- As expected, the Google Books Settlement hearing has been indefinitely postponed. Judge Denny Chin wrote in part "Under all the circumstances, it makes no sense to conduct a hearing on the fairness and reasonableness of the current settlement agreement, as it does not appear the the current settlement will be the operative one." A status conference will be held on 7 October.
- Inside Higher Ed reports on a meeting this week at Baruch College, where University of California administrator Daniel Greenstein spoke about the future of university libraries. Many of his comments seemed to go over like a lead balloon (see the response in the comments section for more).
- An update on the John Sisto story: more than 1,140 Italian artifacts from his collection, including books and manuscripts, are being returned to Italy. Authorities there have determined that the items were "stolen from town archives, libraries and churches in the southern regions of Puglia, Sicily and Molise, and exported illegally."
- Some movement in the Rolland Comstock case: word that a Missouri judge has scheduled the wrongful death civil suit to begin on 7 June 2010. The criminal case is still pending.
- William Noel and Reviel Netz's The Archimedes Codex (my review here) has won the first Neumann Prize of the British Society for the History of Mathematics. The award, to be given every two years, is for the best book in the history of mathematics which is aimed at a broad audience.
- Timothy Barrett, book artist, RBS faculty member and director of the papermaking center at the University of Iowa's Center for the Book, has been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (aka "Genius Grant"). Excellent news!
- In the WSJ, Alexandra Alter writes on the trend of releasing posthumous works: "Works by Vladimir Nabokov, William Styron, Graham Greene, Carl Jung and Kurt Vonnegut will hit bookstores this fall. Ralph Ellison and the late thriller writer Donald E. Westlake have posthumous novels due out in 2010."
Review
- Adam Gopnik reviews Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol in The New Yorker.
- In the San Francisco Chronicle, Jonathan Lopez reviews Allison Hoover Bartlett's The Man Who Loved Books Too Much. Dennis Drabelle offers a short review in the WaPo.
- Jenny Uglow's A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration is reviewed by Frances Wilson in the Sunday Times.
- Wes Davis reviews A New Literary History of America (ed. Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors) in the WSJ.
- In the NYTimes, Susann Cokal reviews Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry.
- Christoph Irmscher reviews Douglas Brinkley's The Wilderness Warrior in the LATimes.
- In the WaPo, Jonathan Yardley reviews Robert Edsel's The Monuments Men.
