- Harvard's Radcliffe Institute has unveiled the digital exhibit Take Note, to accompany the 1-2 November conference on the same subject (for which registration is now open, and I'd encourage anyone who can attend to do so).
- A big win this week for fair use; federal judge Harold Baer ruled in favor of HathiTrust in the lawsuit filed against them by the Authors Guild. You can read the ruling here. I also recommend Kevin Smith's analysis of the decision, and Jennifer Howard's Chronicle report on the case.
- eBay seller Allan Formhals of Hampshire, England, has denied forging signatures on books he sold for thousands of dollars. Formhals says he advertised the books as "signed," not "signed by." The trial is ongoing.
- Dame Margaret Drabble's archive has been donated to the University of Cambridge. It comprises some 90 boxes of drafts, working papers, correspondence, and more.
- Nick Squires reported on the Girolamini Library thefts for The Telegraph, noting (as I mentioned last week) de Caro's replacement of stolen Galileo volumes with forged facsimiles, the removal of catalog cards to hide the thefts, and de Caro's, eh, let's call them embellishments, of his academic and employment record.
- Don't miss Brooke Palmieri's post at the Fine Books Blog on the sale of a copy of the 1605 Bodleian Library catalog.
- The Library of Congress has begun publishing Library of Congress Magazine, a bimonthly journal to highlight items from the Library's collections. You can download the first issue here.
- Texas A&M has received a $734,000 Mellon grant for the Early Modern OCR Project: the goal is to "develop new methods and tools to improve the digitization, transcription, and preservation of earl modern texts."
- From Notabilia, a very nice 18th-century Dutch ream wrapper label.
- Goran Proot posted the second installment in his The Collation series on the Dutch fingerprint, with some excellent and useful example images.
- Over at Past is Present, Jackie Penny offers a look at the packing and shipping process for the current Grolier Club exhibit. If you haven't yet read Edward Rothstein's NYT review of that exhibit, take the time and do so.
- I can't remember if I've posted this already or not, but even if I have, it bears repeating. FABS is running a new essay contest for the under-30 set: "American Book Collectors & Collecting from 1940 to the Present." Prize is $1,000 and publication in the FABS newsletter. Info here, via the Ticknor Society blog.
- Rebecca Rego Barry interviewed Selim Nahas, the founder of publisher Smith&Press, about their newly-published translation of the Nuremberg Chronicle.
- Heather Wolfe posted this week about the projects her students at last summer's Mellon Summer Institute in English Paleography at the Huntington Institute worked on, as "An exercise in collaborative editing." Good stuff (and the collaboration continues: comments on Heather's post enabled confirmation of a tricky word).
- From Lew Jaffe at Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie, Threats and Warnings on Bookplates, a new series: Part One, Part Two.
- Now available as freely-downloadable PDFs at the Otago University Research Archive: Keith Maslen's 2001 book Samuel Richardson of London, Printer: A Study of his Business Based on Ornament Use and Business Accounts and his recent update article, "Samuel Richardson of London, Printer: Further Extending the Canon." [h/t Antipodean Footnotes]
Reviews
- Henry Wiencek's Master of the Mountain; review by Jonathan Yardley in the WaPo.
- Timothy Egan's Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher; reviews by Gary Krist in the WaPo; Wayne Curtis in the WSJ.
