The Suffield Observer (https://thesuffieldobserver.com/category/library/directors-corner/page/7/)
This bear is Paddington, whose story started on Christmas Eve in 1956, at Selfridges in London. Michael Bond, searching for a present, pitied a forlorn toy bear sitting alone on a shelf and took it home. He wrote more than 70 stories about his much-loved bear. Today, over 30 million Paddington books have sold worldwide. The bear is so famous that when the Chunnel opened, a Paddington bear was the first item to enter France.
Politics and food go hand-in-hand. Do you remember Clinton’s fast food hamburgers, Bush’s distaste for broccoli, and cookie recipes from candidates’ wives?
Some libraries have shelves of mysteries, and some are mysteriously haunted. In Connecticut, the most haunted library is in Deep River.
Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian” and other unpalatably racist comments. For this, the American Library Association dropped her name from their children’s award, which was begun in 1954. Theodor Geisel, known as Dr. Seuss, depicted a Chinese man in a derogatory stereotypical fashion in, I Heard It on Mulberry Street. For this, the Springfield Museum removed a mural with the image from its wall. There are countless authors who have written and said offensive things.
Despite Mr. Trump’s recent meeting with Kim Jong-un, the threat of nuclear war lingers in our minds, as it did during the Cold War.
Recently, I was in Dublin, Ireland with my husband. We walked the same streets that Maeve Binchy, Roddy Doyle and James Joyce walked. One rainy day, we posed for a group photo in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where Dean Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver’s Travels, presided. We visited the quirky Little Museum of Dublin where author John Banville (also known as Benjamin Black) promises to donate his brain.
Traditional modern short stories were published in the early 1800s in the United States. Shortly afterward, in 1821, The Saturday Evening Post appeared, one of the most widely circulated magazines. The great demand for short stories in the 1920s insured high prices paid to writers. F. Scott Fitzgerald sold short stories to magazines to pay off his many debts. He received the equivalent of $50,000 for each story placed in The Saturday Evening Post.
Dutch sailors ate so many dodos that the dodos became extinct. Will librarians also become extinct? Extinct, not by Dutch sailors, but by Google? It is true that some librarians should vanish. They are the ones who sit behind an imposing desk, serving as gatekeepers to the library, forcing everyone to adhere to strict rules of conduct.
The glittering library which resides at 50 North Main Street could easily have been written up in Alistair Black’s book, “Libraries of Light.”
Jane Austen is wildly popular. Her six novels are rarely out of print.