Quick note [pun alert] - not book related...

I received a few dollars in change this morning. One of the bills stood out and I took a second glance to see why. It was very nice 1957 Silver Certificate. I am going into the bank later today to exchange it *g*.

Microsoft kills its book scanning program....

See /. for more info.

Sorry I have not posted of late. Thank you for your notes. I will be posting again soon.

Happy Birthday to me...

Thanks to the NYT and my mother-in-law for the the following list of "other things that happened on May 3rd...other than my birth:

N.B. Missing from the following is that it is also the birthday of Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli, b. 1469 (which is also the last four digits of Lux Mentis' phone number...as I like to point out to bewildered tele-marketers).

On this date in:

1802 Washington, D.C., was incorporated.

1898 Israeli founder and prime minister Golda Meir was born Goldie Mabovitch in Kiev, Ukraine.

1916 Irish nationalist Padraic Pearse and two others were executed by the British for their roles in the Easter uprising.

1921 West Virginia imposed the first state sales tax.

1936 Baseball Hall of Famer Joe DiMaggio made his major league debut with the New York Yankees.

1937 Margaret Mitchell won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel "Gone with the Wind."

1948 The Supreme Court ruled that covenants prohibiting the sale of real estate to blacks and other minorities were legally unenforceable.

1960 The musical "The Fantasticks" opened off-Broadway, beginning a record run of nearly 42 years and 17,162 performances.

1979 Conservative Party leader Margaret Thatcher became Britain's first female prime minister as the Tories ousted the incumbent Labor government in parliamentary elections.

1988 The White House acknowledged that first lady Nancy Reagan had used astrological advice to help schedule President Ronald Reagan's activities.

2000 The archbishop of New York, Cardinal John O'Connor, died at age 80.

2001 The United States lost its seat on the U.N. Human Rights Commission for the first time since the commission was formed in 1947.

2005 Iraq's first democratically elected government was sworn in.

2006 A federal jury in Alexandria, Va., rejected the death penalty for al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, deciding he should spend life in prison for his role in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

2007 Astronaut Wally Schirra died at age 84.

Here are some added images of the front room in its current state. The first image shows the wall color "Wolf" next to the trim color...something like "Frozen Phlegm". The shelves are painted "Half-Tone" (a real cop out, if you ask me...N.B. Martha Stewart holds the current best paint color name with "Pudding Mold"). The bottom picture allows you to see all three colors on one wall (and the old door color as I have not yet painted the inside of the closet).

The bottom image also shows "things to be". The shelves will run over the two doors to the wall and there will be a very narrow vertical bookshelf between them. It should, I hope, look very cool with nice narrow tomes in it...

The last extremely cool element will be the "notch" built into the case at the wall above the little space behind the closet door. If all goes according to plan, there will be a notch there that will receive and hold the library ladder that will fit into spaced grooves that will run along the fascia of all the cases. Shelves running 11 feet require a good library ladder. I just hope it all works out as currently conceived.

Update on the front room project...

Well, the boxes for the shelves are finally here (most of them). These are, as you can see, just the boxes...though painted in a spray booth (anyone who has ever had the pleasure of painting installed shelving knows how nice this is). The color looks great with the "Wolf" on the walls (I just realized I did not post pictures of the wall color, will do so as it does not show in these as I did not paint that which is to be hidden)...the jury remains out as to the trim color.

It is a little hard to get the scale in these pictures. We have 11 foot ceilings on the first floor. The boxes are currently sitting on the floor, but will be sitting on about 8 inch boxes so the rooms baseboard molding can be carried across them (if you look in the first picture by the bottom edge of the fireplace, you can see a bit of the baseboard). So the shelves will start about 8 inches or so off the ground and once the crown molding goes on, they should pretty much run the full 11 feet.

The bottom boxes are 2 or so inches deeper and designed for folios and similarly difficult to shelve volumes. The boxes as shown are not yet trimmed out, as they will be getting 3/4 inch trim that will tie everything together and, eventually, frame the glass doors that will be installed (the final design calls for full-height glass inset doors on the upper and bottom shelves...providing both an aesthetically pleasing finish and, more importantly, dust and UV protection).

These weigh a ton...everything you see is 3/4 inch ply-wood (even the backs). Each box is insularly strong enough to take pretty much any load and, when they are all fused together, they should be structurally significant to the house as a whole...

If you look at the first box, you can see the step that will box in a vertical steam pipe running to the second floor. All the shelves for that section are notched to fit. Two point to the Opus. We are planning to tile the fireplace as it was rebuilt at some point and of a brick type that does not fit the house, period or any reasonable aesthetic measure. The current plan also involves rebuilding the mantel to bring it up several inches to balance the size/scale of the shelf between the upper and lower portions of the bookcases. If all goes as planned, the mantel will have a shelf for 12mos and smaller built into it, carrying the books across the chimney span.

I am waiting for the thin, deep shelf that will go in between the closet and interior doors and support the shelves that will carry over the two doors. It should look wonderful when it is done. I'll try to get some other pictures of the walls, etc. shortly.