First, my apologies for the lack of action around here lately. It's been a terribly busy few months, and the next couple are looking even more jam-packed. It's good-busy (lots of writing projects, conferences, travel, and of course the Boston Book Fair in a few weeks), but it's busy. I've got several backlogged blog posts still percolating their way up to the surface, though, and I hope to be able to at least get back to a 2-3-posts-per-week schedule in the reasonably near future.
In the meantime, this week's links and reviews:
- One of the posts I still need to finish writing is about the AAS symposium last month to mark the publication of Roger Stoddard and David Whitesell's bibliography of American poetry published through 1820. Garrett Scott has posted his thoughts on the weekend, and they're your must-read for the week.
- Officials at the National Library of Wales have discovered what may be the earliest illustration of Henry VIII, shown as a young boy crying at the deathbed of his mother.
- Michael Dirda's "Waving Not Drowning" is another definitely-should-read for this week.
- J. L. Bell's book-length historic resource study, George Washington's Headquarters and Home - Cambridge, Massachusetts [large PDF] is now available for download. See John's post at Boston1775 for more info on the document.
- An excerpt from Ian Sansom's Paper: An Elegy appears in The Independent.
- The incredibly long-running lawsuit over certain Kafka papers (and those of his friend Max Brod) ended in Tel Aviv this week; a judge ruled that they should go to the Israeli National Library, and officials there say they plan to catalog the papers and make them available online.
- Over at Public Domain Review, Arika Okrent discusses the wonderfully umlaut-ed "universal language" of Volapük.
- More evidence has emerged that that recently-trumpeted "Jesus was married" papyrus fragment is probably a (very) modern forgery.
- Another article in English on the Girolamini Library (and related) thefts, this time from the Washington Times. The total number of books believed stolen from the Girolamini Library may exceed 4,000. The article includes quotes from ABAA Security Committee chair Garrett Scott, and word that de Caro is now believed to have stolen both copies of Galileo's 1606 work Le Operazione del compasso geometrico e militate known in Italy, at the University of Padua and at Monte Cassino.
- This week Georgia governor Nathan Deal announced that funding had been found to keep the Georgia Archives open, but that five full-time employees will still lose their jobs as of 1 November. Deal also said that he plans to ask the legislature to transfer oversight of the archives from the Secretary of State's office to the University System of Georgia.
- From Jennifer Howard this week, first a Chronicle report, "Ditch the Monograph," and a related blog post, "Let Content Dictate Form."
- David Mitchell is the subject of the NYTimes' "By the Book" column this week. I like his answer to the "favorite author" question.
- Over on the Oak Knoll blog, Rob Fleck posts about moving 6,200 books from Chevy Chase back to Oak Knoll HQ in Delaware.
Reviews
- James McPherson's War on the Waters; review by Howell Raines in the WaPo.
- David Quammen's Spillover; review by Sonia Shah in the NYTimes.
- Jill Lepore's The Story of America; review by Julia Klein in the LATimes.
- Henry Weincek's Master of the Mountain; review by Annette Gordon-Reed in Slate.
- Simon Garfield's On the Map; review by Rachel Hewitt in the Guardian.
- Janet Wallach's The Richest Woman in America; review by Bethany McLean in the WaPo.
- John G. Turner's Brigham Young, Pioneer Prophet; review by Alex Beam in the NYTimes.
