Apologies for the lack of a links & reviews post last weekend; I was traveling back from the SEA meeting in Savannah, and by the time I got home was too sleepy to get started on this. So consider this week's a double-feature (and I'll have more to say on SEA soon, too). If you want one perspective on Savannah in the meantime, as well as a link to the Twitter archive, see Rachel Herrmann's post over at The Junto.
- New: Manuscripts Online, a nifty search engine for written and early print culture in Britain through 1500.
- Another neat new resource: Six Degrees of Francis Bacon, on "reassembling the early modern social network."
- In a must-read post, Heather Wolfe takes a close look at a manuscript diary from the Folger collections and realizes that perhaps the authorial attribution of the diary had been mistaken at some point. Some great detective work here.
- A new Audubon exhibit (really the first installment of three) is now open at the New-York Historical Society. It was reviewed by Edward Rothstein in the NYTimes this week, and featured in the BBC Magazine.
- Some really great news this week: Dan Cohen has been named the executive director of the Digital Public Library of America. They couldn't have made a better choice. Dan posted about his decision to move to the DPLA here.
- An early Charlotte Brontë manuscript poem will go under the hammer at Bonhams on 10 April, and could fetch £40,000-45,000.
- John Palfrey writes in Library Journal about the importance of the first sale doctrine and how the digital shift has led to new, knotty issues in that area.
- If you'll be in Cambridge this summer, there's going to be what looks like a tremendously-interesting conference to celebrate the centenary of A.N.L. Munby, "'Floreat Bibliomania' - Great Collectors and their Grand Designs."
- The ABAA security blog has posted a list of books stolen from Lost Horizons Bookstore in Santa Barbara, CA.
- NARA hosted a presentation this week on the Landau-Savedoff thefts, which you can watch here (and I do recommend watching it if you can; it's well worth it).
- David Rubenstein has donated $10 million to the new Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mt. Vernon.
- Over at the Fine Books Blog, Zhenya Dzhavgova writes about the awesome efforts by booksellers and others to help out Blue Jacket Books in Xenia, OH, much-damaged by a burst water pipe.
- The Toronto Star reports today on what appears to be a severe reduction in acquisitions by Library and Archives Canada. Warning: includes some absolutely ridiculous statements by the head of LAC.
- Eric White has posted at CERL an introduction to and database of C15 print runs.
- Quite a strange story over a signed first edition of The Great Gatsby on offer by bookseller James Robert Cahill: William M. Hitchcock, son of the man to whom Fitzgerald signed the copy of the book, claims that the book was stolen from his home. The book was purchased by Cahill at a Bonhams auction in 2010 (lot description) for $61,000. The FBI reportedly investigated the case in 2012 but closed the case last month.
- Over on the Queens' Old Library Books Blog, a post by Lindsey Askin on Roger Ascham's marginalia.
- Erin Blake highlights a neat new Folger acquisition, one of ten theater "super-scrapbooks" that got away at the original sale, when the Folgers' agent bought the other nine.
- Newly-digitized at Houghton Library, a fascinating 1620s "gospel harmony," known as the Little Gidding Harmony.
- From the T Magazine blog, a profile of the very cool Monkey's Paw bookshop in Toronto (definitely on my list of places to visit someday!).
- In Slate, Matt Kirschenbaum offers a new preview of his forthcoming book Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing.
- Mark Hartsell guest-blogs on the LOC blog about scholars using Thomas Jefferson's books in the reading room.
- A lawsuit was filed this week by a Sherlock Holmes scholar, alleging that the detective is in the public domain and that the estate should not be able to continue to collect licensing fees.
- LATimes book critic David Ulin's essay "The weight of books" makes for essential reading for those of us with, um, many books.
- Over at the Religion in American History blog, Michael Altman offers up "Reading About the 'Hindoos' with John Adams," where he muses about John Adams' marginalia in Priestley's A Comparison of the Institutes of Moses with that of the Hindoos and Other Ancient Nations (scanned here).
- Via the Princeton Rare Books blog, a new study of the Kelmscott Chaucer copies at Princeton, by Robert J. Milevski.
- It was difficult to miss that photo of cat prints on a manuscript document which made the rounds recently. Emir O. Filipović, who took the original image, wrote about the experience over at The Appendix.
Reviews
- Susan Jacoby's The Great Agnostic; review by Jennifer Michael Hect in the NYTimes.
- Sandra Day O'Connor's Out of Order; review by Joan Biskupic in the WaPo.
- David D. Hall's Cultures of Print; review by David Gary at Function Follows Forme.
- Ernest Freeberg's Age of Edison; review by Wendy Smith in the LATimes.
- Andrew Pettegree's The Book in the Renaissance; review by David Gary at Function Follows Forme.
- Jonathon Keats' Forged; review by Catherine Schofield Sezgin at the ARCA blog.
- Jim Crace's Harvest; review by Philip Womack in The Telegraph.
