- Reminder: lots of big events coming up in New York this week during Rare Book Week, including the sale at Sotheby's on Tuesday of the Indiana Historical Society's copies of Audubon's Birds and Quadrupeds.
- More books from the Mendham Collection will be sold at Sotheby's on 20 May as part of their Music & Continental Books & Manuscripts sale. These will include the first edition of Wyclif's works (Worms, 1525), as well as a unique Venetian incunable. As Clive Field remarked in a listserv post this week, "This year is therefore likely to see the complete dismemberment by the Law Society of one of the country's most important religious libraries formed in the nineteenth century, the cataloguing of which the British Library funded."
- In The Guardian, Robin Stummer reports on new graffiti found on the pillars of St Mary's church at Lidgate, Suffolk, which may include the carved "signature" of John Lydgate.
- In the NYTimes this week, "Literary City, Bookstore Desert," on the high rents forcing bookstores out of Manhattan.
- Booksellers Brian Cassidy and Dan Dwyer talk books on an episode of "This Old Book," which you can stream here.
- From cataloger Amy Sims at AAS, a post on "Adventures in Cataloging: Some Sleuthing Required" (part one of a series).
- Also continuing a theme, Erin Blake at The Collation covers some tricky library transcription rules.
- Simon Beattie blogged this week about one of the books he'll bringing to the upcoming New York Book Fair: a copy of an 1843 book composed straight into type by the author.
- Trinity College, Cambridge, is posting digital scans of its medieval manuscripts. See the list here.
- In the TLS, Malyn Newitt argues for greater access to the National Trust's libraries.
- Ian Gadd discusses the recently-published History of Oxford University Press with Adam Smyth on the Centre for the Study the Book podcast.
- At medieval fragments, Ramona Venema writes on fingerprints, blood drops, and other "biological clues" found in manuscripts.
Reviews
- The current New-York Historical Society exhibition, Audubon's Aviary: Parts Unknown; review by Henry Nicholls in The Guardian.
- Samuel Fleischaker's What is Enlightenment?; review by James Schmidt at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
- Jonathon Green's Odd Job Man and Language!; review by Nicholas Shakespeare in The Telegraph.
- Joyce Chaplin's Round About the Earth; review by Andrea Wulf in Literary Review.
- Simon Schama's The Story of the Jews; review by Judith Shulevitz in the NYTimes.
- David Brion Davis' The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation; review by Brenda Wineapple in the NYTimes.
- Louis Bayard's Roosevelt's Beast; review by Hector Tobar in the LATimes.
