- In the Boston Globe this week, a compilation gallery of most of the used bookshops in town. Visit them all, and often!
- Pulitzer prizes will be awarded on Monday. As Carolyn Kellogg points out, PPrize.com has posted a list of what they think are the likely winners for the fiction prize.
- A rare Renaissance-era textbook stolen from the history museum in Kotel, Bulgaria has been found, and a local antiques dealer has been arrested in relation to the theft.
- The AP reports that Susan Quirk, former president of the Posen Public Library District (Ill.) has been indicted on charges that she stole more than $135,000 from the library to pay off personal gambling debts. Quirk has pleaded not guilty, and will be in court next on 11 May. [h/t LISNews]
- Lots of press about it this week, but it's a fun story: Washington & Lee College received a long overdue book back recently; it'd been taken by a Union soldier in 1864. The volume is the first of four in Napier's History of the War in the Peninsula and in the South of France From the Year 1807 to the Year 1814. It was returned by a friend of descendants of the soldier. More at AntieQuarian.
- Another volley in the Shakespeare Portrait Battle: the Folger's Erin Blake has a letter in the TLS in response to the last. And in other Shakespeare news, Justice John Paul Stevens said this week he believes that Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, may be the true author of the plays typically attributed to Shakespeare. The WSJ asked other justices to respond: Scalia concurred with Stevens (!), while Kennedy and Breyer opted in favor of the traditional attribution. Retired justice Sandra Day O'Connor said "It might well have been someone other than our Stratford man."
- The Commonwealth Museum at the MA State Archives building on Columbia Point in Boston reopens tomorrow, the Globe reported on Friday. The exhibit will be "Our Common Wealth: the Massachusetts Experiment in Democracy."
- Contrary to a February statement, trustees of the Remnant Trust decided this week that the collection will be moved from its current home in Jeffersonville, IN. Where it's bound has not yet been announced. [h/t RBN]
- Tim & Co. unveiled a flashy new catalog layout at LT. I like it!
- The Gates Foundation is giving $5 million to OCLC to "develop a public information campaign to boost library support." Why not just give money to the libraries?
- On 22 April, Dunbar Sloane Auction House in Wellington, NZ will sell the collection of Edward C. Simpson (PDF Catalog), which is being called "one of the most important collections ever to be offered on the Australasian market."
- J.L. Bell points out a new searchable database of the London Gazette. He's right, the search is a bit clunky, and I couldn't find a way to browse (boo) but for specific things it should be very useful.
- From Strange Maps, a 1938 German map of BΓΌcherland (The Land of Books), by Alphons Woelfle [h/t Joel Kovarsky, MapHist]
- The Wellcome Library has digitized its collection of 17th-century manuscript recipe books (75 in all), and they're also in the process of indexing the books. Very cool. [h/t Joyce]
Reviews
- In the Boston Globe, Katherine Powers reviews Robert Sullivan's The Thoreau You Don't Know. And David Gessner reviews the same book for the NYTimes.
- In the Times,
