Kenneth Grahame, author of the magical pastoral Wind in the Willows, died 77 years ago today.  Among his great fans were Theodore Roosevelt, my dad (who read it to me twenty five years ago) and Honoria St. Cyr, who reviewed Seth Lerer’s new annotation edition

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in our July 2009 issue. She delights in the way Lerer’s explications and digressions refresh the oft-read text. Although,

it’s also an irresistible game of ‘bet you didn’t know,’ as when we’re helpfully informed that comfrey is “a flowering plant of streams and ditches, recorded in English from Anglo-Saxon times; Symphytum offincale,” or that a mullion is “a vertical bar dividing the panes in a leaded window,” or that “cloop” is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the sound made by drawing a cork from a bottle.” If this is your sort of thing (it very much is mine), you’ll find a nearly endless amount of it in this edition of The Wind in the Willows. And if it isn’t your sort of thing, you can at least turn the page – imagine with deep pity the poor dinner guest who draws the seat next to Lerer and innocently lets fall the word “selvedge.”

Other July 6th milestones? Well, today is the day 52 years ago when John Lennon and Paul McCartney met one another for the first time. Lennon’s band, the The Quarrymen, had just performed. There was a big to-do at St. Peter’s church in Liverpool. Then, twenty years later, as Adam Golaski explains on our blog, they made a “Carnival of Light.”

Nancey Reagan was born on the 6th, too (Steve Donoghue essayed her husband’s diaries in April 2009). George Bush the younger was hatched today, in 1946, and our political Editor Greg Waldmann has been doggedly chronicling his crimes both on our blog and in accomplished and morally compelling monthly essays.

Also on June 6th, in 1997, the Mars Pathfinder deposited the Sojourner scout to begin exploring the mysterious and surprisingly boring surface o the red planet. In November 2008, Astrid Van Sarisgaard described some of the ancient geographies little Sojourner dispelled:

In 1610 … Galileo turned his primitive telescope upon that bright light in the sky and saw the dim outline of a world bathed by sunlight. Not a star, nor a comet, but a planet more or less like Earth, which was a revolutionary break with received knowledge (the Bible makes no mention of other planets). Fifty years later, Dutch astronomer Christian Huygens studied Mars clearly enough to detect rough scratches on its surface. In 1877 Giovanni Schiaparelli studied the planet for months and drew his famous canali on his map of its surface, and those ‘canals’ gave rise to half a century of frenzied speculation about life on the red planet. In the scientific community of the time, that frenzy reached its peak with Percival Lowell, who turned his telescope on Mars and reported not only an extensive network of canals but the reason for them: Mars was obviously a dying world inhabited by a race desperate to tap ice caps for the planet’s only remaining water supply. Most serious scientists wanted nothing to do with Lowell’s ideas, and scientific journals wouldn’t publish him – but when he wove his tales of noble race on a doomed, distant world, you could have heard a pin drop on the floor of Boston’s Horticultural Hall. It was the perfect interplanetary myth.

Happy Exploring and Happy July. Oh, and one more anniversary … bestselling noveler Norah Roberts was married to an accepting and patient man, many many years ago today.

– John Cotter

In the January 5 New York Times, Kenneth Chang reports on the photographs taken in the last month by the extraordinarily high-res camera in NASA’s Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter:

Images taken by the camera, able to see features down to about a yard in size, have revealed details like rippled textures in what had looked like bland dusty regions, and researchers can now count tiny craters, enabling them to better estimate the age of terrains.

This is obviously bed-wettingly exciting stuff for planetary geologists, who are using the findings to bolster the contention that Mars was in the distant past a far more hospitable place, “wet and maybe warm.”

But did Mars sustain life? And is life there now? No conclusive signs are offered in these most recent images, but the question is one that is always on the front of the minds of those doughty men and women who make the study of Mars their lives’ work. In our November 2008 issue, Astrid Van Sarisgaard reviewed three recent books about the red planet

, and found that most tantalizing question looming throughout all three. Click over to learn more about Mars–and stay for the comments field, which contains a discontented rebuttal from one of the book’s authors!

Judging from the latest National Geographic Sports Illustrated: Swimsuit 2009 dvd

, it seems the wonders of the planet Mars can move even the most, um, sedate of authors to flights of verbal fancy. In that issue, John Updike surveys the high-resolution false-color photos coming out of the Phoenix mission and is provoked to a pitch of amazement seldom found in his many, many novels:

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The dead planet is not so dead after all: Avalanches and dust storms are caught on camera, and at the poles a seasonal sublimation of dry ice produces erosion and movement. Dunes shift; dust devils trace dark scribbles on the delicate surface. Whether or not evidence of microbial or lichenous life emerges amid this far-off flux, Mars has become an ever nearer neighbor, a province of human knowledge. Dim and fanciful visions of the twinkling fire planet have led to panoramic close-ups beautiful beyond imagining.

As Open Letters readers will know, Updike isn’t the only one imagining those beauties(like the amazing photo of a sunset on Mars); in our November issue, freelancer Astrid van Sarisgaard also becomes transfixed by the red planet, in her review of three new books about man’s ongoing attempts to explore Earth’s nearest planetary neighbor. Read her piece and see how she and Updike align!