Sunday, April 11, 2010

Links & Reviews

- Tom Post has a Forbes blog post up about visiting the NY Antiquarian Book Fair - good stuff!

- A remarkable copy of the works of St. Augustine will be sold at Sotheby's Paris 18 May auction, the Guardian reports. The ten volumes are heavily annotated by an unidentified "incredible theologian," as a Sotheby's expert puts it. The set is estimated to fetch between €200,000 and €300,000.

- Colin Dickey's essay "On Bones and Libraries" in the Lapham Quarterly Roundtable is a must-read. [h/t Rebecca at Fine Books Blog]

- Over at bookn3rd, Laura's second post on birds in medieval manuscripts includes images of religious and moral texts.

- Edmund King points out that some Ohio State University Press backlist titles are now available online as PDFs, including three of Richard Altick's major titles (among them The Scholar Adventurers).

- A travel diary by Marshal Alexandre MacDonald, the Duke of Tarentum, recounting his first trip from France to Scotland in 1825, has been published for the first time as The French MacDonald.

- The Economist argues, just before the 300th anniversary of the Copyright Act, that copyright terms have gotten too long, and should be shortened. Amen! [via Ian]

- A first edition of Kipling's Jungle Book, inscribed by the author to his daughter Josephine, has been found in Wimpole Hall, a Cambridgeshire National Trust property. Josephine died of pneumonia at age six, and the book is believed to have passed to her sister Elsie, in whose collection it was discovered.

- Even if the Google Books settlement goes through, Google may not be out of the woods: visual artists are now threatening to sue.

Reviews

- E.O. Wilson's Anthill: reviews by Molly Gloss in the Washington Post; Barbara Kingsolver in the NYTimes.

- Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo's Conman: How One Man Fooled the Modern Art Establishment: review by David Pallister in the Guardian.

- David Remnick's The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama; review by Garry Wills in the NYTimes.

- Christopher Heaney's The Cradle of Gold: review by Alvaro Vargos Llosa in the WSJ.

- James Shapiro's Contested Will: review by Saul Rosenberg in the WSJ.