Thursday, April 16, 2009

What I've Been Up To

It's been a busy week. Lots of meetings and other things, but also because I've been trying really hard to finish up a project which I'll be speaking about on Saturday at the New England Historical Association meeting in Portland, ME. That's George Wythe's library, which is now just about all into LibraryThing (here).* The reason this is interesting is because not very much at all was known about Wythe's library until fairly recently (last November or so), when a colleague from Monticello and I identified a list of books in the MHS' Coolidge Collection of Thomas Jefferson Manuscripts as an inventory of Wythe's library, which was bequeathed to Jefferson. The list is now online digitally and in transcribed form, with the LT-catalog as an enhancement (complete title information, edition information where we know it, what Jefferson did with the books he received, where the remaining volumes went, &c.). Hopefully you'll be seeing more about this in other venues soon, but for now that's what I can tell you!

And if you're in Portland on Saturday morning, come by and hear the talk (info here, PDF).


*I still have a few titles and other cool data to add, including some notes on where Wythe originally got the books, &c.