- Over at Slate, you an watch an 18-minute silent movie from 1925 about the making of the OED.
- The Internet Archive's San Francisco scanning center was badly damaged by a fire; there were no injuries or loss of material being scanned, though much equipment was destroyed. They're asking for donations to help them recover.
- Amazon brought belly laughs to indie booksellers all over the country this week when they announced that they planned to allow indies to sell Kindles. Melville House collected some of the best responses.
- Eric Kwakkel asks "Where are the scriptoria?" in medieval images.
- The Appendix has launched a new blog series called Magic Lantern, in which they will spotlight a particularly singular image. The inaugural example is an 1870s Japanese woodblock print of Audubon opening a box of his watercolors which had been eaten to pieces by rats.
- From Notabilia, a nice example of a paper ream wrapper being used as a component of pasteboard.
- Anna Baddeley profiled The Public Domain Review in The Guardian this week.
- The November AEMonthly is out; it includes a short piece on the resignation of the Senate House librarian over that attempted sale of Shakespeare Folios.
- Scott Brown of Eureka Books announced his purchase of the remaining stock of Serendipity Books in Berkeley, amounting to some 100,000 items. Much of this will be sold off at bargain sales over the next few weeks.
- ARCA CEO Lynda Albertson has a very thorough essay on the many questions raised by the discovery of a "lost horde" of Nazi-confiscated art.
- The McGregor Fund has pledged $245,000 to allow select materials from the Tracy W. McGregor Library for digitization and online presentation. The grant will also allow for metadata enhancements and other improvements.
- Jordan Goffin, Special Collections Librarian at Providence Public Library, is highlighted in the Bright Young Librarians series over at FB&C.
- Millions of documents from Bletchley Park are to be digitized and made available online.
- As we wait for the Bay Psalm Book sale later this month, the BL's Head of Hispanic Studies points out that there was a press at Mexico City nearly a century earlier and highlights some of the earliest printing in the Americas. And over on the Sotheby's blog, a very worthwhile post on "Printing the Bay Psalm Book."
- The NYTimes published a roundup of authors' views on how the internet has changed storytelling.
- Raymond Scott confessed to the theft of the Durham University First Folio shortly before he was acquitted of the charge, according to a report in the Sunday Sun tabloid. The confession is to be detailed in a book by Mike Kelly, Shakespeare & Love, scheduled for publication later this month (and, it should be noted, Scott told Kelly in a subsequent text message that he was just joking).
- The record for the longest book domino chain was recently broken at the Antwerp Book Fair. Video here.
- The library school program at Southern Connecticut State University has lost its ALA accreditation.
- Nick Basbanes talked to Jackie Atkins about On Paper for The Philadelphia Junto.
Reviews
- Simon Winchester's The Men Who United The States; review by Stephen Mihm in the NYTimes.
- Jill Lepore's Book of Ages; review by Joanna Scutts in the WaPo.
- Keith Houston's Shady Characters; review by Jon Day in the Telegraph.
- Doris Kearns Goodwin's The Bully Pulpit; review by Heather Cox Richardson in the WaPo.
- Tom Standage's Writing on the Wall; review by Frank Rose in the NYTimes.
