- Ten years after fire destroyed the Duchess Anna Amalia Library in Weimar, Germany, the library's copy of Copernicus' De revolutionibus, thought destroyed, has been found amongst the many books still being restored, a process which is expected to continue for another 15 years.
- The Smithsonian Institution has launched a crowdsourced transcription interface, to allow volunteers to help transcribe Civil War diaries, field notebooks, and more. There's a short report in the NYTimes.
- The Folger Library has announced that all images in its Digital Image Collection (currently nearly 80,000 items) are now eligible for use under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Fantastic news!
- Martin Kemp writes on the threats facing the Warburg Institute Library in the Royal Academy Magazine. More coverage on this front from The Guardian.
- UVA Special Collections has acquired a copy of the rare Tolkien publication Songs for the Philologists.
- Many maps stolen by Peter Bellwood from the National Library of Wales remain missing, Wales Online reports.
- On the Provenance Online Project blog, a look at inscriptions partially trimmed off during rebinding.
- It's all pigeons this week over at Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie.
- New (to me, anyway): the Centre for the Study of the Book at Oxford is now posting podcasts of its discussion series.
- Ravi Somaiya profiles Harper's Magazine publisher John R. MacArthur.
- Emory University has launched Readux, a collection of digitized books from their libraries.
- Joshua Holm reviews and recommends Meredith McGill's article "Copyright and Intellectual Property: The State of the Discipline" in Book History 15.
- Michael Blanding talked to David Holahan from the Hartford Courant about his book The Map Thief.
- Anna Da Silva writes about a spat between Anthony Panizzi and the Royal Society for the Society's Repository blog.
- Maurice Sedgwick writes in The Guardian about "What makes Gormenghast a masterpiece?"
- A book cull at the Boston Public Library has hit the news with a report in the Boston Globe. Administrators are, reportedly, "disposing" of 180,000 "little-used volumes" based on circulation statistics.
- Nalo Hopkinson, a professor of Creative Writing at UC Riverside, has posted about concerns over the future of the university's famed science fiction collection.
Reviews
- Adrian Goldsworthy's Augustus; review by Nicholas Shakespeare in The Telegraph.
- Hampton Sides' In the Kingdom of Ice; review by Robert R. Harris in the NYTimes.
- Peter Snow's When Britain Burned the White House; review by Jonathan Yardley in the WaPo.
