- I had the great pleasure of attending the Authenticity of Print Materials symposium at the Library of Congress this week, and I've posted a brief(ish) report on the symposium over at the Fine Books Blog. It was a thoroughly remarkable day, and it was a real delight to be able to catch up with so many friends and to hear an excellent series of talks on the symposium's theme.
- One of the key elements of the LC symposium was a presentation by Nick Wilding and Paul Needham on the Martayan Lan Sidereus Nuncius, now known to be a forgery. There was quite a good NYTimes article on this last week, and a piece by Nicholas Schmidle on the same topic will be in this week's New Yorker.
- Mitch Fraas reports at the Fine Books Blog about the dispersal of the John Gilson Howell collection of printed and manuscript bibles, long owned by the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, CA.
- Nick Basbanes has an op/ed in this weekend's LATimes, "A paperless society? Not so fast."
- Heather Wolfe has posted on the news that the Folger has received a three-year IMLS grant to fund the creation of EMMO (Early Modern Manuscripts Online), a searchable online database of Folger manuscript transcriptions from 1500-1700.
- From Literary Tourist, an audio interview with Alberto Manguel about his favorite libraries and bookstores.
- As previously reported, the Bay Psalm Book sold at Sotheby's on 26 November for a total of $14.2 million. Some coverage on the sale from NPR, The Telegraph, LATimes, BBC, Boston Globe.
- Over at the ARCA blog, excerpts from WGBH Boston interviews with Gardner Museum Director Anne Hawley and FBI special agent Jeff Kelley. Kelley told reporter Emily Rooney that they essentially know who carried out the theft, and that he believes that the artworks are all still in existence. The FBI and the Gardner have launched a new public effort to recover the art. Hawley told Rooney that immediately following the 1990 theft there were a series of additional threats and extortion attempts against the Museum.
- A major collaborative digitization project between the Bodleian Libraries and the Vatican Library which now live. The project was funded by a $3.2 million grant from the Polonsky Foundation. Coverage from the NYTimes, NPR.
- Travis McDade covers the trend of book and manuscript thieves defending themselves by maintaining that they found the material in the trash.
- Early and un-reprinted works by P.G. Wodehouse have been identified in the archive of Leeds newspaper The Globe and Traveller.
- Seems like we get one of these articles every six months or so, but here's another: author Patricia Cornwell claims to have uncovered new evidence that Jack the Ripper was artist Walter Sickert.
- Over at The Junto this week, a roundtable on the legacy of historian Pauline Maier.
- Booktryst highlighted a copy of the true first edition of Jefferson's Notes which sold for a healthy $269,000 at Christie's this week.
- That Christie's sale brought in a whopping total of $6,743,750, a good chunk of which came from a lavish presentation copy of Newton's Principia to James II, which made $2,517,000 (over estimates of $400,000-600,000). William Morris' Albion Press sold for $233,000. More on the press in the NYTimes.
- Jill Lepore spoke with Joy Horowitz at the LA Review of Books about her new book The Book of Ages.
- The Boston Public Library's Johnson Building will receive a $16 million renovation, the Boston Globe reported this week.
- Former Apple exec Glen Miranker, a fanatic collector of Holmesiana, is profiled in Forbes.
- While in DC this week I also had the tremendous pleasure of enjoying a behind-the-scenes tour at the Folger Shakespeare Library, which is just as exciting as you might think it would be. Among the paintings we saw was "The Infant Shakespeare Attended by Nature and the Passions," or "The Baby Jesus Shakespeare," which Erin Blake blogged about this week at The Collation.
- From Antipodean Footnotes, a profile of a very neat book now in the University of Melbourne Special Collections: a copy of Malcolm Flemyng's An Introduction to Physiology which traveled around the world with Captain Cook on his 1768-71 voyage.
- Jennifer Howard reported for The Chronicle this week that academics who have posted their articles on the social site academia.edu began receiving takedown notices from Elsevir.
- One of the "my year in books" lists that I look most forward to every year is that of Miriam Burstein at The Little Professor. She's posted it here.
- Historian Michael Kammen has died. Read the obituary in the New York Times.
- Rebecca Rego Barry has posted a year-end bookish roundup too, which probably includes a few good additions to your holiday shopping lists.
Reviews
- Alison Weir's Elizabeth of York; review by Roger Boylan in the NYTimes.
- Umberto Eco's The Book of Legendary Lands; review by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst in The Telegraph.
- Simon Garfield's To the Letter; review by Carmela Ciuraru in the NYTimes.
- Leo Damrosch's Swift; review by Jeffrey Collins in the WSJ.
- Yuval Levin's The Great Debate; review by Jack Rakove in the Washington Post.
- Nick Basbanes' On Paper; review by Philip Marchand in the National Post.
- Graham Robb's The Discovery of Middle Earth; review by Wendy Smith in the LATimes.
- Ronald Frame's Havisham; review by Jane Smiley in the NYTimes.
- David Igler's The Great Ocean and Gregory T. Cushman's Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World; review by David Armitage in the TLS.
