Belle da Costa Greene (1879–1950) was one of the most prominent librarians in American history.  She ran the Morgan Library for forty-three years—initially as the private librarian of J. Pierpont Morgan and then his son, Jack, and later as the inaugural director of the Pierpont Morgan Library (now the Morgan Library & Museum).  Not only did Greene build one of the most important collections of rare books and manuscripts in the United States, but she also transformed an exclusive private collection into a major public resource, originating the robust program of exhibitions, lectures, publications, and research services that continues today.  The daughter of Genevieve Ida Fleet Greener (1849–1941) and Richard T. Greener (1844–1922), Belle Greene (named Belle Marion Greener at birth) grew up in a predominantly African American community in Washington, DC.  Her father was the first Black graduate of Harvard College and a prominent educator, diplomat, and racial justice activist.  After Belle’s parents separated during her adolescence, Genevieve changed her surname and that of her children to Greene.  From the time Belle was a teenager, they described themselves as Americans of Portuguese descent and passed as White in a segregated and deeply racist society.  Belle Greene was employed at the Princeton University Library when Junius Spencer Morgan, a nephew of J. Pierpont Morgan and an ardent bibliophile, recommended her to his uncle, whose new library building was nearing completion.  In 1905, Greene began working as an assistant to Junius and ultimately became J. Pierpont Morgan’s private librarian, with her own assistant, Ada Thurston—managing, documenting, and building Morgan's collection of rare books and manuscripts, organizing public exhibitions at outside venues, and establishing relationships with dealers and scholars.  After Morgan’s death in 1913, Greene continued as private librarian to his son, J.P. Morgan Jr., who established the Pierpont Morgan Library as a public institution in 1924.  Greene was named its first director and served in that capacity until her retirement in 1948, two years before her death.  Greene’s legacy is powerful and far-reaching.  While the significant role she played as J. Pierpont Morgan’s librarian is often acknowledged, her tenure in that position lasted a mere seven years.  During her decades-long career as a library executive, she not only acquired countless significant collection items but also made immeasurable contributions to bibliography and scholarship, mentored colleagues at the Morgan and elsewhere, facilitated widespread collection access through object loans and ambitious photographic services, and promoted the work of distinguished women scholars and librarians.  https://www.themorgan.org/belle-greene

The Blue Flower is a 1995 novel by the British author Penelope Fitzgerald.  It is a fictional treatment of the early life of Friedrich von Hardenberg who, under the pseudonym Novalis, later became a practitioner of German Romanticism.  In 2012 The Observer named The Blue Flower one of "the ten best historical novels".  Fitzgerald first came upon the notion of blue flowers having literary significance in "The Fox", a short story by D. H. Lawrence.  She first became interested in Novalis in the early 1960s, after hearing a musical setting of his mystical Hymns to the Night.  Later she conducted research on Burne-Jones and his language of flowers, and discovered that his father-in-law, George MacDonald, was a Novalis enthusiast.  At the end of Fitzgerald's earlier novel The Bookshop a gentian, a blue flower that has faded into colourlessness, is mentioned as having been pressed into one of two books.  In another of her novels, The Beginning of Spring, Selwyn rhapsodizes about the "blue stream flowing gently over our heads", an unattributed quotation from Novalis.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Flower 

In medieval French, there was a set expression rifle et rafle.  These words are from the verbs rifler, to spoil or strip, and raffler, to carry off.  The phrase referred to the plundering of the bodies of the dead on the battlefield and the carrying off of the booty.  The French phrase moved into English in the forms rif and raf or riffe and raf, which meant at first every scrap, from which we may guess that medieval plunderers were extremely thorough.  It’s known by at least 1338 (it appears in Mannyng’s Chronicle of English of that date).  Later it shifted sense through a series of stages, first referring to one and all, or everybody, and then later taking on the idea of the common people, those of no special social standing.  The phrase was abbreviated to riff-raff and can be found in Gregory’s Chronicle of London of about 1470.  https://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-rif1.htm 

John Hubley (1914 –1977) was an American animation director, art director, producer and writer of traditional animation films known for both his formal experimentation and for his emotional realism which stemmed from his tendency to cast his own children as voice actors in his films.  Hubley was born in Marinette, Wisconsin to John Raymond Hubley (1880–1959) and Verena K. Hubley (1891–1978), a painter.  He moved to Los Angeles, California, to study painting at the Art Center School for three years.  In 1935, he gained a job as a background and layout artist at Disney, where he worked on such classic films as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Dumbo, and Bambi, as well as "The Rite of Spring" segment from Fantasia.  On February 25, 1939, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright visited the studio with a copy of the Russian animated movie The Tale of the Czar Durandai (1934), directed by Ivan Ivanov-Vano, which he showed to the artists, among them Hubley.  Wright thought that the different style and design, that was very different from the typical Disney animation, would inspire and give the animators new ideas.  Hubley liked what he saw and was influenced by it.  He was the creator of the Mr. Magoo cartoon character, based on an uncle, and directed the first Magoo cartoon with Jim Backus voicing Magoo.  He moved his studio to New York in 1955, where he switched production over to independent short films.  Hubley married Faith Elliott (1924–2001) the same year as the studio's move.  They began collaborating on films in 1956 with Adventures of an *, commissioned by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.  In 1962, the Hubleys completed The Hole, which won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film that year.  John and Faith continued to collaborate on all of their films through 1977, when John died at age 62 during heart surgery.  Their final production was A Doonesbury Special (with creator Garry Trudeau), which was a co-winner of the Short Film Palme d'Or jury award the year after his death.  Hubley was originally the director of Watership Down, until disagreements with producer Martin Rosen caused the latter to take over.  Some of his work, including the opening sequence, remain in the final version.  The voices of his two other children with Faith Hubley, Mark and Ray Hubley, were used for the Oscar-winning Moonbird.  His widow and their four children carried on his work in the renamed Hubley Studios.  His daughter Georgia Hubley plays drums and sings for the rock band Yo La Tengo and his daughter Emily Hubley is a filmmaker and animator.  The Academy Film Archive has preserved a number of John Hubley's films, including A Smattering of Spots, A Doonesbury Special, and Of Men and Demons.  The Hole was inducted into the National Film Registry in 2013.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hubley 

Lilliput and Blefuscu are two fictional island nations that appear in the first part of the 1726 novel Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift.  The two islands are neighbours in the South Indian Ocean, separated by a channel 800 yards (730 m) wide.  Both are inhabited by tiny people who are about one-twelfth the height of ordinary human beings.    The novel further describes an intra-Lilliputian quarrel over the practice of breaking eggs.  Traditionally, Lilliputians broke boiled eggs on the larger end; a few generations ago, an Emperor of Lilliput, the Present Emperor's great-grandfather, had decreed that all eggs be broken on the smaller end after his son cut himself breaking the egg on the larger end.  The differences between Big-Endians (those who broke their eggs at the larger end) and Little-Endians had given rise to "six rebellions . . . wherein one Emperor lost his life, and another his crown".  The Lilliputian religion says an egg should be broken on the convenient end, which is now interpreted by the Lilliputians as the smaller end.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilliput_and_Blefuscu 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2544  July 27. 2022