Apologies for the lack of links last week; here's a double bill to make up for it.
- A Washington Post video reporter, Lee Powell, spent two days with us at Rare Book School this summer, and he's now posted the resulting five-minute video feature.
- Two more Italian libraries, the Biblioteca del Seminario vescovile di Pontremoli and the Archivio storico della cattedrale di Massa, have announced that they are missing hundreds of incunabula and early printed books. You can download the full list here.
- More than 2.6 million public-domain images from books scanned by the Internet Archive have been uploaded to Flickr at Internet Archive Book Images. Kalev Leetaru, a Yahoo! Fellow in Residence at Georgetown, built a program to extract the images by looking at the areas original OCR programs had ignored and saving those areas as JPG files, according to a BBC report. The images include all relevant Internet Archive metadata and even surrounding text.
- In The Atlantic, Adrienne LaFrance reports on Paul Moran, who collected thousands of pieces of John Updike's trash from the street.
- The University of Rochester has acquired a collection of letters between Susan B. Anthony and fellow women's right activist Rachel Foster Avery.
- Robert Darnton has launched his long-projected website, A Literary Tour de France.
- The bicentenary of J. Sheridan Le Fanu's birthday was marked by articles in The Guardian and The Telegraph, as well as a Google Doodle in the UK.
- Rebecca Mead profiles Mary Beard in the New Yorker.
- Ian Kahn's 2012 ABAA oral history interview is now available on YouTube.
- Over at Notabilia, Steve Ferguson notes the reappearance of an historiated initial L from the 1543 edition of Vesalius in a 1555 edition of Livy.
- Now available in digital form, the second edition of Daniel Mosser's A Digital Catalogue of the pre-1500 Manuscripts and Incunables of the Canterbury Tales.
- Rick Anderson's Library Journal piece "Asserting Rights We Don't Have: Libraries and 'Permission to Publish'" is a must-read.
- At History Today, Patricia Fara writes about the scientific education of Mary Shelley.
- Pittsburgh-area libraries are being targeted by book thieves; thousands of dollars' worth of bestsellers have been stolen from the libraries and sold online. Police say they "hope to make an arrest soon."
- Sarah Werner explores "Pop Shakespeare's typography" at The Collation.
- A neat and amusing visualization from the Rylands Library: what Elizabeth Gaskell's inbox might have looked like in 1854, had she been using Microsoft Outlook.
- Patricia Crosby has pleaded not guilty to the theft of some $2,000 worth of books from the Owl's Neat Upholstery and Antique Store in Bennington, Vermont. Crosby turned the stole books over to police.
- A free, online, collaboratively-written American history textbook, The American Yawp, has now launched in beta version.
- There's a powerful Guardian editorial about the importance of public libraries (specifically in the UK, but the arguments are the same as for this side of the pond).
- The Library of Congress has acquired an iconic Civil War tintype of a Confederate soldier and his slave. The photograph was donated by Tom Liljenquist.
- From the Clog, a look at manuscript recipes for inks and colors in a copy of The excellency of the pen and pencil (1668).
- Tavistock Books has released a "Catalogue of Catalogues," which is well worth a thorough browse.
- A copy of "Action Comics No. 1" sold for $3.2 million on eBay this week, setting a record price for a comic book. More from the Washington Post.
- Houghton's Peter Accardo highlights Thomas Gray's interleaved and annotated copy of Linnaeus' Systema Naturae, which is frankly, nothing short of spectacular.
- Over at the Provenance Online Project they've got a mystery bookplate for us, featuring a squirrel and (probably) Hercules, and a look at how library catalogs can help us reconstruct the appearance of long-ago libraries.
- Rachel from The Book Trout recounts her time at CABS this summer.
- A Yale student has written a guest post for the Beinecke blog about the text font of the First Folio.
- Joanna Rotté recounts her visits to "Athenaeums of the Northeast" in the Broad Street Review.
- A study has found that people reading the same text on a Kindle had more trouble reconstructing the plot of the story chronologically than people who read the text in paper form.
- Jerry Morris tracks the Lydgate manuscript Boke of the Sege of Troy through Quaritch's catalogues and handlists (the manuscript is now at the John Rylands Library at the University of Manchester).
Reviews
- Ryan K. Smith's Robert Morris' Folly; review by Charles R. Morris in the WSJ.
- David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks; reviews by Pico Iyer in the NYTimes, Michiko Kakutani in the NYTimes.
- Brian Catlos' Infidel Kings and Unholy Warriors; review by Nick Romeo in the CSM.
- Joshua Wolf Shenk's Powers of Two; review by Sarah Lewis in the NYTimes.
- Ammon Shea's Bad English; review by Stan Carey at Sentence first.
- Kevin Birmingham's The Most Dangerous Book; review by Rachel Shteir in the NYTimes.
- Karen Abbott's Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy; review by Alice Fahs in the LATimes.
- David Bromwich's The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke; review by Daniel McCarthy in the NYTimes.
