February 25, 2018  From Philip Jones, editor, the Bookseller   Hardbacks are still popular.  Hardback fiction brings in about £70m annually (roughly 20% of the printed fiction market), according to sales data from Nielsen BookScan.  Size also matters:  hardbacks are bigger than paperbacks, they take up more space in bookshops and are more visible--whether in window displays or on bookshop tables.  Hardbacks are also more profitable for publishers: they will often sell at twice the price of their paperback equivalent but do not cost twice as much to produce.  If a hardback becomes a bestseller, the publisher will often delay the paperback release even though that limits the book’s sales potential.  Last year sales of hardback fiction grew 11%.  When the ebook arrived 10 years ago, some pundits suggested format did not matter.  But they were wrong.  A beautiful hardback is a joy, something to cherish, shelve and pass on, and readers are prepared to pay for that just as some people still prefer the cinema over television.  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/25/book-clinic-why-do-publishers-still-issue-hardbacks

We’re a nation of immigrants.  So is our food.  Look at the vast array of produce in the supermarket. Where did all these fruits and vegetables originally come from?  And how did they get here?  According to author Daniel Stone, we have one man to thank for the diversity of this bounty:  David Fairchild.  More than a century ago, Fairchild traveled the world, in search of interesting (and delicious) crops that could be grown by American farmers.  Traveling to every continent but Antarctica, Fairchild brought back thousands of possibilities.  Among Fairchild’s greatest hits:  the avocado (from Chile), kale (from Croatia) and the Meyer lemon (from China).  Just those three have a huge impact on what we eat now.  The avocado alone “should qualify Fairchild for sainthood,” Stone quipped.  “Fairchild grew up in Kansas.  He called them ‘alligator pears.’  Few Americans had seen them before.  In Chile, he found what was the ancestor to the Hass avocado.  He shipped back a thousand of them, hoping some would survive.”  That’s just for starters, Stone added.  Fairchild brought back soybeans (from Indonesia), peaches and oranges (from China), pomegranates (from Malta), nectarines (from Afghanistan), papayas (from Ceylon), red seedless grapes (from Italy) and hops (from Bavaria).  He also was responsible for introducing dates, mangoes, pistachios and wasabi to the American table.  In all, Fairchild is credited with more than 20,000 plant introductions to the U.S.  Debbie Arrington  Find recipes at http://www.sacbee.com/food-drink/recipes/article203553609.html

Most Americans don’t recognize the name Frank N. Meyer, but many are familiar with the fruit that bears his name.  Long thought to be a simple lemon-orange hybrid, the Meyer lemon is now believed to be a cross between three of the original citrus species—citron, mandarin, and pummelo—based on a 2016 genetics study led by French scientist Franck Curk.  Born in the Netherlands in 1875 as Frans Nicolaas Meijer, Meyer was one of a half-dozen explorers scouring the globe for new and hardier things to grow under the direction of long-serving agriculture secretary James Wilson.  Their combined efforts yielded a lot of what we eat today, including avocados, figs, and mangoes.  But Meyer’s unique personality, combined with the tremendous difficulty of his assignment, made him the group’s media darling and arguably the favorite of his boss, David Fairchild, head of the USDA’s Office of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction.  It was his job to think about such things:  Meyer worked for the U.S. government as an “agricultural explorer,” traveling across Asia in search of better food, like some early-20th-century Anthony Bourdain.  The fancy lemon that bears his name is one of some 2,500 types of plants—including multiple varieties of peach, pear, plum, and persimmon, to mention only a few of the p’s—that Meyer picked up during his four long missions to the Far East, braving all kinds of harsh conditions and violence along the way.  Meyer did more than just pick up some soybeans (over 100 different varieties throughout his 13-year career); he was also an early advocate for soy as a food source for humans, not just livestock.  Chris Shott  https://www.tastecooking.com/a-man-a-plan-a-lemon-china/

As we begin planning for the renovation of the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library's main branch, we hope all members of the community will take part in the conversation and process by sharing their input and insight while attending the following community forums in the McMaster Center:

Forum 1:  Wednesday, May 2, 6 - 8 p.m.                 
Forum 2:  Wednesday, May 30, 6 - 8 p.m.                   
Forum 3:  Thursday, June 28, 6 - 8 p.m.                      
For information and updates throughout the planning and construction process, visit  

www.toledolibrary.org/construction/mainrenovation 

Salmon Mousse, or Absolute Power by Sadie Stein   I have been wrestling mightily lately. The temptation:  salmon mousse.  Like many Barbara Pym fans, I have long owned The Barbara Pym Cookbook, published in 1988 by the late author’s sister, Hilary, and Honor Wyatt.  And like many Barbara Pym fans, I have never dared cook from it.  By the jacket copy’s own admission, this is “an armchair cookbook,” a collection of quotations from Pym’s novels and corresponding recipes—they make for excellent reading, but they don’t excite one to run to the kitchen.  While minute meal descriptions are one of the great pleasures of the Pym oeuvre, many of the novels take place during the tyranny of postwar rationing.  However enthusiastic and sophisticated a cook she may have been—and by all accounts she certainly was—Barbara Pym’s recipes are not necessarily calculated to appeal to the twenty-first-century palate.  https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/08/17/salmon-mousse-or-absolute-power/  A treat for devotees of Pym, The Barbara Pym Cookbook offers a modest selection of recipes, adapted for the American kitchen, for foods mentioned in Pym's novels.  Others, such as ``a bowl of groats, fragrant as a cornfield and intriguingly surfaced with little pock marks,'' were Pym's favorites.  All are accompanied by prose morsels taken from the author's corpus.  Plain English food is served in abundance: steak and kidney pie, potted ham, sausage rolls.  https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-525-24706-7

Barbara Pym quotes  “Of course it's alright for librarians to smell of drink.”  “The burden of keeping three people in toilet paper seemed to me rather a heavy one.”  “Dulcie always found a public library a little upsetting, for one saw so many odd people there.”  “I think just a cup of tea...' There was something to be said for tea and a comfortable chat about crematoria.”  “If only one could clear out one's mind and heart as ruthlessly as one did one's wardrobe.” 

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/104015.Barbara_Pym

It was on April 18, in 1944 that the Jerome Robbins-Leonard Bernstein ballet “Fancy Free” was first danced by the Ballet Theater at the old Metropolitan Opera House in New York City.  Bernstein himself conducted, and alongside Robbins and set designer Oliver Smith, took some 20 curtain calls.  “The ballet is strictly wartime America, 1944,” wrote Bernstein, “The curtain rises on a street corner with a lamp post, a side-street bar, and New York skyscrapers making a dizzying backdrop.  Three sailors explode onto the stage.  They are on 24-hour shore leave in the city and on the prowl for girls.  The tale of how they meet first one, then a second girl, and how they fight over them, lose them, and in the end take off after still a third, is the story of the ballet.”  In a curious parallel to the stage action described by Bernstein, the ballet had been first pitched to composer Morton Gould, who said he was too busy, then to Vincent Persichetti, who in turn suggested Bernstein as a third, and perhaps better choice to produce a more hip, jazzy, and danceable score.  Bernstein made piano four-hand recordings as he completed each section of the music, and mailed these off to his partners.  His piano-bench partner for those work-in-progress recordings, by the way, was none other than Aaron Copland.  Composers Datebook

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1877  April 18, 2018  Word of the Day  tit for tat  noun  Equivalent retribution; an act of returning exactly what one gets; an eye for an eye.