I hate all crocodiles, except for one.

Loveable Lyle was first spotted lounging in a bathtub. The Primms have moved into their new Upper East Side brownstone. Mrs Primm hears strange noises from the bathroom and makes the horrifying discovery in the tub. The Primms are horrified but quickly fall in love with the charming and talented reptile. Lyle is very good at double dutch, ice-skating and enjoys watching construction projects. He is kind and sensitive. Lyle and Mrs. Primm are out shopping at a department store and run into Hector P. Valenti -”star of stage and screen !” Signor Valenti and Lyle break into their old act, much to the delight of the store’s customers. Unfortunately, the store is owned by the dastardly “Mr. Grumps”, who is not a fan of Lyle. Mr. Grumps is furious at the showboating in his store! Mr. Grumps has Lyle sent to the city zoo.  Signor Valenti breaks him out with the hope of taking their old act back on the road. Lyle wants to see his beloved brownstone one more time before they leave. As they approach the house, they see Mr. Grumps’ house on fire and Lyle rushes in to save Mr. Grumps and his beloved cat Loretta. Mr. Grumps has a change of heart and all ends well. The drawings of Lyle with his craggly smile are FREAKING CUTE.

Bernard Waber, the author of “Lyle, Lyle Crocodile,” died at his Long Island home after a long illness at the age of 91. Waber debuted as an author in 1962 with “The House on East 88th Street,” which introduced readers to Lyle. Lyle’s story continued in “Lyle Finds His Mother,” “Lyle and the Birthday Party”. He also wrote some non-Lyle books, but Lyle is his most beloved. Waber’s final book, “Lyle Walks the Dog,” was a 2010 collaboration with his daughter, Paulis.

Waber’s “warmth, energy, artfulness, elegance, and abiding respect for children were epitomized in his books,” Houghton’s senior vice president and publisher of books for young readers, Betsy Groban, said in a statement.

In the age-old battle between book and bath, humans have tried many things: the reading tray, the deftly balance towel, the take-your-chances method. An eight-year-old girl genius has solved this conundrum, inventing a simple yet ingenious technique for safeguarding books from falling into the bubbles by suspending the book from the wall. All the device needs is a $4 suction cup from the plumbing aisle at your favorite hardware store. Now if she can invent something similar for the iPad.

The George W Bush $250 million library, on the campus of Southern Methodist University  -a school attended by the likes of former first lady Laura Bush, actor Powers Boothe, and Kourtney Kardashian - was formally dedicated Thursday in a ribbon cutting ceremony.

George Bush bathed in the admiration of a friendly crowd and choked up as he finished speaking and wiped tears from his eyes after sitting down.

George W Bush basked in warm praise from President Barack Obama and three fellow former US presidents as Bush’s library was dedicated in a ceremony that emphasized his resolute response to terrorism while skirting controversies such as his decision to invade Iraq.

The Houston Texas library “Think Tank”  is the staging ground for efforts at burnishing George Bush’s legacy, including a policy center that will explore and promote his ideas.

Other exhibits: The Florida 2000 Butterfly Ballot, as well as a living diorama (caged) of the Supreme Court Justices that decided “The Decider” would be the winner.  Also, a solid gold copy of “My Pet Goat” in a glass case, (when Cheney dies, he will be stuffed and placed in an even larger glass case), he gun used by Dick Cheney to shoot Harry Whittington, as well as pieces of Mr. Whittington’s face, an interactive display showing what exposure to white phosphorus does to the human body and prosthetic limbs

“There was a time in my life when I wasn’t likely to be found in a library, much less found one!” Bush (left)  joked.

Am I required to write something about the fucking Geroge W Bush library? Because I really don’t want to.

Children’s book author E.L. Konigsburg, died at 83 in Falls Church, VA.

The first book I read of hers was her first book:  ”Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth.” It’s about the friendship of two girls, Elizabeth and Jennifer, one of whom claims to be a witch. “A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver” taught me all about Eleanor of Aquitaine and multiple perspective story telling.

Konigsburg’s most famous book is “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler”, which she wrote in 1967. It’s about a couple of Greenwich-residing, grammar-school-aged siblings, Claudia and Jamie Kincaid. Claudia is tired of the injustices and monotony in her life. She is the oldest child and the only girl therefore subject to many injustice. She is bored. Bored with  being “straight-A’s Claudia Kincaid”, bored with arguing about whose turn it is to choose the Sunday night television show, bored of the monotony of everything. So, Claudia forgoes her hot-fudge sundae indulgences for weeks to finance a getaway plan. She forages in the garbage for train passes and pores over the good old AAA tour guide.

Claudia chooses to take her little brother for practical reasons: he is a mini-banker, a little tightwad who owns a transistor radio. You know, I really miss New York. Not the “now” New York, the then New York. The New York before The Squid & The Whale brought divorce to the Museum of Natural History. A New York before ; a New York before  It was a magical, deeply mysteriousNew York that had room for everyone: a brat living unaccompanied in a posh hotel; a bespeckled nerdball scribbling in a notepad as she spied on her neighbors; a boy wandering Chinatown having adventures with a cricket; a teenager finding solace in an elderly neighbor’s cat-filled apartment; Franny and Zoey’s fashionable lunch rooms; a genie in a mystery at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Not a New York where gossipy children act out sexually charged adult dramas, abstractefly moving through the chaos adults leave in their wake.

Anyhoo, the book famously begins:

“Claudia knew that she could never pull off the old-fashioned kind of running away. That is, running away in the heat of anger with a knapsack on her back. She didn’t like discomfort; even picnics were untidy and inconvenient: all those insects and the sun melting the icing on the cupcakes. Therefore, she decided that her leaving home would not be just running from somewhere but would be running to somewhere. To a large place, a comfortable place, an indoor place, and preferably a beautiful place. And that’s why she decided upon the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.”

The depictions of Claudia and Jamie’s long, unauthorized stay in the Metropolitan Museum of Art are some of the most sublime realizations to have ever penetrated the shelves of man. After stuffing their clothes into their violin and trumpet cases, they hide in the back of thee school bus, then sneak off to Grand Central. They spend the day at the museum  deciding which antique display bed to sleep in, then hide out in the bathrooms until all all the guards have left. They spend their days blending in with school field trips to snag free lunches, obsessing over Egyptians galleries, and fishing for coins from the fountain to use for the automat. The Automat. Bathing in the fountain where water is sprayed from dolphins sculptured in bronze. Climbing over the cordon-rouges. Hiding the violin case in a Sarcophagus .Eating roasted chestnts in bed. Speaking of the bed, it is a bed in the English Renaissance Hall, a 16th century, ornately carved canopy.

.”..she lay there in the great quiet of the museum next to the warm quiet of her brother and allowed the soft stillness to settle around them: a comforter of quiet. The silence seeped from their heads to their soles and into their souls. They stretched out and relaxed. Instead of oxygen and stress, Claudia thought now of hushed and quiet words: glide, fur, banana, peace. Even the footsteps of the night watchman added only an accented quarter-note to the silence that had become a hum, a lullaby.”

They read books on Michelangelo and unravel a centuries-old art mystery when they happen upon a statue of an angel which may or may not be carved by Michelangelo — and this, as they say, changes everything. They use their remaining funds to travel to Connecticut and dig through someone’s disorganized card catalog, prompting the catalog’s owner, Mrs. Frankweiler,  to instruct her attorney to re-draft her will. The Angel, the statue of dubious provenance becomes, in its mysterious beauty, the after-the-fact reason Claudia finds for her escape in the first place. As Frankweiler rails in an aside to her lawyer Saxonberg:

“Are photo albums of your grandchildren the only pictures you look at? Are you altogether unconscious of the magic of the name of Michelangelo? I truly believe that his name has magic even now; the best kind of magic, because it comes from true greatness. Claudia sensed it again as she stood in line. The mystery only intrigued her: the magic trapped her.”

As Claudia begins to realize, she has come to the museum not only because she is sick of being the old Claudia, but because she wants — needs! — to return to Greenwich a different Claudia, a Claudia who has bigger concerns than keeping her whites and colors separated, brushing her teeth, and correcting her brother’s grammar: “An answer to running away, and to going home again, lay in Angel,” she thinks.

….”The statue just gave me a chance…almost gave me a chance. We need to make more of a discovery.”

Claudia takes a bath in Mrs. Frankweiler’s black marble bathtub..

….Claudia’s excitement flowed not bubbled. I could see that she was a little surprised. She had known that Angel would have the answer, but she had expected it to be a loud bang, not a quiet soaking in. Of course secrets make a difference. That’s why planning the runaway had been such fun; it was a secret. And hiding in the museum had been a secret. But they weren’t permanent; they had to come to an end. Angel wouldn’t. She could carry the secret of Angel inside her for twenty years just as I had. Now she wouldn’t have to be a heroine when she returned home…expect to herself. And now she knew something about secrets that she hadn’t known before.

Claudia’s on a quest for some greater purpose. “I didn’t run away to come home the same.” And later she adds, “And I don’t want it to be over until I’m sure I’ve had enough.” Claudia’s childhood innocence doesn’t come crashing down, unceremoniously shattered by some tragic experience. Indeed, the vision of childhood in “Mixed-Up Files” is a pretty fantastic one –  that of a beautiful museum at night, stark-raving quiet but loaded with mysteries to solve and deep secrets to uncover, and the freedom to find them, unencumbered by parents and teachers. When Claudia finds the answer to just one of those secrets, she’s not only “different” — she’s become, like the Angel, a singular entity with her own history, her own mystery. And when she leaves the museum, she’s also leaving her childhood, like some abandoned violin case filled with gray clothes, triumphantly behind. Claudia went looking for an epiphany. She didn’t want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard, as it were. And it’s Mrs. Frankweiler, at her home in Farmington, that provides the gentle answer:

The adventure is over. Everything gets over, and nothing is ever the same. Except the part you carry with you. It’s the same as going on a vacation. Some people spend all their time on a vacation taking pictures so that when they get home they can show their friends evidence that they had a good time. they don’t pause to let the vacation enter inside of them and take that home.

E.L. Konigsburg wrote 20 other books and won two Newbury Medals. Another one of her books, “After reading “Mixed up Files”, I made elaborate plans to move my brother and myself into the Philadelphia Museum of Art. We had “bedrooms” picked out and everything. And ”Glide, fur, banana, peace” is my insomnia mantra even now, some 30 years later.

Her, A Memoir by Christa Parravani

The Foundation Trilogy from folio society

Introduction by Nobel Prize-winner Paul Krugman.

3 volumes. Each book is three-quarter bound in buckram, with a paper side on the front board, printed with a design by Alex Wells. Illustrated by Alex Wells.

Foundation

It is the heyday of the Galactic Empire. Nearly 25 million inhabited planets are ruled by this civilisation, which has existed since time immemorial. But one man has dared to predict the Empire’s fall. Hari Seldon is a pioneer of the science of psychohistory, which predicts the patterns of mass behaviour, and he has foreseen galactic war. He establishes two Foundations; one to preserve Imperial knowledge, the other whose purpose and location are unknown. As the Empire collapses, the First Foundation’s inhabitants labour on their Encyclopedia Galactica – unaware that an even more important role has been predicted for them by Seldon.

Foundation and Empire

In the second book, the Foundation has grown in power to rival the dying Empire. With superior technology, and access to energy that other planets lack, it receives tributes from the rest of the Galaxy, all in accordance with the Seldon Plan. But this plan does not take into account the rise of a rogue individual: the Mule, a warlord with the power to manipulate thoughts and emotion. All that stands between the Mule and total conquest of the Galaxy is the mysterious Second Foundation; but its location is a secret that others will die to protect.

Second Foundation

The mule has conquered the Galaxy – or most of it. The First Foundation’s leaders have been either killed, or ‘Converted’. Yet the Mule is still haunted by the existence of the Second Foundation. It is located at ‘Star’s End’ of the Galaxy; but what does that mean? And does this other Foundation even exist? The Mule sends his most loyal general, a former resistance leader who is now brainwashed, and Bail Channis, an ambitious young man whose mind is still free, to investigate. But others are searching for it too, including the 14-year-old Arcadia Darell, who understands Seldon’s plan better than many of her elders …

The Trouble with Tom

The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine

By Paul Collins