Apologies for the radio silence and the once-again epic roundup post of links and reviews. I've been down the delightful Rare Book School rabbit-hole for the last couple weeks, far too busy to manage to keep up with things here. But I've been saving up links and here they all are, before Google Reader goes away:
- Petrina Jackson from UVA Special Collections posted on their blog about the Rare Book School season there, which is great fun. (And yes, you can even see the back of my head in the final picture).
- Something not to be missed: Leah Price's essay "Books on Books," at the great site Public Books.
- New from Meredith Neuman at Clark University, Sermon Notebooks Online.
- Library and Archives Canada purchased the Sherbrooke Collection of War of 1812 documents at auction in London for $573,000.
- A new study suggests that the Voynich Manuscript may actually contain meaningful text, but skeptics remain unconvinced.
- Jerry Morris has posted about the process of cataloging (and recataloging) the library of James Boswell (on LibraryThing).
- Jennifer Lowe pointed out this week some new information on the de Caro thefts in Italy: recent police raids on bookshops in Florence, Rome, Milan, and Turin resulted in the recovery of more stolen books.
- A proof copy of the first bifolium from the Kelmscott Chaucer was up for grabs last week at PBA Galleries, but went unsold.
- Hathi Trust and the DPLA have announced a partnership, which will make some 3.5 million public-domain books available through the DPLA site.
- A Sternean mystery (the date of the original publication of the first volumes of Tristram Shandy) has been solved at last.
- The BL acquired several lots at the sale of the Mendham Collection.
- Yale's recent acquisition of the Anthony Taussig collection of legal books and manuscripts is highlighted in the NYTimes.
- New work on William Henry Ireland? Yes, please! Heather Wolfe and Arnold Hunt report on Shakespeare's personal library as curated by Ireland in his forgeries.
- In the LATimes Jacket Copy blog, Hector Tobar reports on Matthew Haley's recent comments about the state of the book trade in the digital age.
- Founders Online launched earlier this month, and there was a report on this in the Washington Post. J.L. Bell has a quick note on this here, including fears for the long-term health of the NHPRC.
- A copy of the first newspaper printing of the Declaration of Independence sold this week at Robert Siegel Auction Galleries for $632,500, the largest sum ever paid for a historic newspaper. More on this here. The buyer was David Rubenstein.
- German authorities have recovered more than 15,000 books stolen from libraries (including the Bad Arolsen library) by a former official in the Hessian Ministry of Science. Some 2,000 books remain to be returned to their owners.
- On the Princeton Graphic Arts blog, Julie Mellby gives some love to the twenty-one artists who designed engravings for Baskerville's 1773 edition of Orlando Furioso.
- Nate Pedersen interviewed Joseph Felcone about his Printing in New Jersey 1754-1800: A Descriptive Bibliography.
- The National Archives will open a new David M. Rubenstein Gallery and Visitor Orientation Plaza this fall.
- Starting on 15 July, Guernsey's will be holding a seven-day sale of the Harrisburg Collection, some 8,000 items purchased by a former mayor with an eye toward creating a number of museums around the city.
- Ralph Gardner recently visited the Grolier Club and wrote about his trip in the WSJ.
- Four volumes of a copy of Don Quixote once owned by Thomas Jefferson failed to sell this week at a Virginia auction.
- All the libraries and museums in the United States, mapped. [h/t Tom Scheinfeldt]
- From the BBC Magazine, a report on early fashionista Mattheus Schwarz.
- Several books were reported stolen from Wentworth & Leggett Rare Books in North Carolina. See the full list and full contact information here.
- Peter Steinberg writes on the MHS' Beehive blog about some great detective work he's been doing to identify and reconnect pamphlets removed from Harbottle Dorr's newspaper volumes.
- Over at Booktryst, Stephen Gertz highlights a nice association copy of Common Sense which sold for $545,000 at a Sotheby's auction earlier this month. More on the sale over at Jacket Copy. At the same sale, seven books from George Washington's library fetched $1.2 million.
- The John Carter Brown Library is making its own publications freely available online.
- There's a really excellent guest post at The Collation about an annotated copy of The Roaring Girl.
- Also at The Collation, Erin Blake offers up part two of her series on proof prints.
- I was very pleased to see J.L. Bell's excellent response piece Paul Revere and the Sociologists.
- Another installment in the Anchora series on leaf books, this one focusing on a particularly annotated leaf from the Coverdale Bible.
- From the Appendix blog, a look at a 1680 sex manual that even made Pepys blush.
- Turkish media reports indicate several smugglers have been detained in Ankara with manuscripts stolen from Syrian repositories and illegally removed from the country to be sold on the black market.
- James Schmidt comments on Anthony Pagden's The Enlightnment and Why It Still Matters.
- Book collector Tom Johnson is profiled in the Springfield, MO News-Leader. Johnson's library, accumulated over three generations, is now the heart of the nonprofit Johnson Library and Museum, affiliated with Missouri State University.
- From the Houghton Library blog, Leslie Morris reports on the return of a volume from the library of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, gone missing from the Widener stacks at some point.
- Book Patrol notes the Morgan Library's publication of a new facsimile edition of the Van Damme Hours.
- At Medieval Fragments, David Ganz remembers master palaeographer Malcolm Parkes.
Reviews
- Nat Philbrick's Bunker Hill and Richard Beeman's Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor; review by Joyce Chaplin in the NYTimes.
- Neil Gaiman's Ocean at the End of the Lane; review by Benjamin Percy in the NYTimes.
- Colum McCann's TransAtlantic; review by Erica Wagner in the NYTimes.
- Paul Collins' Duel with the Devil; review by Mark Schone in the LATimes.
- Joseph Ellis' Revolutionary Summer; reviews by Andrew Cayton in the NYTimes and Kirk Davis Swinehart in the WSJ.
- Travis McDade's Thieves of Book Row; review by Carolyn Kellogg in the LATimes.
- J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fall of Arthur; review by Andrew O'Hehir in the NYTimes.
- Allen Guelzo's Gettysburg; reviews by David Blight in the NYTimes and Ernest Furgurson in the WaPo.
