Sunday, August 12, 2007

Links & Reviews

Oh so many good things this week!

- From BibliOdyssey, a collection of American Civil War envelopes, a sixteenth-century Spanish parchment manual, and some William Wallace Denslow illustrations from the Wizard of Oz books.

- Joyce has resumed regular book-related almanac entries at Bibliophile Bullpen, a most-welcome development.

- At Weekend Stubble, Paul Collins names his title of the week: L.A. Abbott's Seven Wives and Seven Prisons: Or, Experiences in the Life of a Matrimonial Monomaniac. A True Story, Written by Himself (1870). It's online here, and one current online description calls the book "The misadventures of a homeopathic doctor turned serial bigamist, on the run in upstate New York."

- From John at Boston 1775, word of the XXVI Symposium of the Scientific Instrument Commission, to be held at Harvard and MIT in September. The theme will be "Scientific Instrumentation on the Frontier."

- Ian at Lux Mentis writes on professional niceties in the bookselling world.

- The Little Professor points out some very amusing text in the appendix to a Fordham University manual for theology grad students.

- Jonathan Bate reviews The Letters of John Murray to Lord Byron in The Telegraph, writing "At a stroke, [editor Adam] Nicholson's towering act of scholarship has rendered all existing biographies of Byron obsolete."

- In the NYTimes, Nathaniel Philbrick reviews Amerigo: The Man Who Gave His Name to America (just out from Random House). Philbrick calls the book "wonderfully idiosyncratic and intelligent."