Sunday, October 26, 2008

Links & Reviews

Yesterday morning I presented a paper at the fall meeting of the New England Historical Association, as did J.L. Bell of Boston 1775 and several other friends and colleagues. Mine was an offshoot of the paper I worked on a year or so ago, about the provenance of several extant copies of John Eliot's Indian Bible. The conference was fun, and the papers I got to hear were excellent. I would have liked to hear more papers, but unfortunately was able to listen to just those on my panel and John's, since there were only two sessions with lots of simultaneous panels.

- Over at Boston 1775, a look at the early answers to the question of just what it is that the "V.P. does every day."

- If you haven't already made it a regular stop, Ed & Edgar should be added to your daily rotation. Ed's been and will continue to be very busy documenting his travels with Poe and his advocacy for Philadelphia's Poe Primacy. Also on the Poe front, Rick Ring pointed out that some Poe manuscripts sold at auction this week.

- Book Patrol passes along an essay by publisher David Godine on his principles of publishing.

- Playwright Alan Bennett has donated his archive to the Bodleian Library at Oxford University.

Reviews

- In the Washington Post, Michael Dirda reviews Timothy Ryback's Hitler's Private Library.

- Michael Kenney reviews Sarah Vowell's The Wordy Shipmates for the Boston Globe. Heller McAlpin reviews Vowell's book for the Christian Science Monitor.

- The two recent books about Han van Meegeren (The Forger's Spell and The Man Who Made Vermeers) are reviewed by Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker.