- ILAB has issued an official letter of protest to the Italian Ministries of Culture and Justice over their investigations into de Caro's thefts from the Girolamini and other libraries. This follows the arrest of Danish bookseller Christian Westergaard over books matching titles stolen from the libraries (but all recovered and in German police custody since 2012) and the cancellation of a Bloomsbury/Philobiblon auction in Rome on suspicion that books scheduled to be sold there might have been stolen (none proved to have been removed from libraries). The full letter is very much worth a read.
- Over at The Collation, Goran Proot explores the use of "vv" for "w" in 17th-century title pages.
- Lisa Fagin Davis reports on manuscripts in Alabama and Georgia, and comments on the recent discovery that the now-broken Beauvais Missal was once in the possession of William Randolph Hearst.
- Another bookstore I've always wanted to visit is closing, I'm very sorry to say: Seattle's Wessel & Lieberman is shutting its doors soon.
- A library card signed by Elvis Presley when he was in seventh grade is going up for auction later this month at Graceland.
- Judge Richard Posner, ordering the Conan Doyle estate to pay Leslie Klinger's legal fees, slammed as extortion the practice of certain literary estates charging license fees.
- British Airways is planning to add audio versions of eleven Shakespeare plays to its inflight entertainment options.
- The Brontë parsonage at Haworth has purchased a script from the first film adaptation of Wuthering Heights, made in the 1920s and shot in the Haworth area. No copy of the film itself is known to exist.
- As part of their second sale from the library of Franklin Brooke-Hitching on 30 September, Sotheby's will sell a number of books and other artifacts from the 1914 Shackleton expedition.
- Over at The Junto, a list of forthcoming books on early American topics.
- The diploma of the first African-American student to attend Harvard, Richard Greener (also the father of Belle da Costa Greene) sold for $12,500 this week at a Chicago auction.
- Bookbinding scholar Anthony Hobson died in early July; read an obituary by Nicolas Barker in The Independent.
- Daryl Green of the University of St. Andrews is featured in the FB&C "Bright Young Librarians" interview series.
- Historians have authenticated an inscription in an 1854 book on race as being written by Abraham Lincoln.
- The State Library of Massachusetts has digitized the manuscript of William Bradford's autograph manuscript for Of Plimouth Plantation, now available here. The interface leaves rather a great deal to be desired, I must say, but I suppose better something than nothing.
- Donald Kerr posted on ExLibris-L about a new census he's compiling, of the 1913 work La prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France by Paul Cendrars with artwork by Sonia Delaunay-Terk. Contact him if you have any information about copies of this work.
Reviews
- Edward Dolnick's The Rush; review by Walter Borneman in the NYTimes.
- Michael Schmidt's The Novel: A Biography; review by John Sutherland in the NYTimes.
- Lev Grossman's The Magician's Land; reviews by Sarah Lyall in the NYTimes and Gwenda Bond in the LATimes.
- Helen Rappaport's Four Sisters; review by Natasha Randall in the TLS.
