Sunday, January 17, 2010

Links & Reviews

Some really good book history posts in here, so read closely:

- Princeton's Stephen Ferguson adds to his earlier post on pre-1700 American books by reporting on some new discoveries of Thomas Shepard titles in the Princeton collection (including a set of Luther). We've also found that there were at least a couple Luther books in the Mather Library too - Cotton purchased two Luther titles (1, 2) as duplicates from the Harvard College Library in 1682. And stay tuned for a post from me on the MHS blog about other Shepard titles!

- At Mercurius Politicus, Nick has a very cool post on Pepys changing a title page in 1663 to reflect the return of Charles II. Lots of pictures and diary excerpts!

- The Ricci Map is now on display at the Library of Congress. This map, from 1602, has China at the center, and is known as the first map in Chinese to show the Americas.

- The Public Doman Blog has a very interesting post up, "Farenheit 451 ... Book Burning as done by lawyers." They provide a link to some of the major works that would have entered the public domain this year if copyright laws hadn't been extended.

- An update on the legal kerfuffle over Kafka's papers.

- Another exchange on Robert Darnton's "Google and the New Digital Future" (commented on here), this one with the leadership of the Authors Guild. It's interesting that the authors call the current marketplace for out-of-print books "nil" - I think all the used booksellers out there would find this a little surprising ...

- Publishing Perspectives tackles the question of why so few books by foreign authors are ever published in the U.S. (it's not what you think).

- The University of Pennsylvania has acquired the papers of Chaim Potok; the author left the materials to his alma mater in his will.

- From Early Modern at the Beinecke, a nice post on the font possibly used in the First Folio.

- The new NYPL website has debuted. And they've got a nice online exhibit to mark the 250th anniversary of the publication of Candide.

- Paul Collins looks back at Victorian fears of a French invasion via a Channel Tunnel.

- From BibliOdyssey, images from a c. 1420 Italian technology manuscript.

- A very surprising and neat find during the Jamestown excavations recently.

- Tarquin Tar's Bookcase takes a look at the Fortsas Hoax (including a link back to my 2008 Fortsas Lives! post from when I debuted the Fortsas LT library).

- Not books, but art: Polish police have recovered the nation's only Monet painting, stolen in September 2000 from a Poznan museum. A suspected, identified only as "Robert Z.", has been arrested.

Reviews

- The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt: review by Vanessa Thorpe in The Guardian.

- The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova: review by Clea Simon in the Boston Globe; Simmy Richman in The Independent; John O'Connell in the Times.

- Athanasius Kircher by Joscelyn Godwin: review by James Stevens Curl in the THE.

- The Marketplace of Ideas by Louis Menand: review by Michael S. Roth in the LATimes.

- The Infinity of Lists by Umberto Eco: review by Michael Dirda in the Washington Post.

- Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier: review by Ron Charles in the Washington Post.

- A Brave Vessel by Hobson Woodward: review by Tom Dillon in the Winston-Salem Journal.

- The Devil in the Holy Water by Robert Darnton: review by Eve Ottenberg in In These Times.

- Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin: reviews by Jacob Heilbrunn in the NYTimes; Alan Wolfe in the Washington Post; Peter Stothard in the Times.