- The 51st New York Antiquarian Book Fair concludes today. The first dispatches from the floor indicate a very successful show so far!
- Profiles of LBJ biographer Robert Caro ran in both Esquire and the New York Times. Both are fascinating (and count me as one of those waiting very impatiently for May 1, when the next volume of Caro's work appears).
- The FB&C "Bright Young Things" series continued this week with a profile of Andrew Gaub of Bruce McKittrick Rare Books.
- Paul Collins writes in Slate about the history of threats to end Saturday mail delivery, and why that's probably just the beginning.
- If you haven't been following Caleb Crain's posts about the planned NYPL renovations, get reading.
- In other NYPL news, a $500,000 grant from The Polonsky Foundation will fund the digitization of documents from the Thomas Addis Emmet collection of American manuscripts.
- UC Riverside will mark the acquisition of its 3 millionth volume this week; Terry Belanger will give the keynote talk at the 18 April celebration.
- At Anchora this week, Adam G. Hooks notes some of the ongoing Shakespeare-related events at Yale this spring, and muses about the importance of one item in particular.
- Suzanne Fischer reported this week on the ongoing effort at Brown University to decipher Roger Williams' shorthand in an unidentified theological volume. Follow along with the process at the JCB Books Speak blog.
- Over at the AAS' blog, Past is Present, Caroline Sloat provides a history of the Society's seal. [For another "seal story," see my 2009 Beehive post about the MHS' device].
- From Salon, Alexander Zaitchik's "Amazon's $1 million secret" is entirely worth reading.
- Book designer Chip Kidd's TED talk on book design is very funny, but he's also got some important things to say about what the process of design means for the book as physical object (and what we lose with ebooks). [h/t Dave Gary]
- Harvard hosted a "strategic conversation" on the integration of libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs) - the Harvard Gazette has a writeup.
- Florike Egmond's post on "re-discovering" Gessner's animal drawings made the rounds this week, but for those who might have missed it, I add it here too.
- JK Rowling announced this week that her first non-Harry Potter book will be out this fall. It'll be titled The Casual Vacancy, which prompted a fantastic tweet from J.L. Bell.
Reviews
- Peter Carey's The Chemistry of Tears; review by Catherine Taylor in the Telegraph.
- Stanley Corngold's new translation of Goethe's The Sufferings of Young Werther; review by J.M. Coetzee in the NYRB.
- Lyndsay Faye's The Gods of Gotham; review by Ross King in the Washington Post.
- Richard Fortey's Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms; review by Dwight Garner in the NYTimes.
- E.O. Wilson's The Social Conquest of Earth; review by Colin Woodard in the Washington Post.
- I hesitate to even mention this book lest I accidentally get it any attention whatsoever, but David Barton's The Jefferson Lies is reviewed by Allen Pell Crawford in the Wall Street Journal.
