- The third issue of the Journal of Digital Humanities has been released: it includes a great essay by Sarah Werner, "Where Material Book Culture Meets Digital Humanities."
- New from Brown University, CURIO: Imaging rare, unusual, and intriguing objects at the Brown University Library. [h/t BibliOdyssey]
- Robert Darnton continues the discussion over NYPL renovation plans with an essay in the NYRB, "The Turning Point."
- Jasper Fforde talks to the Washington Post about his new book and what's coming next.
- At Book Patrol, "The Biblio-Surrealism of Jonathan Wolstenholme."
- In the sale of property from the Brooke Astor estate, held 24-25 September, her reading library in ~711 volumes sold for $74,500 (over estimates of just $3,000-5,000).
- Heirs of early Supreme Court justice James Iredell won a suit this week to recover the papers of their ancestor, loaned to the North Carolina State Archives a century ago. Family members are asking for a hefty payment to allow the papers to stay at the archives. [h/t Everett Wilkie on ExLibris]
- From The Public Domain Review, Jonathan Lamb on "The Implacability of Things."
- Amherst College has mounted digital scans of their Emily Dickinson manuscripts [h/t Molly Schwartzburg]
- William Cronon's new AHA presidential column, "How Long Will People Read History Books?" is well worth a read.
- Via Colin Dickey, "The Great New England Vampire Panic," from this month's Smithsonian Magazine.
- The Penn Provenance project posted a letter from book thief Guglielmo Libri to his lawyer, Henri Celliez.
- The absolutely remarkable case of the thefts from the Girolamini Library continues to broaden in scope and severity. The Italian bookselling organization ALAI has now suspended member Luca Cableri of Studio Bibliografico Wunderkammer, and urges all who purchased anything from Cableri or from booksellers Stephane Delsalle or Maurizio Bifolco to contact Col. Raffaele Mancino. Jennifer Lowe offered additional updates on ExLibris: this week four more people were arrested in connection to the conspiracy: booksellers Cableri, Delsalle and Bifolco, plus Fr. Sandro Marsano (former curator of the Girolamini Library), who reportedly allowed people to remove the books from the Girolamini Library. Cableri is believed to have been the contact who arranged for the sale of stolen books at the auction house Zisska and Schauer (they were withdrawn prior to sale). Delsalle is believed to have assisted de Caro in choosing the volumes to steal, and Bifolco reportedly sold many stolen volumes. Other reports out this week indicate that de Caro has now confessed to conspiring with Delsalle to steal books from other libraries, with thefts dating back to 1999. Those libraries include the library of Don Povolo of Verona, the Biblioteca Capitolare di Padova, and the library at Monte Cassino.
Other updates reported by Jennifer Lowe (who's been on top of this story from the beginning, and to whom all of us non-Italian-speakers are greatly indebted) include news that two stolen books from the Girolamini Library were given by de Caro to Senator Marcello Dell'Uttri, organizer of the Milan Book Fair. And late this week came word that de Caro is believed to have stolen a copy of Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius from the National Library of Naples and left a forged copy in its place.
Reviews
- The new NYRB edition of Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici; review by Brian Patrick Eha in the LA Review of Books.
- David Quammen's Spillover; review by Richard Preston in the WSJ.
- Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise; review by Alex Koppelman in the LATimes.
