Thursday, January 31, 2008

Mid-Week Links

Since my Google Reader is getting full:

- I've added a sidebar link to Northern Illinois University Rare Books & Special Collections, a fairly new blog very much worth adding to your reading list. Lynne Thomas' recent post on the Lorello thefts and the "Antiques Roadshow Effect" is just one of the many there that I recommend.

- Michael highlights some amusing new book covers you can use to amuse your neighbors while reading on the train (or wherever).

- fade theory notes a Boston Globe article on the typography used in presidential campaign materials. Two typographers predict the winners based on the fonts they use ... and they're not bad predictions, either ...

- For the second time in a week flooding has occurred at Montana State University's Renne Library. On 22 January, water soaked rare books in the Special Collections department, and on the 29th a frozen pipe burst and damaged a large portion of the library's reference collection.

- Jim Watts points out a James Gleick article in a recent New York Times Magazine. Gleick uses the recent Magna Carta sale noting that as "information" becomes cheaper and more widely available, the physical container may not: "[T]he same free flow that makes information cheap and reproducible helps us treasure the sight of information that is not. A story gains power from its attachment, however tenuous, to a physical object. The object gains power from the story. The abstract version may flash by on a screen, but the worn parchment and the fading ink make us pause. The extreme of scarcity is intensified by the extreme of ubiquity."

- Tim's got some thoughts on a news story that's been making its way around the library-blog-world: Amazon may not be allowing libraries to loan out their new "Kindle" e-readers.

- Rick Ring has a list of upcoming auctions - I'll keep an eye on these and if anything interesting comes out of them, I'll certainly pass it along.