisdom, and even while warning his readers away from unseemly pleasures let slip the knowledge of where they might be found.  The man was a patriotic German in the early-nineteenth-century mold.  The corporate personality was fluent in a dozen languages, and managed during the later nineteenth century and early twentieth to be a patriot of three or four fatherlands at the same time.  The man was born to a line of printers and booksellers in Essen in 1801 and died of overwork in Coblenz in 1859.  The corporate personality—an adaptation by his sons and grandsons of the personality of the man—grew in energy and authority from 1860 to 1914, resumed much of its strength after 1918, found itself in bad company after 1933, and raised itself from the rubble, chastened and subdued, in 1948.  The corporate personality still survives as a publisher of guidebooks, but with little of the style and less of the authority it enjoyed during its years of empire.  Edward Mendelson  Yale Review, 74 (Spring 1985), pp. 386-403  http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/baedeker.html

The Best Reviewed Mystery and Crime Books of 2022  https://bookmarks.reviews/the-best-reviewed-books-of-2022-crime-mystery-and-thriller/

A kasbah, also spelled qasba, qasaba, or casbah, is a fortress, most commonly the citadel or fortified quarter of a city.  In various languages, the Arabic word, or local words borrowed from the Arabic word, can also refer to a settlement, a fort, a watchtower, or a blockhouse.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasbah 

The Velveteen Rabbit, first published in book form in 1922 by a little-known novelist named Margery Williams Bianco, has now been in print for a century, selling over a million copies in the U.S. alone.  Dozens of illustrators have reimagined it, including Maurice Sendak three years before Where the Wild Things Are.  It is frequently adapted for the stage, and Meryl Streep received a Grammy nomination in 1986 for a recording of it she made with the pianist George Winston.  This year, Doubleday released a 100th-anniversary edition with stunning new art by award-winning illustrator Erin Stead.  All the while, it has remained a humble bedtime story across the English-speaking world.  Perhaps you read it when you were small; perhaps you have read it to someone smaller.  Yet The Velveteen Rabbit was always more than a children’s book.  Bianco, already the author of five unsuccessful novels for adults, had once longed to be a writer of serious fiction, but by the time she wrote The Velveteen Rabbit, she had not published a book in eight years.  Andrea Long Chu  https://www.vulture.com/2022/11/velveteen-rabbit-margery-williams-bianco-book.html 

Margery Williams Bianco is the author of the popular children's book, The Velveteen Rabbit (1922).  Before her writing career took off, she spent at least two years attending school in Pennsylvania.  She took a break from writing after having two children.  Later, Bianco continued writing and authored many more children's books, including Winterbound (1936), which won her a Newbery Medal.  Over her lifetime, Bianco published a compilation of over 25 novels and children's books.  Born in London on July 22, 1881, Margery Winifred Williams was born to a barrister and famous classical scholar.  As a young child, Bianco had a vivid imagination and would create different personalities for each of her toys.  But her father stressed the importance of reading for her and her older sister.  He believed reading was the primary source of education for children under the age of ten.  Because of her father's coaching, Bianco grew up with a love of reading and soon developed a passion for writing, using personalities from her childhood.  Bianco's father died when she was seven years old.  When she was nine years old, her family moved to the United States, first to New York, then settling on a farm in Pennsylvania.  Bianco attended the Convent School in Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania, until she was seventeen years old.  By this time, Bianco had decided to become a writer even though her stories had previously been rejected.  Nonetheless, Bianco managed to write children's stories for a London firm that published Christmas books.  In 1902, Bianco published her first novel for adults, The Late Returning.  She published a few early adult novels afterward; however, Bianco had little success with them.  https://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/literary-cultural-heritage-map-pa/bios/Bianco__Margery_Williams

The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens announced Dec. 14. 2022 that it has acquired the archive of American author Thomas Pynchon, considered by many to be among the greatest novelists of our time.  Comprising 70 linear feet of materials created between the late 1950s and the 2020s—including typescripts and drafts of each of his novels, handwritten notes, correspondence, and research—Pynchon’s literary archive offers an unprecedented look into the working methods of one of America’s most important writers.  The author of eight novels thus far and one short story collection, Pynchon, whose work has been translated into more than 30 languages, has influenced generations of diverse and important writers.  Born on Long Island in 1937, Thomas Pynchon attended Cornell University and served two years in the Navy.  While working as a technical writer for Boeing, he wrote his first novel, V., which was published to immediate critical acclaim in 1963 and won the William Faulkner Foundation Award for best debut novel.  Pynchon’s follow-up novel, The Crying of Lot 49, became an instant cult classic.  Published in 1966, it has since become one of the most frequently adopted American novels in university courses worldwide.  In 1974, Pynchon received the National Book Award for Gravity’s Rainbow, a touchstone of American postwar literature that Tony Tanner deemed “one of the great historical novels of our time and arguably the most important literary text since Ulysses.”  The author received a MacArthur “genius grant” in 1988, and his most recent novel, Bleeding Edge, was short-listed for the National Book Award in 2013.  The Huntington is home to more than 11 million library items and annually provides access to some 2,000 scholars, who use the collections in their research projects and many of whom are funded through a robust fellowship program.  The Library holds significant manuscripts by the most important writers of the 15th through the early 20th centuries, ranging from Chaucer to Shakespeare, Mary Shelley to Charles Dickens, and Edgar Allan Poe to Jack London.  Later 20th-century literary archives include the papers of Kingsley Amis, Christopher Isherwood, Charles Bukowski, and Octavia E. Butler.  https://huntington.org/news/news-release-huntington-acquires-thomas-pynchon-archive  

The final of the 2022 FIFA World Cup took place Dec. 18, 2022 in Qatar, resulting in victory by Argentina over France.

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2607  December 19, 2022