- Accompanying the full profile of Rare Book School in the NYT this week, Jennifer Schuessler also posted "The Rare Book Scholar's Secret Weapon," a look at the Hinman Collator.
- Jennifer Howard posted an initial installment about her Rare Book School visit this summer (when I was very pleased to have the chance to meet her in real life, instead of just on Twitter), "But Is It a Book?" This one focuses on a conversation Howard had with Michael Suarez about the nature of the book and where eBooks fit. It's a great post, and I look forward to the rest of the series.
- The Lilly Library has unveiled a large digital collection, The War of 1812 in the Collections of the Lilly Library. See also the press release.
- Something to add to your reading list: Ted Scheinman's essay at The Millions, "Tristram Shandy, Dilettante: Laurence Sterne and the Pleasures of Attention-Deficit Literature".
- Over at Booktryst this week, a series of posts highlighting rare book trade ads from 1902. They start here.
- Esther Yi has an Atlantic.com post about the Digital Public Library of America, which this week received a $1 million grant from the NEH.
- At The Collation, Erin Blake documents "How (not) to mend a tear."
- HRC archivist Micah Erwin writes about his attempt to use crowd-sourced knowledge to identify manuscript scraps used as binder's waste. Also see the Flickr page where the scraps are being posted for discussion.
- Anthony Tedeschi profiles some of the first books printed in Maori at Antipodean Footnotes. He also documents how early printers of Maori texts set up their typecases.
- In the NYT Magazine this week, Ronen Bergman's "A High Holy Whodunit" covers the mysterious history of the Aleppo Codex, and profiles some of those still working to find the missing section of the text.
- The "You've Got Mail" series on the Houghton Library blog goes all the way back to Hellenistic Egypt this week, with a 2nd-century letter on papyrus.
- An archivist at the Watt Library in Greenock, Scotland found a cache of old book stashed in a cupboard behind a file cabinet.
- From Biblioguerilla, a 1556 copy of a Spanish translation of Erasmus in sheets.
- The NYT's Campaign Stops blog has added a "Historically Corrected" category, a project of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College.
- A.J. Jacobs admits he has a blurbing problem, and Colson Whitehead shares his rules on "How to Write."
- A first English edition of Machiavelli's The Prince failed to meet expectations at an Aylsham auction this week; bidding only reached £15,000, under the £25,000-30,000 estimate.
- Over on the Ticknor Society blog, a look at The Cost Books of Ticknor and Fields and their Predecessors, 1832-1858, including a dissection of one of the entries in the book.
- From the Exeter Working Papers in Book History series, Ian Maxted and Ron Impey examine two early printed books in the Exeter collections in which the printer "seizes the opportunity to answer or forestall criticsm."
Reviews
- David Rees' How to Sharpen Pencils; review by Bruce McCall in the NYTimes.
- Russell Potter's Pyg; review by Frances Stead Sellers in the WaPo.
- Paul Thomas Murphy's Shooting Victoria; review by John Sutherland in the NYTimes.
- Deborah Harkness' Shadow of Night; review by Paula Woods in the LATimes.
- Jacques Bonnet's Phantoms on the Bookshelves; review by Michael Dirda in the WaPo.
