Quite an accumulation this week:
- Better late than never, I'm finally posting a link to Ian's dispatch from the Portland Book Fair last weekend.
- Dwight Garner, the senior editor of the New York Times book review, has started a blog, Paper Cuts. [via Reading Copy]
- Over at Book Patrol, Michael notes a design for a special edition of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea: "The book comes wet. Soaked in sea water then sealed in a nice clear pouch." Simply dry the book in the sun (it's printed on waterproof paper) and read. Michael adds "The high-end Jules Verne collectors are going to be tempted to buy two copies of this edition, one to buy and hold and one to buy and dry." In another post, Michael shows us a new sort of bookshelf.
- I almost did a separate post just on all the goodies from Bibliophile Bullpen over the last few days. Joyce points out that the long scroll of Jack Kerouac's On the Road is on display at the Boot Cotton Mill Museum Galley in Lowell, MA; she also links us to this New York Magazine article in which some authors/critics/professors pick books think should be translated into English. Among Joyce's other finds this week: some great photos of a bookshop in France, and an NPR story about a rather unorthodox library organization system in AZ (judgement withheld).
- At Brookline Blogsmith, Lori writes about her love of Anne Fadiman's essays, noting the arrival of her new collection, At Large and at Small.
- Bookride takes a look at the "collectability" of the Bay Psalm Book, the earliest extant American printed item.
- For Slate, Paul Collins hunts eBay for radioactive antiques (literally); he adds some extra quotes and a video clip here. People really will collect anything.
- In the Boston Globe, T. Susan Chang reviews Peter Berley/Zoe Singer's The Flexitarian Table, a review which made me hungry just reading it. Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer reviews Andrew Ferguson's Land of Lincoln for the Washington Post; he concludes "One cannot help wishing that what Ferguson has captured is not really Lincoln's America. Hopefully it is not America's Lincoln, either." Better phrased than my own thoughts on the book, but the same idea. At Reading Archives, Richard Cox examines Richard Godbeer's Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692, which sounds awfully interesting.
- There's a nice essay on Linnaeus at Rare Book Review, which includes quotes praising his work by Jean-Jacques Rousseau ("Tell him I know of no greater man on earth!") and Goethe ("With the exception of Shakespeare and Spinoza, I know no one among the no longer living who has influenced me more strongly").
- Via Rare Book News, John Gribben's tour of British bookshops continues in The Telegraph, and James Goldsborough writes in the Voice of San Diego about the vibrant bookshop culture in Paris (a sentiment also expressed by our librarian at MHS, who recently returned from that city).
- GalleyCat points us to a Christian Science Monitor article about how publishers are starting to sit up and take notice of the growing potential of book-networking sites like LT.
- Speaking of LibraryThing, another major milestone fell by the wayside this week as the total number of books catalogued there passed 15 million.
