Sunday, August 21, 2011

Links & Reviews

- Duke University Libraries received its largest gift ever this week, $13.6 million from university trustee David Rubenstein, managing director of The Carlyle Group. The donation will support the Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections library.

- Over at Past is Present, Doris O'Keefe highlights some really fascinating early 19th-century government documents.

- The Boston Athenaeum announced this week that it will digitize a selection of its extensive Confederate imprints collection.

- The recent launch of Old Bailey Online, a searchable database of the Old Bailey's criminal trials from 1674-1913, garnered some coverage this week in the NYTimes.

- New from Penn, the Seymour de Ricci Bibliotheca Britannica Manuscripta Digitized Archive, some 60,000 digitized research cards for de Ricci's unfinished census of pre-1800 manuscripts in Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

- J.L. Bell notes the release of the Bostonian Society's new iPhone app, Mapping Revolutionary Boston (a fantastic idea).

- On NPR this week Robert Siegel talked to Hugh Thomas about his new book The Golden Empire: Spain, Charles V, and the Creation of America.

- A document thought at one time to be an autobiography by Butch Cassidy was revealed this week to be not that, although it's still not clear just what it is.

- An Abraham Lincoln letter was returned to the National Archives this week; it'd been "removed" from the collections at an unknown date.

- From 8vo, photos and a writeup of what looks like a fabulous visit to Hay-on-Wye (I'm more than a little jealous!).

- In today's NYTimes, David Streitfeld looks at the growth industry of pay-for-review schemes.

- The Harbour Bookshop in Dartmouth, England is likely to close next month after more than 60 years in operation. It was founded by Christopher Robin Milne.

- The first statue of Charles Dickens [in England - see comment] is planned for Guildhall Square, Portsmouth; it's to be installed by next year to celebrate the bicentennial of the author's birth.

Reviews

- Willard Sterne Randall's Ethan Allen; reviews by James Zug in the Boston Globe and François Furstenberg in Slate.

- Charles C. Mann's 1493; review by Ian Morris in the NYTimes.

- Hugh Thomas' Golden Empire; review by Jonathan Yardley in the WaPo.