How Campbell's canned cream of mushroom soup became a Thanksgiving staple by Ashlie D. Stevens  Its creation was a natural extension of French béchamel, a velvety sauce made by whisking milk into a roux until the mixture thickens and becomes smooth.  However, they were the company that canned and commercialized the product in such a way that it has become a holiday staple, with 50% of their annual sales of cream of mushroom soup taking place between November and January of each year.  Founded in 1869 by Joseph A. Campbell and Abraham Anderson in Camden, New Jersey, Campbell's Soup Company began as a small canning business, producing a range of preserved goods such as tomatoes, vegetables, jellies, condiments and soups.  A pivotal moment came for the company, and future Thanksgivings across the continent, in 1897 when chemist John T. Dorrance, who was the nephew of a company executive, invented a method to condense soup by removing water, leading to the introduction of condensed soups.  https://www.salon.com/2023/11/12/americas-bchamel-how-campbells-canned-cream-of-mushroom-soup-became-a-thanksgiving-staple/   

Tania Branigan’s Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution has won the 2023 Cundill History Prize, given annually to a “book that embodies historical scholarship, originality, literary quality, and broad appeal.”  The book, published in May by Norton, explores the lingering effects of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution on the lives of Chinese citizens.  In a starred review, a Kirkus critic called the book—a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and the Baillie Gifford Prize—“a heartbreaking, revelatory evocation of ‘the decade that cleaved modern China in two.’”  Philippa Levine, the chair of the Cundill Prize jury, said, “Haunting and memorable, Tania Branigan’s sensitive study of the impact of the Cultural Revolution on the lives and psyches of an entire generation in China affected every juror, as it will every reader.  All of us found ourselves unable to stop thinking about this extraordinary book.  All of us were deeply moved by the trauma she so vividly describes and by the skills on which she drew in doing so.  This is a must-read.”  The Cundill History Prize, presented by McGill University in Montreal, was established in 2008, and comes with a cash prize of $75,000.  Previous winners include Anne Applebaum for Iron Curtain:  The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 and Tiya Miles for All That She Carried:  The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake.  Michael Schaub https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/articles/winner-of-the-cundill-history-prize-is-revealed/    

Shohei Ohtani spent 2023 as the most dominant player in the American League, and now he has the award to prove it to top off his magical season.  MLB announced that Ohtani was voted the 2023 AL MVP, giving the superstar his second MVP award in the past three seasons.  After a solid first three seasons in MLB, Ohtani took off in 2021, when he won his first MVP award, then finished second to Aaron Judge in last year’s voting.  Ohtani put up incredible numbers in 2023, leading the league with 44 home runs and a 1.066 OPS, with the latter leading all of baseball. He also started 23 games as a pitcher, accumulating 3.14 ERA and 167 strikeouts in 132 innings pitched.  https://www.si.com/mlb/2023/11/16/shohei-ohtani-los-angeles-angels-2023-al-mvp-award   

November 17, 2023  The Leonids are usually bright meteors and the shooting stars can even be colourful, according to NASA.  They are also some of the fastest meteors, travelling at blistering speeds of around 44 miles per second, the space agency said.  The Leonid meteor shower occurs every year in November, as Earth passes through trails of debris from Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle.  The comet was discovered twice independently—once in 1865 by Ernst Tempel and again in 1866 by Horace Tuttle, hence the name.  This year, the Leonid meteor shower started on Nov 3 and is expected to last till Dec 2.  But the Leonids will reach their peak this Saturday.  If conditions are clear, one can also catch a nice display before dawn Friday or late at night that same day.  Between 1:00 am and 4:00 am (local time) Saturday morning, much of the Midwest and parts of the South-eastern United States will have clearer skies, but residents of the West and East coasts will have less visibility of the sky due to rain and cloud cover, according to early forecasts by the National Weather Service.  https://www.wionews.com/science/look-up-leonid-meteor-shower-will-peak-this-weekend-heres-when-and-where-to-watch-659608   

Sally Darr, Formidable Chef of ’80s-Era French Bistro, Dies at 100  A skilled and self-taught cook of homey French fare, she drew fans (including Julia Child) to her Greenwich Village restaurant for more than a decade.  Nestled on the ground floor of a modest brick townhouse on West 13th Street, La Tulipe was a jewel-box of a place, with aubergine walls, a zinc topped bar, rustic French country furniture and barely room for some 15 tables.  Ms. Darr served what is known as cooking “à la bonne femme”—classic but simple French dishes like roast chicken with 40 cloves of garlic, as well as her own innovations, like soft shell crab meunière and an extravagant terrine of what seemed like hundreds of layers of smoked tongue and foie gras mousse.  From the moment it opened in May 1979, it was a success, earning three stars from Mimi Sheraton of The New York Times, who praised its “small but enticing menu,” the “sheer perfection” of Ms. Darr’s zucchini fritters and her “immaculate” lemon tart.  Desserts were Ms. Darr’s forte:  She was a skilled pastry chef, and her apricot souffle, shaped like a minaret and served table-side with a dollop of whipped cream flavored with kirsch, was a best seller.  Penelope Green  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/16/dining/sally-darr-dead.html

Through others, we become ourselves. - Lev Vygotsky, psychologist (17 Nov 1896-1934)

 http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2746  November 17, 2023

An animal cracker is a particular type of cracker, baked in the shape of an animal, usually an animal either at a zoo or a circus, such as a lion, a tiger, a bear, or an elephant.  The most common variety is light-colored and slightly sweet, but darker chocolate-flavored and colorful frosted varieties are also sold.  Although animal crackers tend to be sweet in flavor like cookies, they are made with a layered dough like crackers and are marketed as crackers and not cookies.  Stauffer's Biscuit Company produced their first batch of animal crackers in York, Pennsylvania, in 1871.  Other domestic bakeries, including the Dozier-Weyl Cracker Company of St. Louis, and the Holmes and Coutts Company of New York City, were the predecessors of the National Biscuit Company, today's "Nabisco Brands".  In 1902, animal crackers officially became known as "Barnum's Animals" and evoked the familiar circus theme of the Barnum and Bailey Circus.  Later in 1902, the now-familiar box was designed for the Christmas season with the innovative idea of attaching a string to hang from the Christmas tree.  Until that time, crackers were generally sold only in bulk (the proverbial "cracker barrel") or in large tins.  These small cartons, which retailed for 5 cents at the time of their release, were a big hit and are still sold today.  The number and variety contained in each box has varied over the years.  In total, 53 different animals have been represented by animal crackers since 1902.  In its current incarnation, each package contains 22 cookies consisting of a variety of animals.  The most recent addition, the koala, was added in September 2002 after being chosen by consumer votes, beating out the penguin, walrus and cobra.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_cracker  Thank you, Muse reader!    

Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, (née Miller; 1890–1976) was an English writer known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple.  She also wrote the world's longest-running play, the murder mystery The Mousetrap, which has been performed in the West End since 1952.  A writer during the "Golden Age of Detective Fiction", Christie has been called the "Queen of Crime".  She also wrote six novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott.  In 1971, she was made a Dame (DBE) by Queen Elizabeth II for her contributions to literature. Guinness World Records lists Christie as the best-selling fiction writer of all time, her novels having sold more than two billion copies.  Christie was born into a wealthy upper-middle-class family in Torquay, Devon, and was largely home-schooled.  She was initially an unsuccessful writer with six consecutive rejections, but this changed in 1920 when The Mysterious Affair at Styles, featuring detective Hercule Poirot, was published.  Her first husband was Archibald Christie; they married in 1914 and had one child before divorcing in 1928.  Following the breakdown of her marriage and the death of her mother in 1926 she made international headlines by going missing for eleven days.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agatha_Christie    

Calibri is a digital sans-serif typeface family in the humanist or modern style.  It was designed by Luc(as) de Groot in 2002–2004 and released to the general public in 2007, with Microsoft Office 2007 and Windows Vista.  In Office 2007, it replaced Times New Roman as the default typeface in Word and replaced Arial as the default in PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, and WordPad.  De Groot described its subtly rounded design as having "a warm and soft character".  Calibri is part of the ClearType Font Collection, a suite of fonts from various designers released with Windows Vista.  All start with the letter C to reflect that they were designed to work well with Microsoft's ClearType text rendering system, a text rendering engine designed to make text clearer to read on liquid-crystal display monitors. The other fonts in the same group are Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantia and Corbel.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calibri   

The Stokes Purple® sweet potato hails from North Carolina.  Mike Sizemore, a sweet potato farmer, received some purple-colored potatoes as a gift from an unidentified woman.  He liked them so much that he began to cultivate them, eventually obtaining a patent and, in 2006, launched them in the commercial market.  The Okinawan sweet potato originated in Central and South America.  It is believed that explorers introduced them to the Philippines and China in the 15th Century, and the potato then made its way to Japan in the 1600's.  Initially planted in Okinawa, the southern island of Japan, they were soon cultivated all over Japan. Eventually, these purple potatoes wound up in Hawaii and became a part of the native menu, where they are also known as "Hawaiian sweet potatoes."  Today, they are widely grown in Hawaii and exported to the United States mainland.  The Okinawan sweet potato is said to have 150 percent more antioxidants than blueberries.  Antioxidants help to guard against cardiovascular disease and cancer. They contain two times your daily value of vitamin A, half your daily value of vitamin C, as well as vitamin B6, iron, dietary fiber, and potassium.  While purple potatoes offer a bonanza of disease fighting nutrients, the standout health hero is the powerful antioxidant content linked to reducing inflammation which helps improve blood pressure, overall heart health and may help stunt the growth of certain cancer cells.  Look for the Okinawan sweet potato in your grocery store in the fall and winter seasons.  Unlike its darker skinned counterpart, the tubular-shaped Okinawan sweet potato has a buff or light brown colored skin with a violet-purple flesh.  This tuber has a slightly sweet taste and a creamy texture, lending itself to the same recipes you would use with orange sweet potatoes.  Patricia S. York  https://www.southernliving.com/food/veggies/potatoes/sweet-potato/purple-sweet-potato  Thank you, Muse reader!   

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2745  November 15, 2023 

Anthony Doerr (born October 27, 1973) is an American author of novels and short stories.  He gained widespread recognition for his 2014 novel All the Light We Cannot See, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  Raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Doerr attended the nearby University School, graduating in 1991.  He then majored in history at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, graduating in 1995. He earned an MFA from Bowling Green State University.  Doerr's first book was a collection of short stories called The Shell Collector (2002).  Many of the stories take place in countries within Africa and New Zealand, where he has worked and lived.  His first novel, About Grace, was released in 2004.  His memoir, Four Seasons in Rome, was published in 2007, and his second collection of short stories, Memory Wall, was published in 2010.  Doerr's second novel, All the Light We Cannot See, is set in occupied France during World War II and was published in 2014.  It received significant critical acclaim and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction.  The book was a New York Times bestseller, and was named by the newspaper as a notable book of 2014.  It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2015.  It was runner-up for the 2015 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction and won the 2015 Ohioana Library Association Book Award for Fiction.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Doerr   

Coppicing is a sustainable forestry technique that uses nature’s capacity for regeneration to continually harvest wood from a living tree.  Many hardwood trees will attempt to regrow after being cut down.  Trees like maples and oaks will send up numerous shoots from their stumps, (called a stool if the tree is being coppiced,) which allows for repeated harvests on a set cycle.  When a tree like a maple is cut, the resulting shoots can be thinned, leaving a relatively small number of shoots.  These shoots will grow, resulting in a multi-trunk tree.  You can harvest these new trunks once they reach the size you need.  See pictures at https://www.growingwithnature.org/what-is-coppicing/   

phytomining (uncountable)  noun  (biotechnology)  The planting and harvesting of vegetation that selectively concentrates specific metals from the environment into their tissues, for the purpose of commercial exploitation of the extracted metal.  Synonym:  agromining  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/phytomining#English     

Notable Children's Books – 2023  Each year a committee of the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) identifies the best of the best in children's books.  "Notable" is defined as:  of note or notice, important, distinguished, outstanding.  As applied to children's books, notable should be thought to include books of especially commendable quality, books that exhibit venturesome creativity, and books of fiction, information, poetry and pictures for all age levels (birth through age 14) that reflect and encourage children's interests in exemplary ways.  According to ALSC policy, the current year's Newbery, Caldecott,  Belpré, Sibert, Geisel, and Batchelder Award and Honor books automatically are added to the Notable Children's Books list.  These categories loosely represent the following:  Younger Readers – Preschool-grade 2 (age 7), including easy-to-read books; Middle Readers – Grades 3-5, ages 8-10; Older Readers – Grades 6-8, ages 11-14; All Ages – Has appeal and interest for children in all of the above age ranges.  Find list of titles at https://www.ala.org/alsc/awardsgrants/notalists/ncb    

Feedback from Bryan Todd  Subject:  -  fractal  The Dragon Curve (video, 2 min.) is as pretty as any simple fractal patterns you’ll find.  AWADmail Issue 1115   

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg   angary or angaria  (ANG-guh-ree, ang-GAR-ee-uh)  noun:  The right of a warring nation to seize the property, for example, ships, of a neutral country, provided compensation is paid.  From French angarie (imposition), from Latin angaria (forced service), from Greek angareia (impressment for public service), from Persian hamkara (herald).  Earliest documented use:  1880.  Everybody, sooner or later, sits down to a banquet of consequences. - Robert Louis Stevenson, novelist, essayist, and poet (13 Nov 1850-1894)    

What does it mean to one day sit down to a banquet of consequences?  Well, it is a more elegant version of the well-known saying ‘what goes around comes around’ or the biblical version that ‘you reap what you sow’.  It seems many wise folk have tried to convince us that when we let ourselves off the hook of accountability, the ultimate repercussions may not fit into the self-created and convenient notion that it doesn’t really matter, it doesn’t really count, no-one is looking, it’s not that important, so who cares?   https://challengingcoaching.co.uk/who-wants-to-be-the-accountability-killjoy/    

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2744  November 13, 2023 

SHAGGY DOG STORIES 

·      There was a small African tribe that had a terrible problem.  Every morning a neighboring herd of wildebeasts would stampede through the village, knocking down cooking pots, smashing water jugs and trampling the vegetable gardens.  The chief had tried everything, with no success.  He built fences, but the gnus ran right through them.  Finally, one morning the chief woke up and didn't hear the thunder of hooves.  He went out, and the gnu herd was nowhere to be seen.  They were gone at last!   So, the chief called all the people of the tribe together, and announced, "NO GNUS IS GOOD NEWS!"    

·       A German farmer with relatives in the US sent them a package consisting of some pork sausages made from his old pig.  When they complained that the package had not yet arrived, he wrote:  "Cheer up.  The wurst is yet to come." 

·       This psychic is jailed for false prophecies, but because he is only 4'7" tall and extremely slender, he is able to slip under the bars and make his escape.  Newspaper headline the next day?  "SMALL MEDIUM AT LARGE"  

·        It was once the custom for Watusi chiefs to be inaugurated on wooden thrones.  After the inauguration, the thrones were discarded.  However, a certain tribesman, who had been elected chief several times, kept all his old thrones in the top part of his grass hut.  One year, the weight of the thrones caused the hut to collapse, killing him.  The moral being:  He who lives in grass houses shouldn't stow thrones.   http://www.macscouter.com/stories/ShaggyShorts.asp

San Francisco contractor, David Hewes, friend of Central Pacific President Leland Stanford, was disappointed to discover no one had prepared a commemorative item for the completion of the transcontinental railroad, which was scheduled to be finished on May 8, 1869.  Unable to persuade anyone to finance the casting of a solid gold or silver section of rail, Hewes decided upon a more practical token.  Using $400 of his own gold, he had the William T. Garatt Foundry of San Francisco cast a golden spike. The spike was 5 5/8 inches long, weighed 14.03 ounces and was made of 17.6 carat gold.  Only about $350 worth of gold, however, was used to make the actual spike.  After casting, the golden spike was engraved on all four sides and the top.  Two sides bore the names of railroad officers and directors.  Another side was engraved, “The Pacific Railroad ground broken Jan 8th 1863 and completed May 8th 1869.”  The fourth side was engraved, “May God continue the unity of our Country as this Railroad unites the two great Oceans of the world.  Presented David Hewes San Francisco.”  The top of the spike was simply engraved, “The Last Spike.”  https://www.nps.gov/gosp/learn/historyculture/four-special-spikes.htm  Thank you, Muse reader!    

William Caslon I (1692/93–1766), also known as William Caslon the Elder, was an English typefounder.  The distinction and legibility of his type secured him the patronage of the leading printers of the day in England and on the continent.  His typefaces transformed English type design and first established an English national typographic style.  In 1716, he started business in London as an engraver of gun locks and barrels and as a bookbinder's tool cutter.  Having contact with printers, he was induced to fit up a type foundry, largely through the encouragement of William Bowyer.  Caslon's typefaces were inspired by the Dutch Baroque types, the most commonly used types in England before Caslon's faces.  Caslon typefaces were immediately popular and used for many important printed works, including the first printed version of the United States Declaration of Independence.  Caslon's types became so popular that the expression about typeface choice, "when in doubt, use Caslon," came about.  The Caslon types fell out of favour in the century after his death, but were revived in the 1840s.  Several revivals of the Caslon types are widely used today.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Caslon   SIMILAR FONTS:  Baskerville and Ehrhardt  https://www.typewolf.com/caslon  

Cited as the first original typeface of English origin, Caslon is a serif typeface types, characterized by short ascenders and descenders, bracketed serifs, moderately high contrast, robust texture, and moderate modulation of stroke.  Type historians Stanley Morison and Alfred F. Johnson, a scientist who worked at the British Museum, point out the close similarity of Caslon's design to the Dutch Fell types cut by Voskens and other type cut by the Dutchman Van Dyck.  One of the earliest mentions of Caslon as a punch-cutter and typefounder appears in John Nicols, Biographical and Literary Anecdotes of William Bowyer 1782, where he writes:  "he (Caslon) cut the beautiful fount of English."  Nicols describes this character as far superior over contemporary Dutch founts used in English books at this period.  With the rise of hot metal typesetting in the late 19th century, existing foundry metal typefaces such as Caslon's had to be adapted to specific typesetting technology.  This was true again with phototypesetting in the 60's and 70's, and then again with digital typesetting from the mid-80's to today.  As a result, there are many typefaces called "Caslon" which reproduce the original designs with varying degrees of faithfulness.  https://www.caseyprinting.com/blog/2013/typography/caslon-when-in-doubt-use-caslon   

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg  primary  (PRY-mer-ee, -muh-ree) adjective:  First; main; most important; basic.  noun:  Something that is fundamental or first in sequence, rank, or importance.  verb tr.:  To field a candidate against an incumbent of one’s own party.  From Latin primus (first).  Earliest documented use:  1425; for verb:  1916.  fractal  (FRAK-tuhl)  noun:  Something, such as a shape, curve, pattern, etc., where smaller parts have the same characteristics.  adjective:  Having the form or qualities of a fractal.  Coined by the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot (1924-2010), from Latin fractus (broken), from frangere (to break).  Earliest documented use:  1975.  

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2743  November 10, 2023  

"Cup of joe" was first recorded as entering the English language in 1930, a full 16 years after the grumblings of disgruntled sailing men supposedly put the term into common parlance.  There are two stronger theories for how "coffee" came to be "joe," but neither is verifiable.  The first asserts that "joe" is a corruption of one of two other slang words for coffee:  java and jamoke, the latter itself a compression of java and mocha.  Under that theory, a "cup of jamoke" could easily have slip-slid its way into being a "cup of joe."  People do love to shorten their slang terms, after all.  The second postulates that since "joe" is argot for a "fellow, guy, chap" (the earliest sighting of its being used that way dates to 1846), that a "cup of joe" thus means the common man's drink.  The lexicon of English is replete with instances of "joe" being used to denote a typical guy who is wholly interchangeable with any other guy in the same line of work or area of special interest:  "G.I. Joe," "Holy Joe" (a chaplain or especially sanctimonious person), "Joe College," "Joe Blow," and of course "the average joe."  "Cup of joe" therefore would be the stuff that fuels the common man.  Of the two best theories, jamoke morphing into joe is the strongest contender thanks to this find by linguist Michael Quinion:  "It is significant that an early example appears in 1931 in the Reserve Officer's Manual by a man named Erdman:  'Jamoke, Java, Joe.  Coffee.  Derived from the words Java and Mocha, where originally the best coffee came from.'"  Barbara Mikkelson   https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cup-of-joe/   

The word “skyscraper” originally was a nautical term referring to a small triangular sail set above the skysail on a sailing ship.  The term was first applied to buildings in the late 19th century as a result of public amazement at the tall buildings being built in Chicago and New York City.  The first skyscraper was for many years thought to be the Home Insurance Building built in Chicago in 1885. More recent arguments point to New York’s seven floor Equitable Life Assurance Building built in 1870 and it was arguably the first office building built using a kind of skeletal frame but it depends on what factors are chosen and even the scholars making the argument find it academic.  The structural definition of the word skyscraper was refined later by architectural historians, based on engineering developments of the 1880s that had enabled construction of tall multi-storey buildings.  This definition was based on the steel skeleton—-as opposed to constructions of load-bearing masonry, which passed their practical limit in 1891 with Chicago’s Monadnock Building.  The steel frame developed in stages of increasing self-sufficiency, with several buildings in Chicago and New York advancing the technology that allowed the steel frame to carry a building on its own.  Today, however, many of the tallest skyscrapers are built almost entirely with reinforced concrete.  A loose convention in the United States and Europe now draws the lower limit of a skyscraper at 150 meters (~500 ft).  A skyscraper taller than 300 meters (~1000 ft) may be referred to as supertall.  Shorter buildings are still sometimes referred to as skyscrapers if they appear to dominate their surroundings.  https://vincentloy.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/origin-of-the-word-skyscraper/ 

HAVE YOU SEEN ME?  MISSING WORKS OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE by Zachary Turpin  October 2023

Knowing what is missing is an important first step.  Indeed, sometimes simply bringing a problem to light can speed its solution.  

·         One of the more recent examples of this is the rediscovery of Kate Chopin’s late, lost short story, “Her First Party,” in 2013.  The story was known to have existed, but for decades scholars despaired of knowing where to look.  Success finally came when researchers Bonnie James Shaker and Angela Pettitt combed through an online periodicals database “outside the logical, searchable framework of Chopin’s lifespan” 

·        Decades before he would become a poetic iconoclast, a young Walt Whitman, age twelve, found a job as an editor’s apprentice at the Long-Island Patriot, his father’s Democratic newspaper of choice.  During the year or so he worked for the paper (1831-32), he published in the Patriot what he would later call “a few sentimental bits,” none of which have been identified so far.

·        Louisa May Alcott’s missing works of 1855-59  In her “Notes and Memoranda” ledger (now housed at Harvard’s Houghton Library, and published as part of her Journals), Louisa May Alcott kept track of roughly thirty years’ worth of personal earnings and major family events. 

·       The most recent rediscoveries of Emily Dickinson verses published in the poet’s lifetime were in 1982 and 1984, both by scholar Karen Dandurand.  Her list of the publications of Dickinson’s poems in her lifetime (to which has only been added her 1850 “Magnum bonum harum scarum” Valentine Eve letter) is the still-comprehensive standard.  So far as is known, Dickinson never asked for her poetry to be published, which may explain why these publications are invariably unsigned and must be correlated to a known manuscript.  Nearly all were printed between 1850 and 1870, with most appearing in the nine-year window of 1858-66.

·       A full accounting of Mark Twain’s published works is ongoing, particularly of those writings that appeared in small newspapers early in his career.  As Merle Johnson, Twain’s first serious bibliographer, explained in 1910, the author’s “literary production covered a period of practically five decades.  His range of activities included newspaper, magazine, book, and speech.  He lived in a dozen places, from Honolulu to Vienna. Europe, Canada, and the United States vied for the first publication of his work.  These things, together with the immense volume of publication, render it practically impossible to make these lists technically complete.” 

·        Harriet Prescott Spofford’s tale “In a Cellar,” which first appeared anonymously in the Atlantic Monthly in 1859, was the beginning of her popularity as a writer of mysteries and Gothic romances.  But it was not the beginning of her writing career; she’d spent much of the 1850s submitting stories to Boston newspapers, usually receiving tiny sums for them.  While Spofford’s novels are now well known, none of her early anonymous works have yet been found.  Read extensive article and see pictures at https://commonplace.online/article/have-you-seen-me/ 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2742  November 8, 2023