- The Center for Media and Social Impact has issued a "Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use of Orphan Works for Libraries & Archives."
- French scientists are working to date the Aztec manuscript known as the Codex Borbonicus.
- Jill Lepore writes on the theft of Justice Felix Frankfurter's papers from the Library of Congress, broadening that to discuss the state of the papers of all Supreme Court justices.
- Longtime friend of the blog Laura Massey has opened her own rare book business, Alembic Rare Books.
- The New York City Bar Association sale at Doyle New York on 24 November saw a very high total of $2,369,231, with all lots selling. I'll have more on this sale in the next FB&C.
- The NYTimes covers the ongoing dispute over the estate of Maurice Sendak, featuring the first interview with Sendak executor Lynn Caponera. There's more coverage and analysis of this case in the Connecticut Law Tribune.
- Molly Hardy discusses the NAIP and its possible uses in bibliometric analysis.
- From Atlas Obscura, "Lost Museums of New York."
- The Antikythera Mechanism has been determined to date from around 205 B.C., earlier than previously thought.
- Rachel Nuwer reports for Smithsonian on the digital reconstruction of Livingstone's diary.
- Terry Belanger's summary of the "Acknowledging the Past, Forging the Future" symposium, along with a PDF version of his full report, has been posted on the ABAA blog.
- A collector left a 13th-century Chinese scroll worth more than $1m on a Paris-to-Geneva train; the scroll remains missing.
- Jennifer Schuessler covered the "First Editions, Second Thoughts" auction at Christie's this week for the NYTimes. More coverage from The Guardian.
- The literary archive of Gabriel García Márquez will go to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
- The NYTimes reported on the launch of Digital Einstein, a digital repository of some 80,000 Einstein-related documents. Walter Isaacon wrote about the launch in a WSJ essay (which contains some misguided notions about what digitization means for scholars and viewing original documents).
- Andrea Cawelti posted on the Houghton Library blog about circulating libraries during Jane Austen's time.
- Johanna Drucker has published a new essay, "Distributed and Conditional Documents: Conceptualizing Bibliographical Alterities."
- Philip Pullman writes on William Blake in The Guardian.
- Jennifer Howard covers the "Failure in the Archives" conference for The Chronicle of Higher Ed.
- Newly-recognized unpublished Oscar Wilde materials, including a notebook from around 1880, a corrected typescript of Salome, and a partial draft of "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," will be displayed at the Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia beginning in late January.
- A letter thought to have inspired Kerouac's On the Road, long thought lost, has been found and will be sold by the auction house Profiles in History on 17 December.
- An unpublished libretto by Raymond Chandler has been identified at the Library of Congress.
- A UK court has declared that a ban on sending books to prisoners was not lawful.
- Adventures in Book Collecting highlights collector Estelle Doheney.
- Five books from Oscar Wilde's library have been identified at the National Library of the Netherlands (KB).
- A manuscript of George Washington's 1789 Thanksgiving Proclamation (which I had the good fortune to see displayed at the Boston Book Fair last month) has sold to a private collector for $8.4 million.
- The BPL has launched a special collections blog, Collections of Distinction.
- Candida Moss reports for The Daily Beast on the online trade in early manuscripts.
- Sotheby's London will sell The Felix Dennis Collection, including works by Eric Gill, on 9 December. A Dylan Thomas manuscript and E.H. Shepard illustrations are expected to sell well.
- The Library History Round Table has issued its annual call for papers for the Justin Winsor Library History Essay Award. Submissions are due by 31 January 2015.
- Tim Parks writes for the NYRB about reading with a pen in your hand.
- An 18th-century manuscript map of New Mexico has been acquired by the New Mexico History Museum.
- A Shakespeare First Folio has been discovered in the public library of the French town of Saint-Omer. More coverage from the NYTimes, Fine Books Blog, OUP Blog. Eric Rasmussen talked to USA Today about identifying the book.
- Daniel Akst connects today's e-book subscription services with the membership libraries begun in the 18th century.
- Eric Kwakkel writes on the uses of shelfmarks, catalogs, &c. in the medieval library.
Reviews
- Kate Williams' Ambition and Desire; review by Caroline Weber in the NYTimes.
- Margery Heffron's The Other Mrs. Adams; review by Muriel Dobbin in the Washington Times.
- Andrew Roberts' Napoleon Bonaparte; review by Michael F. Bishop in the WaPo.
- Kirstin Downey's Isabella: The Warrior Queen; review by Kathryn Harrison in the NYTimes.
- Cary Elwes' As You Wish; review by Neil Genzlinger in the NYTimes.
- Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography; reviews by Bich Minh Nguyen in the LATimes and Jennifer Maloney in the WSJ.
- Fredrik Sjoberg's The Fly Trap; review by Jennie Erin Smith in the TLS.
