In the eighteenth century, a European could know the world in great detail without ever leaving his homeland.  Or he could, at least, if he got into the right industry.  So it was with Albertus Seba, a Dutch pharmacist who opened up shop in Amsterdam just as the eighteenth century began.  Given the city’s prominence as a hub of international trade, which in those days was mostly conducted over water, Seba could acquire from the crew members of arriving ships all manner of plant and animal specimens from distant lands.  In this manner he amassed a veritable private museum of the natural world.  The “cabinets of curiosities” Seba put together—as collectors of wonders did in those days—ranked among the largest on the continent.  But when he died in 1736, his magnificent collection did not survive him.  He’d already sold much of it twenty years earlier to Peter the Great, who used it as the basis for Russia’s first museum, the Kunstkammer in St. Petersburg.  This four-volume set of books constituted an attempt to catalog the variety of living things on Earth, a formidable endeavor that Seba was nevertheless well-placed to undertake, rendering each one in engravings made lifelike by their depth of color and detail.  The lavish production of the Thesaurus (more recently replicated in the condensed form of Taschen’s Cabinet of Natural Curiosities) presented a host of challenges both physical and economic.  But there was also the intellectual problem of how exactly, to organize all its textual and visual information.  As originally published, it groups its specimens by physical similarities, in a manner vaguely similar to the much more influential system published by Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus in 1735.  See graphics at https://www.openculture.com/2021/12/albertus-sebas-cabinet-of-natural-curiosities.html#google_vignette   

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

presenteeism  (prez-uhn-TEE-iz-uhm)  noun  The practice of being present at work when it’s unnecessary or counterproductive.  Coined as a counterpart to absenteeism.  Ultimately from the Indo-European root es- (to be), which also gave us yes.  Earliest documented use:  1931. 

philomuse   (FIL-oh-myooz)  noun  A poetry lover  From Greek philo- (love) + Muse (any of nine goddesses in Greek mythology who presided over arts and sciences).  Earliest documented use:  1654.   

From  Bob Freeman  Subject:  secundan 
In Through the Looking Glass the White Queen offers Alice employment with the perk “jam every other day”.  Sadly, that means that there is jam available yesterday and tomorrow, but never today.  So, whenever it is today, there is no jam!  One of many little bits of fun Lewis Carroll played with logic statements and double entendres.

diaeresis or dieresis  (dy-ER-uh-sis)  noun
1.  The separation of two adjacent vowel sounds.
2.  The mark ¨ placed over a vowel to indicate that it’s pronounced as a separate syllable, for example, in naïve or Brontë.
3.  A break in a line of verse when the end of a word coincides with the end of the metric foot.

From Latin diaeresis, from Greek diairesis (division), from diairein (to divide), from dia- (apart) + hairein (take).  Earliest documented use:  1656.

Q.  Why did the vowel wear a diaeresis to the NYC party?
A.  It didn’t want to blend in!
Especially when the party was thrown by The New Yorker.  The diaeresis is a favorite of the magazine.  Read more about it:  The Curse of the Diaeresis.  The umlaut looks the same as the diaeresis but functions differently.  The umlaut changes the pronunciation of the underlying vowel as opposed to indicating separate pronunciation.  

Elizabeth Mavor’s A Green Equinox was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1973, today it’s a conspicuous unknown compared to the novels it was up against:  Beryl Bainbridge’s The Dressmaker, Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince, and that year’s winner, J. G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur.  Fifty years after it was first published, A Green Equinox is being rereleased September, 2023 by McNally Editions in the US and as a Virago Modern Classic in the UK.  Lucy Scholes   https://lithub.com/the-booker-revisited-on-loves-many-manifestations-in-a-green-equinox/   

When an antiques enthusiast purchased a painting that appeared to bear the signature of N.C. Wyeth at a thrift store in 2017, she joked that the $4 item might actually be a real work by the prolific Maine artist and patriarch of the Wyeth family of painters.  Her joke was no laughing matter, and the painting is now estimated to fetch as much as $250,000 at auction in September, 2023.  According to specialists at Bonhams Skinner auction house, the seller unknowingly purchased the work at a Savers thrift store in Manchester, New Hampshire, while searching for frames to reuse.  The Wyeth painting had been stashed against a wall along with mostly damaged posters and prints, according to the auction house.  Carlie Porterfield  See graphics at https://www.cnn.com/style/nc-wyeth-ramona-thrift-store-tan/index.html    

Reader feedback:  DIGITAL WATERMARK

Interesting story and will be easily defeated after a little by those who are serious about creating false images.  As a note . . . with the move from typewriters to computers and electronic printers, forensic folk (police, FBI, etc.) lost the ability to trace a typed letter to a single typewriter based on certain defects in the characters, etc.  So the enforcement community worked with printer manufacturers to place the serial number of each ink jet printer on every single piece of paper printed.  This can be read if you have the right tools.  Electronic document files themselves have their own integrated identifiers usually referred to as “metadata.   

The Italian artist Michelangelo’s statue of David was unveiled on this day in 1504 outside the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence.  It was moved to its current location in the Galleria dell’Accademia 150 years ago in 1873.  Wiktionary

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2716  September 8, 2023