- The Glasgow School of Art's iconic library designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh was destroyed by a fire this week. You can contribute to a response fund here.
- A plan to close the University of London's Institute of English Studies, outlined here, has been temporarily shelved after a strong scholarly outcry, including more than 3,600 signatures on an online petition.
- Robert Darnton writes in the NYRB about the progress of the DPLA and other projects.
- Brian Cassidy's tenth-anniversary e-catalog, "Mistakes Were Made," is an absolute must-read.
- John Overholt made a fascinating find recently: inked bearer type, which he was then able to identify.
- A book inscribed by Oscar Wilde to prison governor James Nelson as a token of appreciation for giving the author access to reading material could fetch £60,000 when sold at Bonhams in London on 18 June.
- The BL Collection Care blog reports on the recent discovery of a watermark on the rear pastedown of the St. Cuthbert Gospel.
- A.J. O'Shaughnessy has won the 2014 George Washington Book Prize, with its $50,000 purse, for The Men Who Lost America.
- From Aaron Pratt, "Flipping EEBO," a post prompted by a very interesting conversation on Twitter.
- You can now watch the trailer for "Cold Storage," a forthcoming documentary film about the Harvard Depository.
- The Mapping the British Book Trade workshop at Oxford this week made for some lively Twitter chatter, which is documented here.
- At The Collation, Heather Wolfe highlights a wonderful and richly-annotated 1572 dictionary.
- William S. Peterson and Sylvia Holton Peterson have launched a new digital reconstruction of the library of William Morris.
- Caleb Crain responds to the abandonment of the NYPL's Central Library Plan.
- From the Smithsonian Libraries Unbound blog, a look at binding waste found in book spines.
- The NYTimes Bits blog covers the current battle between Amazon and Hachette. Utterly ridiculous for Amazon to be doing this; it just makes them look stupid and petty.
- The HRC has acquired the archive of author Ian McEwan. Along the same vein, see Tim Parks' NYRB essay on author archives.
- Walter Isaacson's NEH Jefferson Lecture "The Intersection of the Humanities and the Sciences" is well worth a read.
- Several books believed to be rebound in decorative cloth by Dorothy Wordsworth were sold for £5,800 at Dreweatts this week.
- The BL's new Romantics and Victorians section of their Discovering Literature website was highlighted in The Guardian.
- Sarah Dry talked to Wired about her new book The Newton Papers.
- John Overholt's put up an animated gif of 19th-century progressive color printing processes.
- Another excellent response to Adam Kirsch's TNR piece on DH (linked in my last post), by Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp.
- Colby College's plan to move books out of the stacks is panned in Slate by Rebecca Schuman.
- Larry McMurtry writes on "The Lost Booksellers of New York" in the NYTimes.
- There's an excerpt of Michael Blanding's book on E. Forbes Smiley, The Map Thief, in the Boston Globe Magazine.
- One of my favorite characters, William Jenks, showed up on the AAS blog this week, clothed in books.
- From the University of Melbourne Library Collections blog, "Provenance in Pictures: Tracking the Ownership of Three Early Printed Books."
- Book conservator Samantha Couture is profiled in the Albany Times-Union. Sam does great work, as a few books on my own shelves will attest!
Reviews
- Michael Blanding's The Map Thief; review by Jim Shelton in the New Haven Register.
- Edward St. Aubyn's Lost for Words; review by Jonathan Yardley in the WaPo.
- Michael Waldman's The Second Amendment; review by David Ulin in the LATimes.
- John Leonard's Faithful Laborers; review by Nigel Smith in the TLS.
- Fred Kaplan's John Quincy Adams; reviews by David Shribman in the Boston Globe and Carol Berkin in the WaPo.
- The new edition of Tolkien's translation of Beowulf; review by Craig Williamson in the WSJ.
- Sarah Dry's The Newton Papers; review by Laura Snyder in the WSJ.
- Several alternate histories of the American Revolution are reviewed by Paul Aron at Common-place.
- The Morgan Library exhibition "Gatsby to Garp: Modern Masterpieces from the Carter Burden Collection"; review by Edward Rothstein in the NYTimes.
