Gingerbread NYC will give New Yorkers and tourists an opportunity to celebrate the city, as well as draw attention to its local businesses and artisans.  Two bakeries and/or bakers from each borough will be selected to create a gingerbread display that will follow the theme of Winter in New York and best represents their respective neighborhoods, communities, or boroughs.  Prizes will be awarded in a variety of categories, such as:  Most Representative of Their Neighborhood, Most Creative, Good Enough to Eat, Most Intricate, Grandest, and more.  Displays through Sunday, January 8, 2023 at 1220 Fifth Ave at 103rd St., open Thurs 10–9, Fri–Mon 10–5  https://www.mcny.org/gingerbread-nyc   

Hailing from Seville, serranito is a classic bocadillo sandwich variety dating back to the 1970s.  The sandwich typically consists of either a viena andaluza (an oblong, crusty bread roll) or a mollete (a soft, rustic white bread roll) which is cut in half lengthwise and filled with slices of fried pork tenderloin (lomo de cerdo) and Serrano ham (jamón Serrano), strips of fried green peppers (usually the Italian variety), and tomato slices.  Some versions may also include a slice of tortilla or french omelet, lettuce, cheese, or slices of crispy fried bacon, while others may use chicken breasts or beef instead of the pork tenderloin.  After the sandwich became a great hit at tapas bars in Seville, the name serranito was soon patented and turned into a brand by José Luis Cabeza Hernández, who was nicknamed José Luis del Serranito.  Considered one of the best tapas in Seville, the sandwich is usually enjoyed for lunch or dinner, and it is usually served with a side of french fries and an ice-cold beer.  Posted by Red Panda  https://recipesxp.com/2021/01/18/spanish-serranito-sandwich-serranito-bocadillo/   

Inventor of the Kaleidoscope  David Brewster (1781-1868)  "Father of Modern Experimental Optics"  Reflective symmetry has been observed since ancient times.  Legend claims that early Egyptians would place two or three slabs of highly polished limestone together at different angles and watch with fascination as mandalas were formed by human dancers.  It was not until centuries later, however, that this optical phenomenon was encased in one small tube and given a name.  The kaleidoscope was invented and exhibited in 1816 by Sir David Brewster.  (The patent would be granted in 1817.)  While Brewster was granted a patent for his kaleidoscope, as well as acknowledgment and acclaim for his invention, he did not realize any remuneration.  Others did, however.  There was some fault with the patent registration and before Brewster could claim any financial rewards, kaleidoscopes were quickly manufactured by aggressive entrepreneurs who sold hundreds of thousands with great financial success for themselves.  There is no doubt that Brewster would be surprised and perhaps disillusioned to find that his most enduring legacy is the kaleidoscope.  His achievements and contributions to the world of science, and to the social and cultural history of the era, actually covered a much broader spectrum, as did his numerous inventions, including the lenticular stereoscope, binocular camera, polyzonal lens, polarimeter, and lighthouse illuminator.  See graphics at https://brewstersociety.com/kaleidoscope-university/sir-david-brewster/   

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From:  Joan Perrin  Subject:  bibliophagist  The word bibliophagist reminds me of the song in the musical She Loves Me, sung by shop girl, Ilonia.  She sings that she found the man of her dreams after a Trip to the Library (video:  5 min; lyrics).

From:  Lawrence Crumb  Subject:  prosateur  The title character in Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme was delighted to learn that he had been speaking prose all his life.  

From:  Margaret Breuer  Subject:  Bibliopole 
A charming and au courant book store is Square Books in Oxford, MS.  There are four separate shops located around the town square.  Each shop has a different emphasis.  One of the shops focuses on rare books.  The proprietor is forward thinking and all authors of note have book signings in his store when they are promoting their books in the South.  When I lived in Atlanta, my book club took a road trip to Oxford to pay homage to William Faulkner (we’d just finished reading Absolam, Absolam!) and to visit Square Books where we had a meet-and-greet with the owner and bibliopole, Richard Howorth. It was a delightful and memorable experience.  

From:  P . Larry Nelson  Subject:  bibliopole  I’m guessing the best-known bibliopole might just be the angel Aziraphale in the book (and the 2019 Amazon six-part series) Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.  His bookshop, A.Z. Fell and Co. in Soho has very rare and first edition books, but Aziraphale goes to great lengths not to sell any, having collected them for himself for over 200 years.   

Cartoon of library worker suggesting books would be more charming arranged by color.  See slide #10 of #12 at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/12/19   

Dec. 20 is the earliest date for Winter solstice's eve in the Northern Hemisphere.   

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com   Issue 2608  December 20, 2022

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 

After the end of World War II, Mervin Kelly put together a team of scientists to develop a solid-state semiconductor switch to replace the problematic vacuum tube.  The team would use some of the advances in semiconductor research during the war that had made radar possible.  A young, brilliant theoretician, Bill Shockley, was selected as the team leader.  Shockley drafted Bell Lab's Walter Brattain, an experimental physicist who could build or fix just about anything, and hired theoretical physicist John Bardeen from the University of Minnesota.  Shockley filled out his team with an eclectic mix of physicists, chemists and engineers.  Brown, a physicist who joined the group in 1951, recalls hearing about exuberant parties and good lunches.  Betty Sparks, Shockley's secretary, recalled the group's high spirits at her wedding to Morgan Sparks.  They called their lab "Hell's Bells Laboratory."  In the spring of 1945, Shockley designed what he hoped would be the first semiconductor amplifier, relying on something called the "field effect."  His device was a small cylinder coated thinly with silicon, mounted close to a small, metal plate.  Ensconced in Bell Labs' Murray Hill facilities, Bardeen and Brattain began a great partnership.  Bardeen, the theoretician, suggested experiments and interpreted the results, while Brattain built and ran the experiments.  Technician Phil Foy recalls that as time went on with little success, tensions began to build within the lab group.  In the fall of 1947, author Lillian Hoddeson says, Brattain decided to try dunking the entire apparatus into a tub of water.  Surprisingly, it worked . . . a little bit.  Brattain began to experiment with gold on germanium, eliminating the liquid layer on the theory that it was slowing down the device.  It didn't work, but the team kept experimenting using that design as a starting point.  Shortly before Christmas, Bardeen had an historic insight.  Everyone thought they knew how electrons behaved in crystals, but Bardeen discovered they were wrong.  The electrons formed a barrier on the surface.  His breakthrough was what they needed.  Without telling Shockley about the changes they were making to the investigation, Bardeen and Brattain worked on.  On December 16, 1947, they built the point-contact transistor, made from strips of gold foil on a plastic triangle, pushed down into contact with a slab of germanium.  When Bardeen and Brattain called Shockley to tell him of the invention, Shockley was both pleased at the group's results and furious that he had not been directly involved.  He decided that to preserve his standing, he would have to do Bardeen and Brattain one better.  His device, the junction (sandwich) transistor, was developed in a burst of creativity and anger, mostly in a hotel room in Chicago.  It took him a total of four weeks of working pen on paper, although it took another two years before he could actually build one.  His device was more rugged and more practical than Bardeen and Brattain's point-contact transistor, and much easier to manufacture.  It became the central artifact of the electronic age.  Bell Labs decided to unveil the invention on June 30, 1948.  With the help of engineer John Pierce, who wrote science fiction in his spare time, Bell Labs settled on the name "transistor"-- combining the ideas of "trans-resistance" with the names of other devices like thermistors.  The invention got little attention at the time, either in the popular press or in industry.  But Shockley saw its potential.  He left Bell Labs to found Shockley Semiconductor in Palo Alto, California.  He hired superb engineers and physicists, but, according to physical chemist Harry Sello, Shockley's personality drove out eight of his best and brightest.  Those "traitorous eight" founded a new company called Fairchild Semiconductor.  Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore, two of the eight, went on to form Intel Corporation.  They (and others at Texas Instruments) co-invented the integrated circuit.  Today, Intel produces billions of transistors daily on its integrated circuits, yet Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley earned very little money from their research.  Nonetheless, Shockley's company was the beginning of Silicon Valley.  https://www.pbs.org/transistor/album1/index.html   

25 Eclectic Films Chosen for National Film Registry  Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announced Dec. 14, 2022 the annual selection of 25 influential motion pictures to be inducted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.   Selected for their cultural, historic or aesthetic importance to preserve the nation’s film heritage, the newest selections include a vibrant diversity of American filmmakers, as well as landmark works in key genres and numerous documentaries.  The 2022 selections date back 124 years in filmmaking to an 1898 film of the “Mardi Gras Carnival” parade in New Orleans. The film was long thought to be lost but recently discovered in a museum in the Netherlands.  The most recent film now added to the registry is 2011’s “Pariah,” directed by Dee Rees.  This year’s selections include at least 15 films directed or co-directed by filmmakers of color, women or LGBTQ+ filmmakers.  The selections bring the number of films in the registry to 850, many of which are among the 1.7 million films in the Library’s collections.  Hollywood releases selected this year include Marvel Studios' “Iron Man,” Disney’s beloved “The Little Mermaid,” John Waters’ “Hairspray,” the unforgettable romantic comedy “When Harry Met Sally,” Brian De Palma’s adaptation of “Carrie,” and the 1950 film version of “Cyrano de Bergerac,” which made José Ferrer the first Hispanic actor to win an Oscar for Best Actor.  Turner Classic Movies (TCM) will host a television special Tuesday, Dec. 27, starting at 8 p.m. ET to screen a selection of motion pictures named to the registry this year.  Hayden will join TCM host, film historian and Academy Museum of Motion Pictures Director and President Jacqueline Stewart, who is chair of the National Film Preservation Board, to discuss the films.   

December 13, 2022  For what is now the seventh time in a row, Emily Temple presents the best book covers of the year—as chosen by some of the industry’s best book cover designers.  This year, 31 designers shared their favorite covers of the year, with a grand total of 103 covers, representing work by 62 different designers for 54 different imprints.  Their choices and their comments are at https://lithub.com/the-103-best-book-covers-of-2022   

Crowdfunding publisher Unbound has partnered with an AI platform to challenge people to use artificial intelligence to solve Cain’s Jawbone, a literary puzzle that has only ever been cracked by four people since it was published in the 1930s.  Cain’s Jawbone is a novel by Edward Powys Mathers, who was then the Observer’s cryptic crossword compiler.  It’s a murder mystery in which six people die, but it can only be solved if readers rearrange its 100 pages in the correct order.  Unbound said the pages could be sorted to reveal the six victims and their respective murderers “through logic and intelligent reading”.  The person or team that finishes the competition at the top of the leaderboard wins $300.  The contest opens on Dec. 15, 2022 and closes on 31 December.  Sarah Shaffi    https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/dec/14/contest-challenges-ai-to-solve-legendary-literary-puzzle-cains-jawbone   

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2606  December 16, 2022 

Milk toast is made with two breakfast staples:  milk and toast.  Bread is toasted, buttered, and cut into bite-sized pieces.  It is then placed in a bowl and topped with warm milk. Milk toast was the precursor to the breakfast cereals we know and love today. https://www.thekitchn.com/milk-toast-recipe-23279008    

Caspar Milquetoast is a comic strip character created by H. T. Webster for his cartoon series The Timid Soul.  Webster described Caspar Milquetoast as "the man who speaks softly and gets hit with a big stick".  The character's name is derived from a bland and fairly inoffensive food, milk toast.  In 1912, Webster drew a daily panel for the New-York Tribune, under a variety of titles—Our Boyhood Ambitions, Life's Darkest Moment, The Unseen Audience.  In 1924, Webster moved to the New York World and soon after added The Timid Soul featuring the wimpy Caspar Milquetoast.  Milquetoast developed out of the design of another character, Egbert Smear, or The Man in the Brown Derby.  The character was said to have ushered in a new era of timidity in comics.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspar_Milquetoast   

On March 8, 1890, perhaps after a nightmare caused by “a too-generous helping of dressed crab at supper,” Bram Stoker began work on Dracula, a novel that would take him seven years to complete.  But years before that fateful feast, in an early foray into the literary world, Stoker wrote a 2,000 word fan letter to Walt Whitman.  Stoker first encountered Whitman when, as a student at Trinity College, he read an entertainingly bad review of Poems by Walt Whitman, a selection of the poems from Leaves of Grass.  Stoker and his friends read the pan aloud to each other (19th century novelists—they’re just like us!), including, perhaps, this memorable kicker:  “It has been said of Mr. Whitman by one of his warmest admirers, ‘He is Democracy.’  We really think he is—in his compositions, at least; being, like it, ignorant, sanguine, noisy, coarse, and chaotic!”  Jessie Gaynor  https://lithub.com/did-you-know-bram-stoker-wrote-walt-whitman-a-very-intense-2000-word-fan-letter/   

There’s no such thing as a perfect crime.  If there were, you wouldn’t know it was a crime.  Various sources    

On December 16th, 1901, 35-year-old Beatrix Potter printed 250 copies of a book that she had written and illustrated herself—a book about a mischievous bunny named Peter Rabbit . (Maybe you’ve heard of it?)  Potter had originally written the story for the five-year-old son of her former governess, who suggested that Potter’s drawings and stories might be turned into books for all children.  Potter liked this idea, and expanded the story she had written into a book called The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Mr. McGregor’s Garden, complete with black and white illustrations and a colored frontispiece.  She submitted it to six publishers, but it was rejected by all of them.  “From a book editor’s point of view,” wrote biographer Linda Lear, “her story was too long, her narrative lacked proper pacing, there were no colored illustrations, and the black and white outline pictures were too different from the familiar ones.”  Undeterred (and unwilling to compromise) Potter decided to publish the story herself, ordering 250 copies from Strangeways & Sons, a printer in London, along with 500 copies of the frontispiece.  It cost about £11, and soon after, she began distributing the copies to family and friends, and even selling a few—including to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who bought a copy for his grandchildren.  By February 1902, she had to print 200 more copies, and these too quickly sold out.  Literary Hub  December 11, 2022   

Newtons are a Nabisco-trademarked version of a pastry filled with sweet fruit paste. "Fig Newtons" are the most popular variety (fig rolls filled with fig paste).  Their distinctive shape is a characteristic that has been adopted by competitors, including generic fig bars sold in many markets.  The product was invented by Charles Roser and baked at the F. A. Kennedy Steam Bakery for the first time in 1891.  The first Fig Newtons were baked at the F. A. Kennedy Steam Bakery in 1891.  The product was named after the city of Newton, Massachusetts.  The Kennedy Biscuit Company had recently become associated with the New York Biscuit Company, and the two merged to form Nabisco—after which, the fig rolls were trademarked as "Fig Newtons".  Since 2012, the "Fig" has been dropped from the product name (now just "Newtons").  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newtons_(cookie)    

Blanche is a feminine given name.  It means "white" in French, derived from the Late Latin word "blancus".  See list of royal names, names of  celebrities and fictional characters named Blanche at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanche_(given_name)#:~:text=Blanche%20is%20a%20feminine%20given,Late%20Latin%20word%20%22blancus%22.   

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2605  December 14, 2022 

pareil  noun (plural pareils) (obsolete, quaint)  An equal.

pareil  adjective  pareil (feminine pareille, masculine plural pareils, feminine plural pareilles)  like, alike, same  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pareil

Use nonpareil to describe someone or something that is beyond compare, an absolute model of perfection of a particular thing.  Jane Austen was a writer nonpareil, and James Bond a spy nonpareil.  Coming from the medieval French words non, meaning "not," and pareil, meaning "equal," so quite literally it means "not equal" or "unequaled."  Like a lot of fancy French terms adopted by the English language (e.g., "bons mots," "eminence gris"), the use of nonpareil is generally restricted to written form. 

noun  model of excellence or perfection of a kind; one having no equal colored;  beads of sugar used as a topping on e.g. candies and cookies; a flat disk of chocolate covered with beads of colored sugar

adjective  eminent beyond or above comparison  https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/nonpareil 

Nov. 15, 2022  Foraging for fungi may not only mean mushrooms are on the menu. New research has shown that mushroom skins could provide a biodegradable alternative to some plastics used in batteries and computer chips, making them easier to recycle.  Researchers from the Johannes Kepler University in Austria were working on flexible and stretchable electronics, with a focus on sustainable materials to replace non-degradable materials, when they made their discovery, published in the journal Science Advances.  Hafsa Khalil    https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/15/world/mushroom-skin-electrical-circuits-scn-scli-intl/index.html

Kitchen Sink School  This term was coined by art critic David Sylvester in 1954 and referred to a group of British social realist painters popular in mid-1950's who focused their work deliberately on the unglamorous.  Sylvester described the artists as painting 'everything except the kitchen sink, no, the kitchen sink too'.  Their pictures were populated with drab everyday objects depicting British post-war austerity, notably interior scenes of domestic clutter and detritus.  These included commonplace subject matter of daily life like cluttered kitchens, backyards and slum tenements.  https://www.artbiogs.co.uk/2/movements/kitchen-sink-school

‘Let sleeping dogs lie' means avoid interfering in a situation which is currently stable.  'Let sleeping dogs lie' derives from the long-standing observation that dogs are often unpredictable when they are suddenly disturbed.  Geoffrey Chaucer was one of the first to put this notion into print, in Troilus and Criseyde, circa 1380, although the belief itself may well be much older:  "It is nought good a slepyng hound to wake."  The expression may have started as a warning about the risk of waking a potentially dangerous animal, but it later turned metaphorical.  By the time it became established as a proverb its meaning had 'leave well alone', or as we might have it in the 21st century, "if it ain't broke don't fix it".  https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/let-sleeping-dogs-lie.html  © Gary Martin 

George Newall (1934-2022) studied musical composition in school before going to work at an ad agency.  This combination of interests helped him become a driving force behind “Schoolhouse Rock.”  While working as a creative director at the ad agency McCaffrey and McCall, Newall was asked to come up with a project setting education topics to rock music.  Along with co-creators Bob Dorough (1923–2018) and Tom Yohe, Newall invented “Schoolhouse Rock,” launching the series in 1971.  Newall wrote the music and lyrics to several “Schoolhouse Rock” tunes, including “Unpack Your Adjectives” and “The Energy Blues.”  The series ran through the 1970s and early ‘80s, and Newall helped revive it for new stints in the 1990s and 2000s.  He won four Emmy Awards for his work with “Schoolhouse Rock.”  Newall died Nov. 30, 2022.  Linnea Crowther  https://www.legacy.com/news/celebrity-deaths/george-newall-1934-2022-schoolhouse-rock-co-creator/

bibliophagist  (bib-lee-AH-fuh-jist)  noun  One who loves to read books; a bookworm. From Greek biblio- (book) + -phage (one who eats).  Earliest documented use:  1881. Another form of the word is bibliophage.  A.Word.A.Day

Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work. - Gustave Flaubert, novelist (12 Dec 1821-1880)  A.Word.A.Day 

 Happy birthday!  Wiktionary went online on December 12, 2002.

 http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2604  December 12, 2022 

I can vividly recall the night I first read Crockett Johnson’s celebrated children’s book Harold and the Purple Crayon to my three-year-old son, Max.  I spotted it buried in a pile of books on his shelf, a jumble of mostly hand-me-downs from Max’s brother and sister.  Beneath the cheery primary colors of works like Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Sandra Boynton’s Hippos Go Berserk! and Margaret Wise Brown’s classic Goodnight Moon, there it was, distinguished by its more subtle pallet, a monochromatic scene of magenta, purple and deep, dark scarlet on its cover.  If you haven’t had the good fortune to read it, Johnson’s book tells the story of Harold, a boy who is always alone with his crayon.  When Harold doesn’t use his crayon to draw, the pages of his book are nothing but stark whiteness.  When Harold deploys his mighty crayon, however, he draws a world in which he embarks on a hero’s journey that eventually leads him home.  Harold and the Purple Crayon belongs to a pantheon of books that exhort children to follow their imaginations.  In this, Harold is brother to Alice, Dorothy, Lucy Pevensie in “The Chronicles of Narnia,” Max, who goes “Where the Wild Things Are,” (and whose author, Maurice Sendak, was a protégé of Johnson) and a long, long list of others.   Ross Ellenhorn  https://lithub.com/on-harold-of-the-purple-crayon-and-the-value-of-an-imaginative-journey/   

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

Lexington Market is a historic market in Downtown Baltimore, Maryland.  The market is now housed in a 60,000-square-foot market shed building completed in 2022 that is home to 50 merchants and kiosks.  The market has occupied many market buildings over its 200+ year history, most recently in its "East Market" building at Paca and Lexington Streets that was built following a major fire in 1949 that destroyed the shed building built in 1871.  Following the completion of its new market building, the East Market building was decommissioned and slated for future development.  Lexington Market is located near the Baltimore Light Rail and Baltimore Metro Subway stops of the same name.  It is about six blocks from Oriole Park at Camden Yards.  Lexington Market is one of the longest-running public markets in the nation, having been around since 1782.  The market continues to stand in its original site.  The land for this historical market was donated by General John Eager Howard, famous colonial Revolutionary War commander of Maryland Line regiment of Continental Army from his estate "Belvedere" (also known as "Howard's Woods) west and north of Baltimore Town.  The market originally operated without sheds and stalls.  Farmers would load up their horse drawn wagons with ham, butter, eggs and produce.  Farmers would travel from Towson and Reisterstown to sell their goods at the market, while watermen would bring their catches from the Chesapeake Bay and converge on Lexington Market's property to sell their goods starting before dawn.  Before being called Lexington Market it was known as Western Precincts Market.  The Market is owned by the City of Baltimore and managed by the nonprofit Baltimore Public Markets Corporation.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexington_Market 

November 24, 2015 at Lexington Market in Baltimore  These days, there seems to always be at least two or three 25-pound freshly roasted turkeys on the Krause's counter somewhere, waiting their turn to be sliced for sandwiches or turned into an even more substantial dinner meal.  He says the Thanksgiving turkey sandwich (turkey, gravy, stuffing, cranberry sauce) is popular, but suggests the regular roasted-turkey sandwich on rye or kaiser roll is the best thing on the menu.  But he's learned that everyone has his or her own opinion on the matter.  "Some customers like turkey breast, some like the drumstick, some like dark, some like white," he says.  "By now, we know who likes what."  Whatever magic Hwang works, retired Baltimore counselor Bobbi Hucek was happy with the results.  She was picking up six full turkey dinners to go to bring to her church for the priests.  The previous week, she'd bought four dinners to bring to the beach with her family.  She's been coming to Krause's for 20 years.  "I always came down to Lexington Market for the crab cake, and then I discovered this," she says.  "I think people love the turkey as much as the crab cake--they're shocked by the moistness of the turkey.  Michael Y. Park  photography by John Falls  https://www.bonappetit.com/people/out-of-the-kitchen/article/krauses-lite-fare-lexington-market   

We’ve come to the end of another bountiful literary year, and for all of us review rabbits here at Book Marks, that can mean only one thing:  basic math, and lots of it.  Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be calculating and revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2022, in the categories of (deep breath):  Fiction.  https://bookmarks.reviews/the-best-reviewed-books-of-2022-fiction/   See also Non-Fiction  https://bookmarks.reviews/category/non-fiction/ 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com   Issue 2603  December 9, 2022 

Famous Quotes from The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare

"Why, then the world 's mine oyster" (Act II, Scene II).
"This is the short and the long of it" (Act II, Scene II).
"I cannot tell what the dickens his name is". (Act III, Scene II).
"As good luck would have it".  (Act III, Scene V).  https://www.william-shakespeare.info/quotes-quotations-play-merry-wives-of-windsor.htm   

In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare’s “merry wives” are Mistress Ford and Mistress Page of the town of Windsor.  The two play practical jokes on Mistress Ford’s jealous husband and a visiting knight, Sir John Falstaff.  Merry wives, jealous husbands, and predatory knights were common in a kind of play called “citizen comedy” or “city comedy.”  https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/the-merry-wives-of-windsor/   

As sea level rises, more and more saltwater encroaches on the land.  Along the world’s coasts and estuaries, invading seawater advances and overtakes the fresh water that deciduous trees rely upon for sustenance.  The salty water slowly poisons living trees, leaving a haunted ghost forest of dead and dying timber.  Still standing in or near brackish water, the decaying trees of a ghost forest resemble giant graying pillars that protrude into the air.  Researchers report that the rapid increase in ghost forests represents a dramatic visual picture of environmental changes along coastal plains located at or near sea level.  In many areas, rising sea levels combine with land sinking from the last ice age, as is currently happening in the Chesapeake Bay watershed.  The Mississippi Delta region of Louisiana is undergoing changes due to rising waters, the sinking of Earth's crust, and sediments compacting along the Mississippi River.  With land and water constantly shifting, woodlands die and are buried in open water.  This is apparent along North Carolina’s maritime forests, where only a glimpse of once peaceful and verdant groves, now ghost forests, remain.  https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/ghost-forest.html  See also https://www.artforum.com/interviews/maya-lin-on-planting-a-ghost-forest-in-manhattan-86134 and https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/55333961-ghost-forest   

Henri Manguin, Still Life with Copper Pitcher (ca 1902)  https://www.jigidi.com/solve/l4s0mbk2/henri-manguin-french-1874-1949-still-life-with-copper-pitcher-ca-1902/   

Henri Charles Manguin (1874–1949) was a French painter, associated with the Fauves.  Manguin entered the École des Beaux-Arts to study under Gustave Moreau, as did Henri Matisse and Charles Camoin with whom he became close friends.  Like them, Manguin made copies of Renaissance art in the Louvre.  Manguin was greatly influenced by Impressionism, as is seen in his use of bright pastel hues.  Many of his paintings were of Mediterranean landscapes; and would soon represent the height of his career as a Fauve artist.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Manguin   

BLACK PEPPER SNOWBALLS  Makes about 36 cookies.  Becca Rea-Tucker  https://lithub.com/is-revenge-baking-a-thing/  

There are two ways to pronounce the noun conch—which refers to a variety of sea mollusks and their large shells—and how you pronounce it determines its plural. The more common pronunciation is with a hard k sound at the end, so that the word rhymes with honk.  For this pronunciation, the plural is conchs. The other pronunciation is with a ch sound at the end, so that it rhymes with launch (in U.S. pronunciation, at least).  The plural for this pronunciation is conches.  https://grammarist.com/usage/conches-conchs/  

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2602  December 7, 2022