Sunday, September 21, 2014

Links & Reviews

- A 28-year-old Bangor, Maine man, Russell Graves, has been sentenced to two years in prison (with all but six months suspended) for the theft of 75 Civil War cartes de visite and 50 WWI and WWII posters from the Bangor Public Library, where he had been working as a janitor. Graves was caught when he tried to sell some of the stolen material to Maritime International, a Bangor collectibles shop.

- Rebecca Rego Barry talked to Alix Christie about her new novel Gutenberg's Apprentice (a copy of which recently arrived here; I'm looking forward to reading it soon).

- Book Patrol reports on a now-abandoned plan by ILAB to develop a partnership with AbeBooks to promote the listings of ILAB dealers.

- There's an interesting piece in Wired about multispectral imagery and its use on Yale's 1491 Martellus map.

- Christian Dupont has officially taken up the reins as John J. Burns Librarian and associate university librarian for special collections at Boston College.

- Art and document forger Mark Landis is the subject of a new documentary which recently opened in New York, "Art and Craft." More from The Art Newspaper.

- The Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress recently acquired two manuscript diaries of Mathew Carey, covering portions of 1821–1825. Julie Miller highlights the acquisition.

- Jane Austen's House Museum in Chawton, Hampshire, will exhibit one of the manuscript booklets for Austen's unfinished novel "The Watsons" through December.

- At Antipodean Footnotes, a look at the University of Melbourne's copy of William Cowper's The anatomy of humane bodies (1698), which contains many manuscript notes by an English apothecary.

Reviews

- Charles N. Edel's Nation Builder: John Quincy Adams and the Grand Strategy of the Republic; review by Donald Breed in the Providence Journal.

- Justin Martin's Rebel Souls; review by Dennis Drabelle in the WaPo.

- Nick Bunker's An Empire on the Edge; review by Brendan Simms in the WSJ.