A rather delayed links and reviews, since I took some time away for the holidays. It was very nice to have a full week at home with my family, and I was delighted to be able to meet a couple of the new additions (my cousins are now having children!), enjoy an afternoon of sledding on the hill across from my grandparents' house where we all spent many many winter days when I was younger, and snuggle with my sister's new puppy. And of course there were more delicious meals than I can count, several peaceful days in which I got a great deal of reading done, and some great birding at my mom's feeders, which I had a devil of a time keeping sufficiently filled!
But now, back to business:
- Last week's "On the Media" featured a discussion with Scott Sherman about his Vanity Fair piece "The Long Good-Bye," on the 1962-3 New York City newspaper strike. Both the interview and the article are highly recommended (I don't know about you, but I had no idea how dramatic and important the consequences of this strike were).
- From the Chronicle, Jen Howard's "The Secret Lives of Readers", on scholarly interest in the history of the reading experience, is a must-read.
- Jennifer Schuessler's "The Paper Trail Through History" in the NYTimes is a good look at some of the neat work being done in what Schuessler says might be called "paperwork studies."
- Convicted signature forger Allan Formhals has been sentenced to ten months in prison.
- Steve Ferguson highlights the scrapbooks created by Princeton Librarian Frederic Vinton in the 1870s and 1880s, on such topics as the assassination of President Garfield and the New York City snowstorm of 1888.
- From Wired, a look at how the digital shift has changed the antiquarian book market.
- Andrew Scrimgeour, dean of libraries at Drew University, has a NYTimes essay about the care and handling of scholars' personal libraries after their deaths. If only were treated with as much respect as those Scrimgeour discusses!
- The Dallas Morning News profiles Don Hobbs, a collector of Sherlock Holmesiana in languages other than English (he's got about 11,000 volumes!).
- Sarah Werner recaps the three-day Teaching Book History workshop held at the Folger Library earlier this month. I enjoyed following the discussions on Twitter and Sarah's post is a good summary of the proceedings.
- Quite a surprising auction result for a thirty-volume set of Dickens' works sold at a Virginia auction in early December: the volumes fetched $70,800 (over pre-sale estimates of $2,500-4,000). To be fair, the collection did have a nice association: it was inscribed by Dickens to a friend.
- Tomorrow marks the 150th anniversary of day the Emancipation Proclamation took effect. The National Archives has posted a short film about the original document.
- In the Guardian, Joe Moran covers the Great Diary Project, a new effort at the Bishopsgate Institute to preserve British diaries.
- Over at The Junto, Seth Parry writes about finding a bible in the University of Chicago's Regenstein Library with an unexpectedly interesting and important provenance. I'm torn about this post: part of me is delighted that he got to experience the book in the way that he did, but the archivist/librarian in me thinks he ought to have taken it to Special Collections immediately upon discovering what it was, heh.
Reviews
- Kevin Phillips' 1775; review by Jack Rakove in TNR.
- John Glassie's A Man of Misconceptions; review by Jennifer Schuessler in the NYTimes.
- Don M. Hagist's British Soldiers, American War; review by J.L. Bell at Boston 1775.
- B.A. Shapiro's The Art Forger; review by Maxwell Carter in the NYTimes.
- Joyce Chaplin's Round About the Earth; review by Bruce Barcott in the NYTimes.
