First, a couple things I forgot to mention last weekend:
- The May Fine Books Notes is out, with a feature by Nick Mamatas on Lovecraft's Providence, Nick Basbanes on collecting ephemera, Ian McKay on recent auction highlights, and more.
- A special issue of Common-place is up as well, "American Food in the Age of Experiment," edited by David Shields. Great content, as always!
- Ian has a sum-up of last weekend's MARIAB fair in Wilmington, MA.
- Booktryst has the great story of bookseller Vic Zoschak's eBay find of five hand-written ledgers containing the records of the Senate Appropriations Committee from 1879 to 1909. The ledgers will be going home to the Library of the Senate.
- New Tumblr: Biblio-Tech, on, well, biblio- and tech- stuff!
- Some spaces are still available in this summer's London Rare Book School courses.
- Yale announced this week that millions of digital images of objects in its museum, archive and library collections will be made available to the public through a new open-access policy. More than 250,000 images are already online in the new Yale Digital Commons catalog.
- One of those great book-find stories this week: a South African tourist picked up a €3 book at a Limerick flea market and sold it for more than €8,000. It was a first edition of Wuthering Heights.
- More from Yale: Joanne Freeman's American Revolution course is online at YouTube, in 25 lectures. [h/t @RagLinen]
- Harvard professor Leah Price is profiled in the Harvard Gazette about her work on books as physical objects: she's got a book coming out later this year, Reader's Block: The Use of Books in Nineteenth-Century Britain.
Reviews
- Suzanne Marrs, ed. What There is to Say We Have Said: Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell; review by Richard Eder in the Boston Globe.
- Geraldine Brooks' Caleb's Crossing; reviews by Matthew Gilbert in the Boston Globe and Jane Smiley in the NYTimes.
- N. John Hall's Correspondence: An Adventure in Letters; review by Rebecca Rego Barry in Fine Books Notes.
- Molly Peacock's The Paper Garden; review by Andrea Wulf in the NYTimes.
- Erik Larson's In the Garden of Beasts; review by Philip Kerr in the Washington Post.
