From Asimov

- Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovel, commander-in-chief of the British fleet, was murdered in 1707 by an old woman as he struggled ashore after the loss of his ship on the rocks of the Scilly Islands. She killed him in the belief, current at the time among coastal inhabitants, that a body washed up was a derelict, thus giving her legal possession of the emerald ring on the admiral's finger.

- The American paleontologist Edward Cope (1840 - 97), whose large collection of fossil mammals is at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, was a Quaker and consequently refused to carry a gun during his U.S. Western expeditions, despite the very real danger from Indians. He once flabbergasted hostile Indians surrounding him by removing his false teeth and putting them back, over and over. The Indians let him go.

- Ben Franklin wanted the turkey, not the eagle, to be the U.S. national symbol. He considered the eagle "a bird of bad moral character" because it lives "by sharping and robbing."

- Cyprus was one of the world's important mining centers in ancient times, but for reasons still unknown the Romans halted operations there and sealed the tunnels. Many of the tunnels were found and reopened in this century, thanks to clever detective work by an American mining engineer, D.A. Gunther. In the New York Public Library, he had happened to find an ancient account of the mines. Years of ingenious search in Cyprus led him to the tunnels, which he found complete with usable support timbers and oil lamps. Cyprus became an important mining center again.

- A well-intentioned philanthropist, Eugene Scheifflin, instituted a project in the 1890s to bring to America all the birds mentioned by Shakespeare. Unfortunately, Hotspur talks about the starling in Henry IV, Part I; starlings were therefore let loose in New York's Central Park. The noisy nuisances now number in the millions from Alaska to Mexico, and they will be with us for as long as the plays of Shakespeare. Maybe longer.

- from Isaac Asimov's Book of Facts

The History of Fishes

Halley's traumas were not yet quite over. The Royal Society had promised to publish the work, but now pulled out, citing financial embarrassment. The year before the society had backed a costly flop called The History of Fishes, and they now suspected that the market for a book on mathematical principles would be less than clamorous. Halley, whose means were not great, paid for the book's publication out of his own pocket. Newton, as was his custom, contributed nothing. To make matters worse, Halley at this time had just accepted a position as the society's clerk, and he was informed that the society could no longer afford to provide him with a promised salary of £50 per annum. He was to be paid instead in copies of The History of Fishes.

- from A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, 49.

Always scribble, scribble!

"Dr. Donne's verse are like the peace of God; they pass all understanding."
- James I, on John Donne

"Reading him is like wading through glue."
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson, on Ben Jonson

"I remember, the Players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing, (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, would he had blotted a thousand."
- Ben Jonson, on William Shakespeare

"Another damned thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr Gibbon?"
- The Duke of Gloucester, to Edward Gibbon

"I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, with, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer is...marriageableness...Suicide is more respectable."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, on Jane Austen

"Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs from the Chicago stockyards."
- H.L. Mencken, on Henry James

"He spares no resource in telling of his dead inventions...Bare verbs he rarely tolerates. He splits infinitives and fills them with adverbial stuffing. His vast paragraphs sweat and struggle; they could not sweat and elbow and struggle more if God Himself was the processional meaning to which they sought to come."
- H.G. Wells, on Henry James

"Why don't you write books people can read?"
- Nora Joyce, to her husband, James Joyce

"Many accepted authors simply do not exist for me. Their names are engraved on empty graves, their books are dummies, they are complete nonentities insofar as my taste in reading is concerned. Brecht, Faulkner, Camus, many others, mean absolutely nothing to me, and I must fight a suspicion of conspiracy against my brain when I see blandly accepted as "great literature" by critics and fellow authors Lady Chatterley's copulations or the pretentious nonsense of Mr. Pound, that total fake."
- Vladimir Nabokov, on Ezra Pound and great literature

"I don't like him one bit. He was a poseur. He was married to this woman who was very pretty. My husband [H.G. Wells} and I were asked to see them, and my husband roamed around the flat and there were endless photographs of T.S. Eliot and bits of his poetry done in embroidery by pious American ladies, and only one picture of his wife, and that was when she was getting married. Henry pointed it out to me and said, "I don't think I like that man."'
- Rebecca West, on T.S. Eliot

"A Woollcott second edition."
- Franklin Pierce Adams, replying to Alexander Woollcott's boast, "What is so rare as a Woollcott first edition?"

"I don't like Salinger, not at all. That last thing isn't a novel anyway, whatever it is. I don't like it. Not at all. It suffers from this terrible sort of metropolitan sentimentality, and it's so narcissistic. And to me, also, it seemed so false, so calculated. I simply can't stand it."
- Mary McCarthy, on J.D. Salinger

- Excerpts from Fighting Words, ed. James Charlton

Love is not just for professionals, after all.

But as anyone who actually has made the effort to play the piano knows, it is also infinitely more satisfying and moving to make the music yourself, even if you can't play very well. It's the difference between watching a romantic movie and being in love. Love is not just for professionals, after all. And what makes love so heartbreaking and beautiful is that we are not perfect, that it is ultimately beyond our control and that we must struggle for joy and wrestle with our shortcomings.

Smitten, Cooke recalls a world much of which has faded or vanished, not least the spanking new Steinway baby grands for $985 he helpfully lists along with the $3 rentals. But the music he exalts hasn't. Nor have the benefits of learning to play the music. They go on forever.

- Michael Kimmelman, from the introduction to Charles Cooke's 1941 Playing the Piano for Pleasure