Thursday, August 23, 2007

Links & Reviews

I was trying to save these up for Sunday, but I'm sure there'll be more by then:

- One I forgot from last week - Stephen King has an essay in Entertainment Weekly on the end of the Harry Potter series. It's one of the more insightful commentaries on the books I've read.

- Michael at Book Patrol comments on "mega-listers", including one such who's harvesting ABE's "want list" data.

- In the Telegraph, Alan Marshall reviews Wayne Franklin's new biography of James Fenimore Cooper (the first volume of two).

- Rachel at fade theory notes that Alberto Manguel recently reviewed Nathan Englander's The Ministry of Special Cases, and that a new short story collection edited by Manguel - Summer Stories - is reviewed in the Globe and Mail.

- From BibliOdyssey, wonderful botanical illustrations from Jacob Bigelow's American Medical Botany (1817-1820), the first color-plate illustrated book produced in America.

- Richard at Bytown Bookshop points out a neat site for typophiles; Type Cases highlights many different methods of organizing type founts.

- Ed from Bibliothecary has a review of A Philadelphia Perspective, the Civil War Diary of Sidney George Fisher in yesterday's Philadelphia Inquirer. Ed also comments on the new crop of Shakespeare books, including an upcoming biography of Shakespeare's wife by Germaine Greer.

- Scott Brown confirms that Heritage's stock has in fact been sold to Bloomsbury Auctions, with an estimated worth of some $10 million. That'll definitely be an auction to watch.

- Judith Maas reviews Ghostwalk for the Boston Globe, coming away from the book about the same way I did.

- LibraryThing's got yet another noteworthy feature: TagMirror. If mine is any indication, this actually works quite well indeed.

I decided to do up a separate post on alchemy in colonial America, so stay tuned for that.