I've got a bumper crop of things I've been saving up to pass along, so without further ado:
- Off the Shelf reports on Scholastic's announcement yesterday that 11.5 million copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows were sold in the first ten days of release, 8.3 million in the first day alone. And that's just in the U.S.
- Scott Brown notes a piece from the Publisher's Lunch newsletter reporting that Allison Bartlett's book The Man Who Loved Books: The True Story of a Rare Book Thief, a Book Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession, about thief John Charles Gilkey, will be published by Riverhead. Scott's even dredged up a 2006 article by Bartlett about the Gilkey case, which is well worth a read.
- Paper Cuts has some 'stray questions' for author Eric Schlosser, who says he's working on a book about the U.S. prison system.
- From Rare Book Review, news that Shakespeare's Globe and the British Library are teaming up to produce facsimile reprints of individual Shakespeare plays as they appeared in the First Folio; the initial offerings are Othello, The Merchant of Venice and Love's Labour's Lost.
- Travis comments on the Yale Alumni Magazine article I mentioned the other day; he makes a point I'd forgotten, that the article says Smiley will serve five years in prison when in reality he's scheduled to be released in January, 2010.
- Reading Copy announces the ten largest July sales on AbeBooks; at the top was a signed copy of the first American edition of Einstein's Relativity for $12,500.
- From AHA Today, word that the National Archives has made a non-exclusive deal with Amazon subsidiary CustomFlix to produce DVDs of select historic films and newsreels from NARA's holdings. The DVDs, produced on demand from copies stored at CustomFlix, will retail for $19.99. NARA will receive a digital "preservation copy" of each film.
- At Critical Mass, librarian K.G. Schneider writes about the survival of small press journals in a digital environment. It's a good essay, in which she notes "it's one thing to promote access to electronic information as a common good and quite another to insist that a discipline's needs are well-met by replacing a well-known, beloved form with an incomplete, disembodied, fletcherized stream of 'information.'" Quite so.
- Over at Book Patrol, Michael points out some spooky books.
- Joyce points out a YouTube video in which bookbinder Peter Goodwin comments on brittle book syndrome.
- Forrest has the third installment of the Affair of the Diamond Necklace.
- Andrew Ferguson was on NPR recently discussing Land of Lincoln.
- Bookride examines the collectibility of Richard Burton's 1855 book Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah.
