Sunday, February 14, 2010

Links & Reviews

- Over at bookn3rd, Laura's started a series of posts on birds imagery in medieval manuscripts. I love this sort of thing, and will be waiting impatiently for the next installments.

- Tony Campbell notes that actor Fred Melamed told New York Magazine that he's writing a screenplay based on the Smiley map thefts.

- Countway's Jack Eckert reported on ExLibris this week: "The Center for the History of Medicine has joined with peer libraries to initiate a digital Medical Heritage Library. The Center will receive $400,000 over the next two years to digitize 10,000 rare books from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries that relate to the intersection of medicine and society. The initiative is funded by a $1.5 million award from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to the Open Knowledge Commons, a nonprofit organization dedicated to building a universal digital library for democratic access to information."

- J.L. Bell pours some more cold water on the "Constitution draft" news story that made the rounds last week.

- From BibliOdyssey, some lovely engravings of moths.

- A great project at Providence Public Library, where Rick Ring reports they're making a database of printer/bookseller/publisher images (about 1,000 of them!).

- There's a new exhibit at the Yale Law School library: "Reused, Rebound, Recovered: Medieval Manuscript Fragments in Law Book Bindings." It will run through May 2010.

- Libraries & the Cultural Record and its predecessor titles (Libraries & Culture and Journal of Library History) are now entirely available through JSTOR (with a subscription).

- Their owner has identified the original plantation ledger and several diaries used by William Faulkner as a source for names and themes in his novels. Sally Wolff-King, a lit professor at Emory, will be publishing a book on the findings in June (Ledgers of History: William Faulkner, an Almost Forgotten Friendship, and an Antebellum Diary). The original documents are now held at the University of North Carolina.

Reviews

- Marilyn Johnson, This Book is Overdue: review in the Boston Globe.

- Mary Beard, It's a Don's Life: review by Anthony Grafton in The New Republic.

- Woody Holton, Abigail Adams: review by Rosemary Zagarri in the Washington Post.

- Kathryn Allamong Jacob, King of the Lobby: review by Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post.

- Michael Kranish, Flight from Monticello; review by Robert K. Landers in the WSJ.

- Samuel Cohn, Jr., Cultures of Plague; review by Lauro Martines in the TLS.

- Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America: reviews by Robert Epstein in the Independent; Lucy Daniel in the Telegraph; Andrew Taylor, also in the Independent.