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The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

A Gutenberg Bible from 1455, an autographed and annotated manuscript of Maimonides' Mishneh Torah, and the oldest surviving Hebrew codex are among the ancient texts included in a new digitization project by the University of Oxford's Bodleian Library and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. The project, funded by a $3.2 million grant from the Polonsky Foundation, will make a number of "Hebrew manuscripts, Greek manuscripts, and incunabula, or 15th-century printed books" available for free viewing by the public. According to the project's website, "these groups have been chosen for their scholarly importance and for the strength of their collections in both libraries, and they will include both religious and secular texts." In an essay, the scholar Malachi Beit-Ari called the project a "unique cultural and scholarly enterprise which will provide students, scholars and the general public with easy access to these rich hidden treasures." The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, said in a video interview that the collection is "something that inspires worship," adding that upon seeing the texts, "there is just a lifting of the spirits."

In an interview, the crime novelist Ian Rankin tells The Telegraph that it took "a good 12-14 years, and many books" before his writing began to pay.

Much more lucrative, apparently, is a gig overseeing Apple's compliance with punishment after losing its e-book antitrust case in July. In a court filing last week, Apple complained that its court-appointed monitor, Michael Bromwich, charges $1,100 an hour, in addition to a 15 percent administrative fee. Apple also complained that "Mr. Bromwich has already shown a proclivity to leap far beyond his mandate, and now this Court proposes amendments that would give him power to interview Apple personnel ex parte, something he will no doubt be quick to exploit." Bromwich was asked to monitor Apple after the company was found to have colluded with publishers to fix ebook prices. In a letter to Apple quoted by All Things Digital, Bromwich complained in turn of a "surprising and disappointing lack of communication from Apple."

The mythographer, novelist and historian Marina Warner writes about sea monsters and "the monstrous imagination," which she says "revels in excess and assemblage; tricephalous and multilimbed, with arthropod and reptilian features such as ruffs, tusks, fangs, tentacles, and jaws, many of these primordial monsters are hybrids defying nature. They belong to dark places, those underworlds under land and sea — volcanoes, ocean abysses — because they embody our lack of understanding, and mirror it in their savagery and disorderly, heterogeneous asymmetries of shape."

Imagine how Robbie Travis felt. He waits tables at Libertine, a high-end restaurant just outside St. Louis, and his ex insisted on coming in just a few days after they'd broken up.

Like everyone else, waiters and waitresses have to show up for work on days they'd rather be anywhere else. But it's especially tough to shrug off a bad mood in a job where people expect you to greet them gladly.

"You have to fake it a little bit," Travis says. "That's what pays the bills."

When I've asked servers lately how they were doing, the answers ranged from "hanging in there" to "excellent — no, great!" No one has come out and said they were lousy.

But when I asked what it's like to have to wait on people when they've been distracted by bad news, every one of them had a story.

"I've had plenty of bad days. I've had deaths in the family," says Emily Nevius, a waitress at Longfellow Grill in Minneapolis. "But it's work and you put your work face on."

Similarly, Laura Abusager, who has waited tables in Bloomington, Ill., for the past five years, says she tries to put on a "poker face" when she's dealing with issues in the rest of her life. She feels like her work doesn't suffer, but she says her coworkers can always tell when things are going wrong at home or in relationships.

The customers, too. "I feel like I get better tips when I'm in a good mood," Abusager says, "and when I'm in a bad mood, it's like they can sense it."

Restaurant owners and managers know servers who can be fun and flirty or at least chatty and attentive not only get better tips, but add to the quality of the dining out experience in a way that's crucial to the bottom line. (Indeed, psychological research supports the idea that friendlier waiters get better tips.)

Except for real regulars, customers don't know about their waiter's life and don't want to know about it, says Meredith Berkowitz, Travis' coworker at Libertine.

"We do meetings here where they tell us to leave our problems at home," says Davee Crain, a waiter at Geno's East pizzeria in Chicago.

Performance matters. There's an old cliche about people who wait tables all being aspiring actors, but it's clear that acting is a big part of their day jobs.

"It's an acting job," Crain says. "It's a mask."

Waiters who are having a really bad day can always borrow a trick from Ann Patchett.

"Even if you make mistakes — you forget to put in their orders or you put in the wrong order or you drop their drinks on their heads, which I did once — you can tell them it's your first day," the novelist told a St. Louis audience during her current book tour. "Even if you've been doing it a long time, if you tell them it's your first day, they'll give you a 50 percent tip."

The Planet Money men's T-shirt was made in Bangladesh, by workers who make about $3 a day, with overtime. The Planet Money women's T-shirt was made in Colombia, by workers who make roughly $13 a day, without overtime.

The wages in both places are remarkably low by U.S. standards. But the gap between them is huge. Workers in Colombia make more than four times what their counterparts make in Bangladesh. In our reporting, we saw that the workers in Colombia have a much higher standard of living than the workers in Bangladesh.

Noreli Morales, a Colombian worker who helped make our women's T-shirt, lives with her mom and her daughter in an apartment that has a kitchen and a bathroom. Shumi and Minu, Bangladeshi sisters who worked on our men's T-shirt, share a single room with Minu's husband. There's no running water, no kitchen. Noreli sends her daughter to daycare; Minu can't afford daycare, so her daughter lives back in the village, with her parents.

Interactive Documentary

The first heavy rains of the season fell two weeks ago at Salt Point State Park, on the northern California coast, and now ranger Todd Farcau is waiting anxiously for the forest floor to erupt with mushrooms.

That first bloom of fungi, which has been delayed by drought, will draw mushroom hunters —crowds of them — and that is what Farcau is nervous about. Mushroom hunting, which is legal in Salt Point State Park but prohibited in most other California parks, has grown in popularity in the past five years, thanks to foraging classes and tours, word-of-mouth publicity and hype from chefs who are featuring wild mushrooms in their restaurants.

As a result, known mushroom grounds are taking a beating. At Salt Point State Park, mushroom hunters sometimes carve new trails into the forest, trample small plants, and illegally use rakes and shovels to turn over the forest floor in search of young, budding mushrooms, according to Farcau. Some, he adds, leave trash piles by the road and toilet paper in the woods.

"It looks like a rock festival has passed through," Farcau says.

Mushroom hunting has grown more popular elsewhere, too. Todd Spanier, a San Francisco-based commercial mushroom collector and vendor, tells The Salt that "it's a global thing." The slow food movement, Spanier says, combined with the Internet age, is inspiring foodies everywhere to walk into the woods with their eyes on the ground.

Sure enough, concerns have grown in places as scattered as England and Washington, D.C.-area parks about the burgeoning numbers of fungi foragers, both commercial and recreational, and the impacts they may be having on the land.

Foragers are hungry for more than mushrooms, too. In the Eastern U.S., the numbers of people hunting for ramps, a fragrant onion-odored wild bulb, have increased dramatically — perhaps even unsustainably. In New York City's Central Park as well, how-to tours like those of so-called "Wildman" Steve Brill have reportedly caused a boom in the numbers of urban foragers seeking edible greens and roots, creating a nuisance for city gardeners and park rangers.

In Salt Point, Farcau believes mushroom-collecting tours are having a powerful multiplying effect. "These tour leaders will take out 10 or 15 people, and each of them will tell 10 or 15 people, and each of them will tell 10 or 15 people," he says.

Not that mushroom hunting is anything new. Across Europe and Asia, generations of families have returned to the same forested places to collect edible fungi. These mushrooms — including famed truffles, morels, porcini, chanterelles and matsutake — attract people with their unique flavors and aromas, which cultivated species tend to lack.

In California, the core of the mushroom hunting culture was traditionally European immigrants and a small community of eccentric hobbyists. But foraging classes, guide books, Internet buzz and even mushroom-identification smartphone apps have brought mushroom hunting into mainstream foodie culture.

David Campbell, who leads mushroom hunting outings with his company, Mycoventures, has made Salt Point State Park the location of monthly forays. He says he recognizes that he is "guilty" of helping fuel the foraging craze.

"It's a delicate balance between sharing, which I like to do, and protecting your [mushroom] patches from public knowledge," says Campbell, who charges $45 a head for one-day outings.

Another regular Salt Point mushroom hunting tour leader, Patrick Hamilton, concedes that his guided walks in the woods, which cost $90 a head, may be having an impact on a limited resource.

"I have been personally responsible for turning a lot of restaurant chefs on to wild mushrooms, and I've sometimes asked myself, 'Is this really what we want to be doing?' " Hamilton says.

In most areas open to mushroom hunting, collectors must abide by strict limits. At Salt Point State Park, for example, hunters cannot take more than five pounds of mushrooms per day — though many people break this rule, ranger Farcau says.

Mushroom collecting is prohibited in most county, state and national parks in California, and while there has been informal discussion of closing off remaining legal collecting areas, some mushroom hunting enthusiasts say the best thing to do would be the opposite — that is, legalize the activity in more places.

"Salt Point gets hit so hard because it's the only place left to go," says Ken Litchfield, a hobbyist collector and teacher at Merritt Community College in Oakland, Calif.

Hamilton envisions a similar solution to alleviating the pressure on Salt Point State Park:

"If they would just open up all the parks to [mushroom] hunting, you wouldn't even notice us."