Weekly Reader, a staple in American classrooms for a century, is shutting down.  Chief rival Scholastic, which bought the school newspaper earlier this year, is folding it into Scholastic News and axing all but five of Weekly Reader’s 60 employees in White Plains, NY.  Like all papers, Weekly Reader was struggling with changes roiling the print world and was under pressure to develop digital editions.  Along with school budget cutbacks, those challenges were compounded by ownership turmoil that left the paper with few resources to invest, sources said.   Weekly Reader and its predecessor My Weekly Reader, which grew out of Current Events magazine in 1902, was read by two-thirds of all kids in grammar school at its peak and hit a high of 13 millions subscribers across its editions for pre-school through 12th grade.  Scholastic, the publisher behind the Harry Potter franchise, agreed to buy the paper from Reader’s Digest Association for between $10 million and $20 million in February.  Sources speculated Scholastic may have bought Weekly Reader to get its hands on the subscriber list. http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/painful_lesson_UQv7N2JdO2cVnAn1qQDnDN

Kim Krug took a big step in June 2009:  she opened the Monkey See, Monkey Do children's bookstore in Clarence, New York with her mother, Kathleen Skoog, as her business partner.  Starting a small business at any time can be challenging, but Krug did so amid an economic downturn, and in an industry under pressure from online booksellers and e-books.  She has positioned her business at 9060 Main St. as more than a bookstore, with a variety of summer camps and activities built around books.  The store also carries titles for young adults and adults.  Krug said the store has a following among fans of independent bookstores, and it recently received a national honor, the Women's National Book Association Pannell Award, for bringing books and young people together. 

Read an interview with Kim Krug at:  http://www.buffalonews.com/business/article959486.ece

The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center was founded in 1864 as the Vassar College Art Gallery. Vassar was the first college or university in the country to include an art museum as part of its original plan.  The current 36,000 square foot facility was designed by Cesar Pelli and named in honor of the new building’s primary donor Frances Lehman Loeb, a member of the Class of 1928.  The Lehman Loeb Art Center’s collections chart the history of art from antiquity to the present and comprise over 18,000 works, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, textiles, and glass and ceramic wares.  Notable holdings include the Warburg Collection of Old Master prints, an important group of Hudson River School paintings given by Matthew Vassar at the college’s inception, and a wide range of works by major European and American twentieth century painters.  Opened to the public in November 1993, the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center has been called "a symphony of architecture" by the New York Times.  Link to the collection at:  http://fllac.vassar.edu/about/index.html

Location:  124 Raymond Ave Box  Poughkeepsie, NY 12604

Information Line  (845) 437-5632

For five weeks each summer Rare Book School brings some 300 librarians, conservators, scholars, dealers, collectors and random book-mad civilians together for weeklong intensive courses in an atmosphere that combines the intensity of the seminar room, the nerdiness of a “Star Trek” convention and the camaraderie of a summer camp where people come back year after year.  Bringing an understanding of the materiality of the book back into literary studies is something that Michael Suarez, an Oxford-trained specialist in 18th-century British literature and a Jesuit priest who took over as the school’s director in 2009, speaks of with an almost missionary zeal.  “A book is a coalescence of human intentions,” he said in a phrase often repeated around the school.  “We think we know how to read it because we can read the language.  But there’s a lot more to reading than just the language in the book.”  The atmosphere at Rare Book School, which was founded at Columbia University in 1983 by the scholar Terry Belanger and transplanted to Charlottesville in 1992, is casual and egalitarian, despite the presence on the faculty of some of the world’s leading experts in the history of the book.  Jennifer Schuessler  Read much more at:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/24/books/rare-book-school-at-the-university-of-virginia.html?_r=2&ref=books

The Google Ngram Viewer is a phrase-usage graphing tool which charts the yearly count of selected n-grams (letter combinations),  words, or phrases, as found in over 5.2 million books digitized by Google Inc (up to 2008).  The words or phrases (or ngrams) are matched by case-sensitive spelling, comparing exact uppercase letters, and plotted on the graph if found in 40 or more books.  The Ngram tool was released in mid-December 2010.  The word-search database was created by Google Labs, based originally on 5.2 million books, published between 1500 and 2008, containing 500 billion words  in American English, British English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, or Chinese.  Italian words are counted by their use in other languages.  A user of the Ngram tool has the option to select among the source languages for the word-search operations.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Ngram_Viewer 

Ngram Viewer explanation:  http://books.google.com/ngrams/info

See a Google Ngram at:  http://books.google.com/ngrams/

The Twenty-seventh Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads:  No law, varying the compensation for the services of Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.  The long history of the Twenty-seventh Amendment is curious and unprecedented.  The amendment was first drafted by James Madison in 1789 and proposed by the First Congress in 1789 as part of the original Bill of Rights.  The proposed amendment did not fare well, as only six states ratified it during the period in which the first ten amendments were ratified by the requisite three-fourths of the states.  The amendment was largely neglected for the next two centuries; Ohio was the only state to approve the amendment in that period, ratifying it in 1873.  In 1982 Gregory Watson, a twenty-year-old student at the University of Texas, wrote a term paper arguing for ratification of the amendment.  Watson received a 'C' grade for the paper and then embarked on a one-man campaign for the amendment's ratification. From his home in Austin, Texas, Watson wrote letters to state legislators across the country on an electric typewriter.  During the 1980s, as state legislatures passed pay raises, public debate over the raises reached a fever pitch and state legislatures began to pass the measure, mostly as a symbolic gesture to appease voters.  Few observers believed that the amendment would ever be ratified by the required thirty-eight states, but the tally of ratifying states began to mount.  On May 7, 1992, Michigan became the thirty-eighth state to ratify the amendment, causing it to become part of the U.S. Constitution.  Find court cases cited and suggested further readings at:  http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/27th+Amendment

Find the U.S. Constitution, supreme law of the land, with its seven articles and 27 amendments at:  http://www.findlaw.com/casecode/constitution/   

Punctuation Nerds Stopped by Obama Slogan, 'Forward.' by Carol E. Lee  in the July 31 edition of The Wall Street Journal reminded me that punctuation can be added or subtracted.  An example of addition was adding an exclamation point to Hamilton, Ohio in 1986.  The idea came from a Cincinnati public relations firm, Brewer, Jones & Feldman, hired by the Council and the Chamber of Commerce to improve the Hamilton! image.  ''It's an attention getter!'' exclaimed Richard Parks, the Chamber of Commerce president.  ''We've found it to be a catchy symbol, something we can build on as part of our overall public relations campaign!''   http://www.nytimes.com/1986/05/16/us/hamilton-ohio-acts-to-become-hamilton.html  While used extensively in the city's documents, letterheads, business cards and on local signage, "Hamilton!" was not successful in getting Rand McNally to use the new moniker on state maps.  The city's website does not use the exclamation point.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton,_Ohio  The Wall Street Journal uses a period after its title in both the print and online editions.  I think that could be easily subtracted for a cleaner look.  Also, the Forward slogan of Obama doesn't have to have a period, but it really doesn't matter one way or the other.   

The first social media Olympics have become a minefield for the Olympic movement—and especially for Twitter Inc., which has trumpeted its tight connection to the London Games.  

Heading into the global sporting event, the International Olympic Committee touted its social-media capabilities and struck partnerships with Twitter, Facebook Inc., FB -6.63% and Google Inc.'s GOOG +0.11% YouTube, among others.  Twitter, meanwhile, also played up its partnership with Comcast Corp.'s CMCSA +1.04% NBCUniversal, which is broadcasting the Games.  At a London news conference July 31, IOC spokesman Mark Adams said the organization didn't regret encouraging the use of social media during the Games—and probably couldn't control social media if it tried.  Read about ranting, marketing and suspensions at:   http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444405804577561211511205968.html