Sunday, March 20, 2011

Links & Reviews

- Some really fantastic offerings this week from the American Antiquarian Society. They launched a brand-new Illustrated Inventory of Paul Revere's Works (see their blog post about the inventory here), which is remarkable for its scope and ease of use (also, it's beautiful). And they've been promoting their great Adopt-A-Book event for this year. The catalog of potential adoptions includes something for everyone; I even found a pair of early newspapers from a town right near where I grew up, and adopted them.

- The University of Michigan Special Collections library is offering some 300 lots of duplicate and other materials by closed-bid sale. Bids are due by 5 p.m. on 25 March, so browse away!

- CHNM's Scripto crowdsourced-transcription project has launched, with the Papers of the War Department. I've applied for an account and look forward to trying out this transcription method.

- At Inside Higher Ed, Serena Golden interviews Ann Blair about her book Too Much to Know.

- Rick Ring notes the copy of Memoir of the Northern Kingdom at Trinity's Watkinson Library. I'm beginning to think I might need to do a little census of copies of this pamphlet, see if any out there have interesting marginalia or provenance.

- Linda Holmes' NPR essay "In Praise of Cultural Omnivores" is well worth a read.

- The Andrew W. Mellon foundation has awarded a $48,500 grant for a redesign of the English Short-Title Catalog.

- Artist and illustrator Barry Moser is profiled in today's Boston Globe.

Reviews

- James Gleick's The Information; review by Geoffrey Nunberg in the NYTimes.

- Harlow Giles Unger's American Tempest; review by Chuck Leddy in the Boston Globe.

- John Stubbs' Reprobates; review by Nicola Shulman in the Telegraph.