- Some fantastic news this week: the University of Cambridge has begun the digitization of Charles Darwin's scientific library, with 330 of 1480 titles available digitally along with transcriptions of Darwin's marginalia.
- The National Library of Medicine released Medicine in the Americas, a digital library of more than 350 works of early American medicine.
- I mentioned it on Twitter this week, but in case you missed it, there's a profile of Morgan Library curator John Bidwell in the NYTimes.
- Ian Crouch reports on The Book Bench about a Dutch political group's planned burning of Lawrence Hill's novel Someone Knows My Name (published originally as The Book of Negroes and in Holland as Het Negerboek).
- While I'm quite sure "indepthly" is not in fact a word, KSPR's report on the civil wrongful death suit in the Rolland Comstock case is worth watching and reading. Jury selection is expected to begin on Monday, and both sides are claiming they'll bring new evidence to the case. An earlier report is here.
- Applications for this year's New Scholars program at the Bibliographical Society of America are due by 31 July. Info here.
- I haven't had a chance to listen yet, but I've downloaded and am looking forward to Digital Humanities and the Future of Libraries, a talk at the NYPL.
- Quite a good deal on the Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, available through 31 August. Save up your pennies!
- At Anchora, a look at provenance notes and marks of readership in early printed copies of Chaucer.
- Chris at Book Hunter's Holiday has found some amusing little anecdotes on book collecting in a private library catalog from 1885.
- A book believed stolen from a Greek university library in 2003 was found in a stairwell last week.
- In the NYTimes, Fernanda Santos writes about the increasingly common trend of schools eliminating librarian positions to cut costs.
- CHNM's new project PressForward got lots of buzz on Twitter this week, and also a short writeup in the NYTimes' ArtsBeat blog.
- Booktryst highlights a new exhibit at the Folger: Fame, Fortune, & Theft: The Shakespeare First Folio. Looks like the catalog's a goodie too, I'm going to have to hunt up a copy. Rebecca Rego Barry also comments on the exhibit (and the catalog!) at the Fine Books Blog.
- From the WSJ this week, a piece on the complex logistics of the imminent move of the Barnes Foundation's art into Philadelphia.
- Don't miss Alexis Madrigal's piece "What Big Media Can Learn from the New York Public Library."
- British book thief Sean Cowie was sentenced to six months in jail after his tale of being ill with cancer turned out to have been entirely fabricated.
- On the Telegraph book blog, Mark Mason asks how many books you'll read in your lifetime.
- News from ESTC: links to Proquest's Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Gale/Cengage's Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) are now available through the ESTC public access site via the British Library: http://estc.bl.uk. Links to ESTC titles in Google Books are going to be added, apparently (no word on Internet Archive titles, but hopefully those will be added as well). Subscriptions are required to view the EEBO and ECCO titles.
- Kaivan Mangouri writes in the Boston Globe on how some Boston-area bookshops are "coping" with the new normal.
- From Bookride, a discussion of booksellers' descriptions and some dubious uses of the descriptor "fine" (among other oft-used terms).
Reviews
- David Reynolds' Mightier than the Sword; review by Andrew Delbanco in the NYTimes.
- David Pearson's Books as History; review by Stephen J. Gertz at Booktryst.
- Paul Lockhart's The Whites of Their Eyes; review by David Shribman in the Boston Globe.
- Michael Sims' The Story of Charlotte's Web; review by Valerie Sayers in the Washington Post.
