- The Hyperallergenic blog is keeping a running update of damages at the National Museum in Cairo, and boingboing has some images of Egyptians forming human chains to protect the museum.
- Registration for the New England Archivists spring meeting is now open - the conference, "The Future of Archives," will be held at Brown University on 1-2 April.
- You have until 4 February to get the early bird registration prices for the Society of Early Americanists conference in Philadelphia on 3-5 March. This is shaping up to be a really excellent meeting, and I many to see many of this blog's readers there!
- In the NYTimes today, Geoff Nicolson writes on the "perils of literary profiling" (i.e. drawing conclusions about a person from the books listed on their Facebook page, or even what's on their shelves).
- Alex Beam writes in the Boston Globe about possible hangups in the Library of Congress acquisition of the Twitter archive.
- Mark Twain impersonators are having a good time of it these days!
- More from the NYTimes on the speculation that Mark Salter is the author of O.
- Launched this week: the Journal of Universal Rejection. More here.
- On the Princeton Rare Books blog, Stephen Ferguson has some great images of a c. 1605 writing table (called a "Renaissance iPad" by Edward Rothstein in his review of the Morgan's current diaries exhibition).
- A rather odd story from the Guardian about some Jonathan Swift letters which appear to contain examples of Swift writing in "baby talk."
- From the AAS blog, a fun inside look at their reading room "paper rituals".
- Lew Jaffe reports that sometimes the line between "English" and "American" bookplates can be a little hard to determine.
- Rebecca Rego Barry notes a new, redesigned edition of Tristram Shandy, which I've ordered.
- Bonham's London will sell a love letter from John Keats to Fanny Brawne at a March auction. The note is expected to fetch as much as £120,000.
- Techcrunch notes a new interactive publishing project, SocialBooks, which in effect makes a book into an iPad app, through which readers can share highlighted text, comments, &c. The first book released this way? The Bible.
- From Booktryst, a look at Goodspeed's 1933 advertisement in Fortune.
Reviews
- Ben Tarnoff's Moneymakers; review by Michael Washburn in the NYTimes.
- Charles Cumming's The Trinity Six; review by Allen Massie in the Scotsman.
- Edward Lengel's Inventing George Washington; review by Michael Kenney in the Boston Globe.
- John Thompson's Merchants of Culture; review by Jason Epstein in the NYRB.
- O: A Presidential Novel; review by Timothy Rutten in the LATimes.
