Alice Elizabeth Kober (1906–1950) was an American classicist best known for her work on the decipherment of Linear B.  Educated at Hunter College and Columbia University, Kober taught classics at Brooklyn College from 1930 until her death. In the 1940s, she published three major papers on the script, demonstrating evidence of inflection; her discovery allowed for the deduction of phonetic relationships between different signs without assigning them phonetic values, and would be a key step in the eventual decipherment of the script.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Kober   

Linear B was one of the most tantalizing puzzles of any era, and for half a century, some of the world’s foremost scholars tried coax the tablets to yield up their secrets.  Then, in 1952, the script was deciphered seemingly in a single stroke—not by a scholar but by Michael Ventris, an impassioned amateur whose obsession with the tablets had begun in childhood.  The decipherment brought him worldwide acclaim.  But it also cost him his architectural career, his ties to his family, and, quite possibly, his life.  That is the story of the decipherment as it has been known so far.  But a major actor in the drama has long been missing:  Alice Kober, a classicist at Brooklyn College.  Though largely forgotten today, Kober came within a hair’s breadth of deciphering Linear B before her own untimely death in 1950.  Yet, as The Riddle of the Labyrinth reveals, it was she who built the foundation on which Ventris’s decipherment stood, an achievement that until now has been all but lost to history.  Drawing on a newly opened archive of Kober’s papers, The Riddle of the Labyrinth restores this unsung heroine to her rightful place at last.  http://margalitfox.com/books/the-riddle-of-the-labyrinth   

Linear A is a writing system that was used by the Minoans of Crete from 1800 to 1450 BC to write the hypothesized Minoan language or languages.  Linear A was the primary script used in palace and religious writings of the Minoan civilization. It was succeeded by Linear B, which was used by the Mycenaeans to write an early form of Greek.  It was discovered by archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans in 1900. No texts in Linear A have yet been deciphered.  The term linear refers to the fact that the script was written using a stylus to cut lines into a tablet of clay, as opposed to cuneiform, which was written by using a stylus to press wedges into the clay.  Linear A belongs to a group of scripts that evolved independently of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian systems.  During the second millennium BC, there were four major branches:  Linear A, Linear B, Cypro-Minoan, and Cretan hieroglyphic.  In the 1950s, Linear B was deciphered as Mycenaean Greek. Linear B shares many symbols with Linear A, and they may notate similar syllabic values, but neither those nor any other proposed readings lead to a language that scholars can read.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A    

The Riddle of the Labyrinth was named to The New York Times Editor's Choice list in June 2013, and was named one of the Times 100 Notable Books of 2013.  It was awarded the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing in 2014.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Riddle_of_the_Labyrinth 

"Every language glimmers with sparks of earlier ones . . . Though tiny, the sparks can illuminate a history of invasion, conquest, trade, and the wholesale movement of populations."  "A writing system is a woven fabric, an interlaced network of sounds and symbols."  The Riddle of the Labyrinth:  the Quest to Crack an Ancient Code by Margalit Fox   

Tom Gauld (born 1976) is a Scottish cartoonist and illustrator.  His style reflects his self-professed fondness of "deadpan comedy, flat dialogue, things happening offstage and impressive characters".  Others note that his work "combines pathos with the farcical" and exhibits "a casual reduction of visual keys into a more rudimentary drawing style".  Gauld is best known for his comic books Goliath and Mooncop as well as his collections of one-page cartoons.  He has also authored a number of smaller-scale books such as Guardians of the Kingdom, Robots, Monsters etc., Hunter and Painter and his cartoon Move to the City, which ran weekly in London's Time Out in 2001–2002.  Gauld studied illustration at Edinburgh College of Art, where he first started to draw comics "seriously", and the Royal College of Art.  At the Royal College of Art, he worked with friend Simone Lia.  Together they self-published the comics First and Second under their Cabanon Press, which they started in 2001.  (The two volumes were subsequently published together by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2003, as Both.)  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Gauld 

Revenge of the Librarians:  Book Review   Tom Gauld returns with his wittiest and most trenchant collection of literary cartoons to date.  Some particularly favored targets include the pretentious procrastinating novelist, the commercial mercenary of the dispassionate editor, the willful obscurantism of the vainglorious poet.  Quake in the presence of the stack of bedside books as it grows taller!  Gnash your teeth at the ever-moving deadline that the writer never meets!  Quail before the critic’s incisive dissection of the manuscript!  And most important, seethe with envy at the paragon of creative productivity!  See graphics of six other Tom Gauld’s rantings at https://drawnandquarterly.com/books/revenge-of-the-librarians/  Thank you, Muse reader! 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2768  January 10, 2024