Sorry for the delay this week. Here's some of what's been going on:
- In case you missed it in my auction post, Jane Austen's turquoise/gold ring sold for £152,450 at auction last week.
- Heather Wolfe has a Collation post on cadel initials (with some great images).
- At Bookplate Junkie, Lew Jaffe examines an early American bookplate in his collection, that of Georgia doctor Alexander Fothringham.
- Newly available, "The Poetry of the Gentleman's Magazine, 1731-1800." Includes searchable databases of titles, authors, and first lines.
- From Booktryst, a great provincial booksellers' advertisement from 1770, and a look at a forged Poe signature.
- Glenn Fleishman writes for the Economist about those faux deckle edges publishers sometimes include on modern hardcover books.
- Michael Witmore and Robin Valenza's "What Do People Read During a Revolution?" sparked interesting responses from Joe Adelman (here) and Ben Schmidt (here and here).
- At the JCB books blog, an update on the effort to decipher Rogers Williams' shorthand.
- Recent theft reports via the ABAA security blog: two large books have gone missing from the offices of the Edinburgh World Heritage Trust Library, and two manuscripts and an early printed book have been reported stolen from St. John's University.
- Several key decisions on copyright were handed down last week by the Supreme Court of Canada. Good rundown here.
- A 1714 version of Vivaldi's "Orlando Furioso" has been located among Vivaldi's papers in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Turin; it had previously been incorrectly cataloged as a later revision of the opera (which was originally published and performed in 1727).
- Michael Dirda writes in The American Scholar about one of his favorite places to browse for books.
- The upcoming "Last Book Sale" at Larry McMurtry's Booked Up, rated an overview article in the WSJ.
- A new (to me) useful database resource: British Armorial Bindings. Via The Collation.
- Over at Fonts in Use, a look at the Dunlap broadside printing of the Declaration of Independence.
- A small collection of Eliot Ness memorabilia will be sold at auction in September.
- Dave Eggers is featured in the NYTimes "By the Book" feature this week.
- From Eliga Gould in Foreign Policy, "How Did the British Press Cover the American Revolution?"
- Pamela Samuelson's "Reforming Copyright is Possible" is well worth a read.
- A large Gandhi archive was pulled from a Sotheby's auction last week after being sold directly to the Indian government for $1.1 million.
- A new short film introduces "Epilogue," a forthcoming documentary on the future of print culture.
- Rory Litwin at Library Juice posts an email sent to current MLIS students at St. Catherine's University (St. Paul, MN), announcing that after an academic reorganization the LIS program will be part of the business school.
- Over at Anchora, Adam G. Hooks deconstructs Ben Jonson's Workes.
Reviews
- Rebecca Stott's Darwin's Ghosts; review by Hugh Raffles in the NYTimes.
- Jefferson Morley's Snow-Storm in August; review by Fergus Bordewich in the WSJ.
- A.N. Wilson's The Elizabethans; review by James Shapiro in the NYTimes.
- Stephen Prothero's The American Bible; review by Stephen L. Carter in the WaPo.
- Philip McFarland's Mark Twain and the Colonel; review by Richard Zacks in the WSJ.
- Robert Bucholz and Joseph P. Ward's London: A Social and Cultural History, 1550-1750; review by Jonathan Yardley in the WaPo.
- Stephen Carter's The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln; review by Jonathan Shapiro in the LATimes.
- Steve Kemper's A Labyrinth of Kingdoms; review by Tim Jeal in the WSJ.
