Back from Bermuda! I'll have a full post on that with pictures and all later on tonight or tomorrow, but in the meantime, a belated links & reviews (because the overflowing Google Reader hurts my brain):
- From BibliOdyssey, artillery illustrations.
- The March Fine Books Monthly is up, so be sure to check that out at your leisure.
- There's a long article in the Financial Times about why people steal rare books. I'll probably have more on this later, but I pass it along now at any rate.
- Cool story in the Globe today about a colonial-era silver mug recently given to the MFA.
- The building housing the Historic Archive of the city of Cologne partially collapsed on Tuesday, trapping as many as three people and possibly causing great damage to the collections. Reuters: "The building was one of the biggest archives of its kind in Germany. Among its 65,000 documents were some dating back more than 1,000 years. The archive also housed half a million photos chronicling life in Cologne." More at Der Spiegel, Iconic Books, and at the Guardian on the loss of Heinrich Böll's papers, which were just received by the archive in February.
- My alma mater has put together a spiffy little video on the campus' historic design and its designer, the French architect Joseph Jacques Ramée.
- The LATimes has announced the finalists for its 2008 book awards. The winners will be announced on 24 April.
- In Slate, Paul Collins writes about Amazon's lack of charitable contributions. Doesn't buying Beedle the Bard count? That all went to charity, didn't it?
- Cass Sunstein writes on the Federalist Papers in the NYRB, and also in the NYRB is an exchange among several folks about Darnton's recent piece there.
- The Times reports that bibliophile Richard Prince is looking to give away a massive collection of books "about sex, drugs, Beat [poets], hippies, punks – and great reads," as he puts it. The Morgan Library is reportedly in negotiations to obtain Prince's library.
- A very cool site from the folks at George Mason University's Center and History and New Media: Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800. Backstory here. [h/t BU Libraries Special Collections]
- Word this week from Terry Belanger that two of G. Thomas Tanselle's classic seminar syllabi (to Introduction to Bibliography and Introduction to Scholarly Editing) are available on the Rare Book School website in PDF form.
- Via VSL:Web, Zamzar, an online program to convert files from one type to another (a huge variety of types, too!). Nifty.
Reviews
- Steven Johnson's The Invention of Air is reviewed in the Philly Inquirer.
- In the NYTimes, Baz Dreisinger reviews Martha Sandweiss' Passing Strange, a new biography of Clarence King.
