• Desegregating public libraries: “In 1925, NAACP Secretary Walter White mounted opposition to the establishment of a library science school at the all-Black Hampton Institute, reasoning that the creation of a segregated training program would only bolster an already segregated profession or create boundaries where they were being deliberately and incrementally torn down. A decade later, the American Library Association would be on the hot seat when it held its 1936 conference in the old Confederate capital, Richmond, Virginia; Black participants were allowed, but were seated in their own section in meeting halls and were not invited to any events where meals were served.” (LitHub)

• The enduring pleasures of Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. (Humanities)

• European royals of the eighteenth century loved fireworks, which didn’t always work out so well: “All of Louis XV’s displays were created by the king’s official pyrotechnicians, the Ruggieri brothers. The Ruggieris, whose fireworks company is still in operation today, pioneered much of what we see in modern fireworks displays—moving effects, unique shapes, and the ‘quick match’ fuse used to light multiple rockets at once are all Ruggieri inventions. Unfortunately, the Ruggieris bombastic displays also created what the Guinness World Records still considers the world’s worst firework disaster, in terms of number of deaths.” (Atlas Obscura)

• Why are writers so into the idea of burning their own manuscripts? “Writers are nothing if not melodramatic. Nikolai Gogol asked Leo Tolstoy to hold his manuscript for the second Dead Souls, but Tolstoy refused. Gogol had already burned a copy of it in 1845, and ultimately burned the rest in 1852. Eudora Welty said she would ‘burn everything up’ to stymie potential biographers—everything as in personal correspondence, not manuscripts. Daniel Alarcón would burn his diaries as well: ‘that’s the space where I criticize people and am totally inarticulate.’ Kenzaburō Ōe said he wanted to burn all of his unfinished manuscripts before he died, but there is no sign that he burned finished ones.” (The Millions)

• At the Smithsonian, curators are collecting and preserving more than a century’s worth of beauty and personal care products. (Racked)

• Rehabilitating Evelyn Waugh: “Fifty years dead now, the vile, rude, snobbish, cigar-chomping, ear trumpet–brandishing, banana-gobbling bigot is slowly becoming, in distant memory and from a comfortable distance, a bit of an old sweetheart. The more one reads about him, the more one likes him. Even the banana incident—shortly after the Second World War he ate three precious, strictly rationed bananas intended for his children in front of them, an act that his son Auberon famously found difficult to forgive and even more difficult to stop talking about—seems in retrospect as much a prank as an act of pure unpleasantness, more jolly jape than great evil.” (Literary Review)