Apologies for the slightly belated links & reviews this week. Without further ado:
- Sam Anderson's essay "'What I Really Want is Someone Rolling Around in the Text'" in the NYT Magazine has some interesting things to say about marginalia in the electronic age, and I really like his final lines: "What I really want is someone rolling around in the text. I want noticing. I want, in short, marginalia, everywhere, all the time. Suddenly that seems deliriously possible."
- Albert H. Small has given a large collection of material relating to the history of Washington, D.C. to George Washington University, as well as funds for the construction of a museum.
- Rebecca Rego Barry notes on the FB&C blog a "sleeper auction" in Kansas City, where the collection of Eugene DeGruson was sold on 26 February. A Walt Whitman manuscript poem sold for $55,500.
- Ralph Gardner profiles Bauman Rare Books in the WSJ.
- The Bridwell Library at SMU has acquired a collection of 115 catechisms dating from 1493 to 1830, including 19 unique copies. The collection was put together by Bruce McKittrick Rare Books.
- Ron Chernow's Washington has won the New-York Historical Society's American History Book Prize.
- The finalists for this year's George Washington Book Prize were announced last week by Washington College: they are Pauline Maier's Ratification; Jack Rakove's Revolutionaries; and Alan Taylor's The Civil War of 1812. The winner will be announced on 25 May.
- AbeBooks Europe has acquired ZVAB.
- I had somehow missed the news that ABC will be airing a pilot for a show which features Poe as a detective in pre-Civil War Boston (as well as the "BOSTON?!" backlash from Poe-ites elsewhere). Paul Lewis makes the Hub's case in a Boston Globe essay.
- In the March Perspectives on History, Anthony Grafton writes on culturnomics and new trends in digital historical scholarship. Very much worth a read.
- A new exhibition at Old Palace at the Minster in York focuses on the lost library of Alcuin of York, a famed 8th-century scholar.
- Jennifer Howard reports on new methods and models for university presses (based on a new AAUP report). Howard also filed a story this week on how the Borders bankruptcy may affect university presses.
- An update to the Private Library's post on auction catalogs and bibliographies.
- A census of Kelmscott Chaucers put together by William S. and Sylvia Holton Peterson is now available from Oak Knoll Press.
Reviews
- The Caxton Club's new volume of essays about association copies, Other People's Books; review by Rebecca Rego Barry in Fine Books Notes.
- Dan Cohen's talk at last week's Digital Public Library of America planning meeting, on "what scholars want" from the DPLA.
- Douglas Waller's Wild Bill Donovan; review by Louis Menand in the New Yorker.
- Over at Res Obscura, a defaced (or, more accurately, de-arsed) 1710 herbal and its author, William Salmon.
- Edward Dolnick's The Clockwork Universe and Laura Snyder's The Philosophical Breakfast Club; review by Alan Hirshfeld in the WSJ. Snyder's book is also reviewed by Alexander Fabri for The Daily Beast.
- Imogen Robertson's Instruments of Darkness; review by Jason Goodwin in the NYTimes.
- Rebecca Hunt's Mr. Chartwell; review by Ron Charles in the WaPo.
- Julia Miller's Books Will Speak Plain; review by Chela Metzger in The Bonefolder.
- Maya Jasanoff's Liberty's Exiles; reviewed by Linda Colley in the Guardian;
