I realized that this week marked the 8th anniversary of the first post on this blog; it seems almost remarkable that it's continued so long! The milestone seems particularly fitting since I've been spending more time actually thinking about this blog than I usually do, in preparation for a seminar at RBMS this coming week where I'll be talking about "Publishing for Professional Growth." Given the other excellent folks on the panel (Jessica Pigza, Anne Bahde, Colleen Thiesen, and John Overholt as moderator) it should be a really good discussion, and I'm quite looking forward to it. If you're in Las Vegas for RBMS and want to come, it'll be held from 4-5:30 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon.
- The new ABAA website launched this week, and it's quite impressive!
- A first edition of Whitman's Leaves of Grass from the Huguette Clark collection fetched $305,000 at Christie's this week, setting a new record for a Whitman work.
- The copy of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest inscribed to his jailer sold at auction this week for £55,000.
- A new exhibition, "Once There Were Billions: Vanished Birds of North America" opens at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History on 24 June.
- With the news that a book at Harvard has now been confirmed to be bound in human skin, the BBC Magazine surveys the well-worn ground of anthropodermic bindings.
- Just weeks after the threat to IES comes another one: now the Warburg Institute could be closed and its collections broken up as the University of London seeks to change the 1944 deed of trust which brought the collection to London. A ruling on the terms of the deed could come this fall. This isn't exactly a new danger, though: Anthony Grafton and Jeffrey Hamburger posted an essay on the possible closure over on the NYRB blog way back in 2010.
- The DPLA has received an $81,000 grant from the Whiting Foundation to explore educational possibilities for its collections.
- Colum McCann gets the "By the Book" treatment in the NYTimes.
- Elizabeth Eisenstein spoke to Thomas Hill for his Library Café podcast. You can listen here.
- The NYPL's Rose Main Reading Room will remain closed for around six months to allow for inspections and repairs to the ceiling after a plaster rosette fell in May.
- Julian Baggini reports in the Financial Times about recent research into the differences between reading on paper and reading on a screen.
- Nathan Raab writes at Forbes about a Lincoln document believed authentic for the last seven decades or so, but now proven to be a forgery.
- Over at The Collation, Deborah J. Leslie writes on throwout plates, bound so that an illustration or table could be viewed while still reading the text.
- The Reading Experience Database bibliography has been updated with a number of new and forthcoming articles.
- Several unpublished Pablo Neruda poems have been found during the cataloging of the poet's manuscripts.
- Dublin police have discovered more than seventy pieces of art, rare books and other objects believed to have been stolen over more than four decades.
Reviews
- Fred Kaplan's John Quincy Adams; review by Randolph Walerius at Roll Call.
- Lauren Owen's The Quick; reviews by Andrew Sean Greer in the NYTimes and Elizabeth Hand in the LATimes.
