- [Update]: Just after I posted I read Ian's terrific news that he's been voted into the ABAA/ILAB. Many congratulations to him and to the other new members!
- The Victoria Times-Colonist reported this week that a collection of letters written by Queen Victoria, including some composed soon after the death of her friend and servant John Brown, will be sold at auction in Canada. The archive of letters, written to the wife of a former royal chaplain, are expected to fetch up to $20,000.
- On NPR this week, a discussion of the Great Seal of the United States.
- A Lizzie Borden researcher believes she has found a new image of Borden as a young girl, Boston.com reports. The unlabeled photograph was discovered in the collections of the Swansea (MA) Historical Society.
- Ellen Chason has donated about 100 books from her father's extensive collection to the Mary & Harry L. Dalton Rare Book & Manuscript Reading Room at UNC Charlotte. The donation is valued at $100,000, and includes a 1599 "Breeches Bible."
- Michael Lieberman passes along a really delightful post from Brian Cassidy, who recently celebrated his first anniversary as a
- Over at The Little Professor, Miriam Burstein has another dispatch from the Google Books trenches. Good, useful commentary as always.
- Rick Ring found a fascinating little book from 1862: Rhymed Tactics (military drills set to verse). The book is available digitally via, aherm, Google Books.
- Folks at Harvard have unveiled Theatrum Catalogorum, an annotated list of European library catalogs (with North American catalogs to follow). [h/t librarian.net]
- J.L. Bell comments on what I heard was an excellent talk at MHS on Friday (I was on duty, so missed it) by Edward Lengel on the process of editing George Washington's papers. Lengel has just published The Glorious Cause: George Washington's Revolutionary War Letters (HarperCollins).
- Travis has some relevant thoughts on People of the Book, tying one of its messages to an absolutely ridiculous argument made by Spiegelman's defense team (that, "as long as duplicate and photocopies of particular books exist, there is no loss to culture. ... His ignorant remarks were consistently and embarrassingly destroyed by people who actually knew what they were talking about, of course. But Brooks’ book does a great job of demonstrating what a book has to offer us, not just in beauty or sentiment, but actual concrete information, aside from just the words on its page.").
- John Overholt notes progress on the Johnson correspondence digitization project at Houghton. He reports that one of the newly-uploaded letters is one from Johnson to James Macpherson, the fabricator of the Poems of Ossian (which I discussed briefly here). Classic Johnson.
- At Cliopatria, Ralph Luker discusses Historians for Obama, which collects the signatures of more than 160 historians who've endorsed Obama's presidential candidacy. They include Joyce Appleby, David Blight, Robert Dallek, Anthony Grafton, David Hall, James McPherson, Barbara Weinstein and a whole host of others.
- James Oakes' The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics and Elizabeth Brown Pryor's Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters are the winners of this year's Lincoln Prize for Civil War Scholarship. Each author will receive $20,000.
- Tim has some thoughts on the ongoing J.K. Rowling-Harry Potter Lexicon lawsuit and poses an interesting theory.
Reviews
- The Washington Post has begun a series of reviews covering the umpteen gazillion Lincoln books that are going to appear in the runup to his 200th birthday next year. This week their reviewers tackle Brian McGinty's Lincoln and the Court (reviewed by Charles Lane), William Lee Miller's Lincoln: The Duty of a Statesman and Allen Guelzo's Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates that Defined America (reviewed by Michael Bishop).
- Richard Cox comments on Alan Dershowitz's Finding Jefferson, in which the lawyer discusses his collecting habits, his recent acquisition of an 1801 TJ letter, and his new plan to teach a seminar for first-year Harvard law students based entirely around Jefferson letters.
