- During the first RBS session in June a Virginia Public Radio reporter visited and recorded a feature about the school and its people. The seven-minute segment is now available online (mp3).
- In the San Diego Reader, Jeannine Schinto has a retrospective on the four sales Sotheby's sales of the James S. Copley library, summing it up quite well: "[Bidders] paid big money for a few choice items, underpaid for others, and sat on their hands for far too much of the rest."
- Don't miss Monica Porter's Telegraph piece "'84 Charing Cross Road' Revisited" - it's well worth a read.
- After a week of testimony and deliberation, a civil jury determined that Alberta Comstock, the ex-wife of murdered book collector Rolland Comstock, was responsible for his death. They awarded $125,000 to Faith Stocker, the daughter of Alberta Comstock who had brought the civil suit. The criminal investigation continues.
- From McSweeney's this week, Ben Shattuck reports in from a Civil War reenactment.
- PW highlighted the Book Inscription Project (which seems less active than it might be, but is still quite interesting).
- California book dealer Michael Hollander, contacted by a Hawaiian man offering to sell rare books, ended up assisting in the arrest of the man and the return of the books to the library of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, from which the 23-year-old had stolen them.
- Molly Peacock previews her new book The Paper Garden (on botanical collage-maker Mary Granville Delany), in The Telegraph.
- The Lehman Collection of music manuscripts, currently on deposit at the Morgan Library, is up for sale, NPR reports.
- John Overholt alerted me to a newly-cataloged collection at Houghton, researcher Hans Kasten's collection of records and documents related to the case of Johann Georg Heinrich Tinius (1764-1846), a Prussian bibliophile convicted of murder in 1813.
- The July AE Monthly is out; it includes news that the reclusive half-sister of William Andrews Clark, Jr. (Huguette Marcelle Clark) left funds at her death to turn her Santa Barbara, CA mansion into a museum for her art and rare book collections.
Reviews
- Thomas Schaeper's Edward Bancroft; review by Jack Rakove in TNR.
- Amanda Foreman's A World on Fire; review by Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the NYTimes. Foreman also has an essay in the WSJ, "Turning Messy History Into a Tale."
