NEIGHBORS / SHORT TAKES : The Story Lady : A bust of retired librarian Emilie Ritchen is unveiled, but sculptor Todd Leonard laments over the new version.

From the man who brought the world Ross Perot masks in ceramic comes a bronze bust of a book lender.

Meiners Oaks sculptor Todd Leonard is paying tribute to longtime librarian Emily Ritchen (a.k.a. The Story Lady) with a replica of her, now on display at Emilie Ritchen School in Oxnard.

The work was officially unveiled last week. Ritchen was an Oxnard librarian from the late 1920s to the late 1960s.

The sculpture was originally going to depict a life-size Ritchen, reading to a group of children, while sitting atop a cabinet. The cabinet would have served as a free lending library. Budget constraints altered the project.

So, is Leonard happy with the work? Yes and no.

“It’s as good as most portrait busts,” he said, “but it’s also as dull as most portrait busts.”

And, said Leonard, the bust doesn’t have the impact of the full-size version. “The whole idea was to make the kids feel comfortable on the first day of school. She was in a pose reading ‘Charlotte’s Web’ to the kids, with a grin on her face,” said Leonard. “Now, it fails to communicate the essence.”

She at least is still smiling, even if Leonard isn’t.

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In other publication news: Remember the Mozart bicentennial fuss a couple of years back?

We got all caught up in it like everyone else. We even contacted the Washington D.C.-based Austrian Press and Information Bureau, the PR service of the composer’s native country, looking for a Ventura County connection.

We struck out on the local angle but, refusing to give up entirely, we stayed in contact and have been receiving a monthly newsletter from the service ever since.

Well, the February edition arrived last week and guess what? We have found that local story, sort of.

We were skimming through the publication when this sentence caught our eye:

“In the year of the 225th birthday of Andreas Hofer, the Tyrolean resistance hero against Napoleon and his armies,” it reads, “there comes startling news from . . . Agoura Hills, California, of all places.”

It’s almost Ventura County. (Tyrol, by the way, is in west Austria.)

It had been thought that Hofer had no living descendants, but a guy named William Andrew Hofer, who resides just south of the county line, seems to be the man’s great-great-grandson. We feel our patience has paid off.