- Everett Wilkie reported on ExLibris-L today that three of the "Transylvania Four": Charles Thomas Allen, Eric Borsuk, and Spencer Reinhard, were released from federal prison on Friday, 4 May. The fourth, Warren Lipka, is scheduled for release on 28 May.
- Former NARA curator Leslie Waffen was sentenced this week to 18 months in prison, followed by 2 years of supervised released. He was also ordered to pay a $10,000 fine. The AP's Jessica Gresko filed a piece this week recounting how Waffen's thefts came to be discovered.
- Neil Gaiman talked to the NYTimes about his reading habits; guaranteed to make you smile at one point or another.
- Analysts at the British Museum have determined that a John White map of the area around the Roanoke colony may include clues to the ultimate fate of the colony and its members. See the full report here [PDF].
- Draft pages of Antoine de Saint-Exupery's "The Little Prince" will go on sale at Paris' Artcurial auction house on 16 May.
- Sid Lapidus' talk at the recent New York Book Fair on the nature of book collecting is now online.
- Some crazy and incredibly sad stuff going on in Canada, where Libraries and Archives Canada has been ordered to cut staff by 20% over three years (among other reductions). See an outline of the planned cuts here.
- Sarah Werner has posted the text of a talk she gave at the Geographies of Desire conference in late April, "Where Book Culture Meets Digital Humanities."
- From the AAS' Past is Present blog, Jackie Penny writes about finding Ansel Adams' name in the visitor logs.
- In Slate, E.O. Wilson talks to Liz Else about his new book The Social Conquest of Earth.
- Trinity College's Watkinson Library has acquired a Second Folio.
- It's been fascinating to watch the story about the discovery of a Paul Revere print at Brown make the rounds; this week it was featured in the New York Times.
- From The Millions, "Are eReaders Really Green?"
- A Voynich 100 conference will be held at Rome's Villa Mondragone on Friday, 11 May, to mark the 100th anniversary of the "discovery" of the Voynich Manuscript. Any readers going?
- J.L. Bell highlights a Ben Franklin letter which suggests Franklin may have been the American to write a description of tofu ("Tau-fu").
- A new crowd-sourcing project from the Bodleian Library, "What the score at the Bodleian?" aims to allow general users to assist with the cataloging of music scores.
- Also on crowd-sourcing, don't miss Jennifer Howard's Chronicle article, "Breaking Down Menus Digitally, Dish by Dish."
- Caleb Crain offers "A New Plan for the New York Public Library."
- A new issue of Common-place is up, with three feature essays on political history.
- May's AE Monthly is out.
- A report by NARA's inspector general on missing "top secret" materials at the Washington National Records Center is now available. It makes for fairly interesting reading, actually.
- William St Clair talked to The Browser about five books he considers key to the history of reading during the Romantic period.
Reviews
- Hilary Mantel's Bring up the Bodies; reviews by James Wood in The New Yorker, Janet Maslin in the NYTimes.
- Robert Caro's The Passage of Power; reviews by Bill Clinton in the NYTimes; Michiko Kakutani in the NYTimes;
- Ian Maclean's Scholarship, Commerce, Religion; review by Scott McLemee at Inside Higher Ed.
- G. Thomas Tanselle's Book-Jackets; review by James Ferguson in the TLS.
- Thomas Penn's Winter King; review by Nick Owchar in the LATimes.
- Peter Silverman's Leonardo's Lost Princess; review by T. Rees Shapiro in the WaPo.
- Charles Mann's 1491 and 1493; review by Jeremy Adelman in Foreign Affairs.
