- Paul Collins notes his new New Scientist article [subscription required, sadly] on the "Edison Test," a 1920s attempt to use standardized testing as a basis for employment. You can take the full test (slightly modified) here.
- Earlier this month I passed along the news that the Guernsey Memorial Library director had gotten herself into some hot water over improper use of library funds. LIS News has some more on that, with one attendee at a recent library board meeting describing the situation as featuring "an angry mob."
- Some movement this week in the Rivero map theft case; an El Pais article (in Spanish) reports that two other men are believed to have been involved in the thefts from Spain, as well as other thefts from libraries around South America. These are Buenos Aires bookstore owner Daniel Guido Pastore and Uruguayan Washington Luis Pereira. Tony Campbell found an earlier article from El Pais with further details.
- The Fortsas project got some very nice attention from De Papieren Man, a lovely Dutch blog which I've added to the sidebar.
- Houghton Library has acquired some very interesting manuscript library catalogs: "one, a list of books purchased for the Reading Society, Benevolent Society, and Sunday School of Bury, Lancashire from 1806-1826, and the second, the catalogue of the Dundas family’s private library at Melville Castle near Edinburgh, compiled in 1862." Very cool.
- J.L. Bell has an excellent survey of Thomas Jefferson resources online.
- My article "Enlarging the Bibliosphere: Using LibraryThing to Promote Book History" is in the next issue of Aus dem Antiquariat (you'll know it when you see it, it's the only article in English). The text isn't online, so far as I can tell.
- Richard Cox, back from vacation, has some thoughts on three new books about collecting (loosely defined): McMurty's, Israel's, and William Davies King's Collections of Nothing.
- Writing for Britannica Blog, Robert McHenry comments on Oliver Wendell Holmes' 1858 musings on youth and activity.
- Over at Ed and Edgar, Ed's been posting on "The Raven" all week, so read back through and enjoy the wide selection of posts. My favorite was the first post, featuring a reading of the poem by the great Basil Rathbone.
Review
- In Salon, Louis Bayard reviews Lee Israel's Can You Ever Forgive Me? and Jonathan Lopez' The Man Who Made Vermeers.
