July 9, 2008  Just moments after David Wroblewski sat down on a shaded bench in the oval-shaped dog run at 72nd Street in Riverside Park, a goldendoodle (half golden retriever, half poodle) jumped up and started licking his face.  It was exactly what you might expect would happen to the author of “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle,”  “Edgar Sawtelle” is his first book.  And while he said the formal outline for the story came to him in all of five minutes, it took more than 10 years to complete (really more like 15, he later confessed, saying he didn’t want aspiring writers just starting out to hear that and be discouraged).  The tale is structured along the lines of “Hamlet,” with elements of Rudyard Kipling and Stephen King mixed in with the Shakespeare.  More than anything, it is his intimate knowledge of dogs and his humanized versions of them that most distinguish Mr. Wroblewski’s work.  The 1934 book “Working Dogs,” about a project called Fortunate Fields to breed German shepherds for certain characteristics (like guiding the blind), was one of Mr. Wroblewski’s primary sources; he invents a correspondence between Edgar’s grandfather and an imagined director of the project that traces the evolution of these breeding theories.  Other details in the book are based on Mr. Wroblewski’s own experience.  His family ran a dog kennel in Pittsville, in central Wisconsin, when he was a boy.  It was a tough business, and after about five years, they had to give it up.  “I knew I wanted to write about dogs and the way that I knew them, not as fictional devices,” he said.  “Real dogs.”  The idea that Edgar would be mute was also a result of personal experience.  Mr. Wroblewski had to have minor surgery on his tongue in the early 1990s, which made it difficult to speak.  “I just stopped talking” for a while, he said. “I became very observant.”  He thought it would be interesting to have a character who couldn’t talk. Edgar, he said, “is hyper-observant in the way that Hamlet is hyper-verbal.”  Patricia Cohen   http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/09/books/09dogs.html?pagewanted=all  See also The Book That Made Me A Reader David Wroblewski on Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book at http://centerforfiction.org/for-readers/the-book-that-made-me-a-reader-archives/david-wroblewski-on-the-book-that-made-him-a-reader/

Canine Classics picked by David Wroblewski:  So Long, See You Tomorrow, The Jungle Book, The Call of the Wild, Dog Man, Adam's Task, Winterdance:  The Fine Madness of Running the Iditarod, Animals in Translation, If Dogs Could Talk

As self-published books gain legitimacy, libraries develop ways to include local work in collections.  “We used to have an event in Glen Ellyn called BookFest involving local merchants and the library,” says Susan DeRonne, adult department director at Glen Ellyn (Illinois) Public Library (GEPL).  “[It] had a tent where self-published authors could sell their works, and it became more and more popular in its last years.”  GEPL is one of a growing number of libraries that are acquiring self-published books and making them available to patrons, either in dedicated collections or as part of their regular holdings.  These libraries recognize that many self-published works offer unique value and a way to provide service tailored to their community.  The library is currently looking at products that will allow it to offer self-published ebooks, and DeRonne says that the library has budgeted to include ebooks in the collection next year.  “We expect the collection to continue to grow, particularly when we add the ebook portion, and we’re looking forward to that,” she says.  The collections also offer another way for the library to connect to local writers’ communities. DeRonne says that GEPL doesn’t have a dedicated writers’ group, but it does belong to a group of Illinois libraries that sponsors a series of “Inside Writing and Publishing” seminars.  “That’s where we got a big chunk of our list of people who might want to submit their books,” she says.  The library also hosts programming related to National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)—the annual event in which participants attempt to draft a novel within the month of November—and it will promote the Emerging Author Collection then as well.  Multnomah (Portland, Oregon) Central Library has established a series of programming related to self-publishing taking place through the end of the year to help local writers finish and publish their books, including a talk by Smashwords CEO Mark Coker.  Toronto Public Library (TPL) doesn’t have a special collection for self-published books, but the library has always considered self-published books for its regular collection and the number of self-published titles that authors ask the library to consider has grown significantly in recent years.  TPL now receives about 300 requests per year from authors to consider self-published books, although it ultimately adds far fewer than half of those to its collection as either hard copies or ebooks in OverDrive.   Greg Landgraf  http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2015/10/30/solving-the-self-published-puzzle/

“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”  “The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words.”   Hippocrates II of Cos (c. 460 BC – c. 370 BC), a Greek physician  https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/248774.Hippocrates?page=1  Find seven physicians named Hippocrates at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocrates_(physicians)

The Fee Library  Are subscription libraries seeing a rebirth?  If Seattle is any indicator, it appears so by Joseph Janes   A new library, the brainchild of David Brewster, is opening January 2016.  This isn’t a new branch of Seattle Public Library (SPL); it’s a new subscription library, rather grandly named Folio: The Seattle Athenaeum.   Read about it at   http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2015/10/30/fee-library-subscription-libraries/

The woman who was the epitomé of the "vamp" persona in cinema history, Theda Bara, was born Theodosia Goodman in Cincinnati, Ohio on July 29th, 1890.  She was given her new name by Hollywood, and billed as the daughter of an Eastern potentate though her father was actually a tailor.  Theda had a conventional upbringing and schooling.  She went to New York to do a play after graduating from high school, and then she traveled to Hollywood to pursue a screen career.  Theda Bara's fabricated screen name was an anagram for "Arab death."  She was called a "vamp" because of her absurd, vampirish personality, on and off screen.  In her famous film "A Fool There Was" (1916), Theda supposedly hissed to the character who played her sweetheart:  "Kiss me, you fool!" (the line actually was "Kiss me, my fool!"--which somehow is funnier).  For publicity purposes Theda was often photographed with skulls and snakes, wearing beaded, fringed clothing which looks ridiculous today, but which obviously served as titillating shock value back in the 1910's.  Most of Theda's vamp films were made during a mere four year period.  When her contract was dropped by Fox, and her film career was essentially over, Theda tried to make it on Broadway for several years, but was not successful.  The public's tastes had changed.  Vamps were out, and the innocent virgin heroines played by Mary Pickford and Marguerite Clark were in.  In 1925 Theda returned to Hollywood to try and resurrect her career, but ended up playing caricatures of her former screen personality.  She retired completely from films in 1927.  http://www.goldensilents.com/stars/thedabara.html  See also https://silentology.wordpress.com/theda-bara/

See Unshelved comic strip including recommendations for books  and notices of talks and appearances by Ambaum & Barnes at  http://www.unshelved.com/   "Unshelved" is a registered trademark of Overdue Media LLC.

Global law firm Dentons, Singapore's Rodyk and Australian firm Gadens have agreed to come together to create the dominant global law firm in the Pacific Rim.  Expected to launch in 2016, the firm will have more than 7,300 lawyers, more than 9,000 timekeepers and nearly 13,000 people, working from more than 130 locations.  http://www.dentonscombination.com/pdf/pacific_rims_leading_global_law_firm.pdf

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1382  November 23, 2015  On this date in 1644,  John Milton published Areopagitica, a pamphlet decrying censorship.  On this date in 1924, Edwin Hubble's discovery that the Andromeda nebula is actually another island universe far outside of our own was first published in The New York Times.