- A WHYY Edgar Allan Poe short film which our guy Ed was involved won a Mid-Atlantic Emmy for Historic/Cultural-Program Feature or Segment. You can watch the short here.
- BookTV has an interview with Allison Hoover Bartlett about The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, her new book about book thief John Charles Gilkey. You can watch online, or check the CSPAN2 listings for air times.
- Writing for Publishers Weekly, Andrew Albanese asks "Can the Google Book Settlement Be Saved?" And in the NYTimes, Kenyon College professor Lewis Hyde writes the most cogent essay I've seen throughout this debate on the question of orphan works. This is the must-read of the bunch.
- A malfunctioning sprinkler caused damage to documents at the Missouri State Historical Society this week, according to media reports; thankfully the documents were duplicate state files from the 1970s-90s, and can be replaced.
- Over at Boston1775, J.L. Bell notes a new issue of the online magazine History Now, all about the American Revolution. I'm looking forward to making my way through the articles.
- The Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded this week (full list of winners), and this year's list included the first award for literature; it went to "Ireland's police service (An Garda Siochana), for writing and presenting more than fifty traffic tickets to the most frequent driving offender in the country - Prawo Jazdy - whose name in Polish means ‘Driving License.'"
- The Private Library has begun a series on Bibliomania: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI ...
- Christine and Robert at Colophon Books have added a subject-based index to their website, so if you just want books on forgery, wood engravings, or book auction catalogs, &c., this will be a handy way to browse their holdings.
- The National Heritage Museum's exhibit "Freemasonry Unmasked!" opened on 3 October. The show "features forty objects from the Library and Archives collection, ranging from 1700s and 1800s ritual exposures to an anti-Masonic comic book from 1978."
- Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello has won the $25,000 Frederick Douglass Book Prize for 2009, an annual prize awarded by Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition for "the best book written in English on slavery or abolition."
- James Cummins has issued a "Books About Books" list (PDF).
Reviews
- Maureen Dowd's NYTimes review of The Lost Symbol is a must-read.
- Miranda Seymour reviews Jenny Uglow's A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration in the Telegraph.
- Allison Hoover Bartlett's The Man Who Loved Books Too Much is reviewed by Christopher Beha in the NYTimes.
- In the Guardian, Philip Pullman reviews Joscelyn Godwin's Athanasius Kircher's Theatre of the World.
- Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry is reviewed by Tom Adair in the Telegraph.
- Paul Collins' The Book of William gets a short review in the NYTimes.
- In the TLS, Mary Beard reviews Margaret Miles' Art as Plunder and Carole Paul's The Borghese Collections and the Display of Art in the Age of the Grand Tour.
- Frances Wilson reviews Dan Cruickshank's The Secret History of Georgian London in the Times.
- A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book is reviewed by Brooke Allen in the WSJ.
