- New blogs, via Laura and Ian: The Private Library and Bibliopole. Both are excellent. I've added links on the sidebar.
- Registration is now open for the Houghton Library's Johnson at 300 symposium, to be held 27-29 August. I must remember to register, this is not a conference to miss!
- Abby was off to the London Book Fair recently to speak at a panel on books and marketing in an online world.
- From BibliOdyssey, natural history images.
- In the Globe today, news that UMass Dartmouth's Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture has digitized 84,000 pages of the Diário de Notícias (1919-1973), called "the most important Portuguese newspaper ever published in the United States." The archive is freely available here.
- Famed book collector Daniel Volkmann died on 27 April. Obituary.
- Ian's got a very good post on the wide range of ways bibliophiles are connecting these days.
- Chinese and other media outlets have been profiling Du Weisheng, a conservator at the National Library in Beijing.
- Another posthumous Tolkien book was released this week. Christopher Tolkien comments on the work in The Guardian.
- Rick Ring found a neat little law book in the PPL's collections this week. And Rick's got a post unveiling a new print serial publication, Occasional Nuggets. I've subscribed - you should too!
- Two books, one from Shelley's library and one from Byron's, were recently found in a French trash can. They've now been acquired by London dealer Peter Harrington.
- David Weinberger comments on a forthcoming search engine, WolframAlpha. [h/t Tim]
- Rory Litwin notes that some podcasts from the recent MIT Media in Transition conference are now posted.
- In the Boston Globe, Irene Sage covers what certainly seems to be a fascinating new book by a local author (Reif Larson's The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet). I've ordered a copy.
- The silly biblio-news of the week award goes to the "health and safety" officials at the Bodleian Library, who have banned the use of stepladders (making certain books inaccessible to students). [h/t Ian]
Reviews
- In the Washington Post, Louis Bayard reviews Jonathan Bate's new biography of Shakespeare, Soul of the Age
- In April's William & Mary Quarterly, Edward Countryman reviews Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello [PDF].
- Ron Charles reviews The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet for the WaPo.
- In the NYTimes, Iliya Troyanov's The Collector of Worlds (a novel about Sir Richard Francis Burton) is reviewed by Ben Macintyre.
