The Woodlawn Vase is an American trophy given annually to the winning owner of the Preakness Stakes at Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore. For many years the trophy was given to the winning owner to keep for one year until the next running of the race. In 1917, the Woodlawn Vase was first awarded to the Preakness winner. In 1953 the winning owner was no longer allowed to keep it. In 1983 the trophy’s silver design was appraised by Tiffany and Company of New York (the original creator in 1860) as priceless but a figure of $1,000,000 was established for insurance purposes. The value is now believed to be worth in excess of $4,000,000.

Ganna Walska was the creator of the botanical garden Lotusland. She was also married six times. Her husbands included:

• Russian baron Arcadie d’Eingorn, a Russian officer, divorced him for drunkenness 1915
• Dr Joseph Fraenkel, a famed New York endocrinologist, died 1920,
• multimillionaire sportsman and carpet tycoon Alexander Smith Cochran, married 1920, divorced 1922
• industrialist Harold Fowler McCormick, married in 1922, divorced 1931
• English inventor of a death ray, Harry Grindell Matthews, died 1941
• Theos Bernard, her sixth and last husband, a scholar of yoga and Tibetan Buddhism (and book-author), married 1942, divorced 1946

Walska pursued a career as an opera singer. Her memoirs were called Always Room at the Top. Orson Welles claimed that McCormick’s lavish promotion of Walska’s opera career—despite her apparent renown as a terrible singer—was a direct influence on the screenplay for Citizen Kane, wherein the titular character does much the same for his second wife, Susan Alexander.

Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer is a tragicomic and harrowing portrait of a morally defective mind. Written in a highly unreliable first person narrative, this unsung masterwork is an account of a crime and its aftermath: the scientist-hero (or scientist-villain) is tried, sentenced, and deported to a remote island where he is privileged to work as an epidemiologist. He seeks redemption in science, but in spite of himself he is a man of feeling. The book came out of the same fertile literary ground between the wars that produced The Man Without Qualities and The Sleepwalkers; like those modernist classics and the works of Ernst Weiss’ friend, Franz Kafka, Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer is a prescient depiction of a profoundly unsettled society.

Gaspar van Wittel was a Dutch landscape painter.

A look from Alexander Wang’s pre-fall 2010 collection.

Whole World Catalog

Wolfgang Weingart. Swiss typographer.

Gordon Walters.

Robert Walser. Another Swiss genius.