- Vincent Noce has a report for The Art Newspaper about the ongoing investigation into Gérard Lhéritier's alleged manuscripts Ponzi scheme.
- A Library Company of Philadelphia press release has more information on the identification of nature printing blocks used in Franklin's shop.
- Duke University will return a 10th-century Byzantine manuscript to Greece. The manuscript, like another returned last year by the Getty, was stolen from a Greek monastery in the 1960s.
- The BL has posted 46 newly-digitized Greek manuscripts.
- The Guardian reports that Navajo officials successfully purchased seven tribal masks at a French auction, which the U.S. government and tribal leaders had tried to stop going forward. Hopi leaders declined to bid, saying they viewed the sale as "sacrilege."
- Speaking of the BL, as of 5 January you will be able to photograph materials in certain reading rooms; this service will be extended in March to include the Manuscripts and Rare Books reading rooms.
- Several recently-funded provenance and marginalia projects are highlighted in the NYTimes (second section of article).
- The University of Illinois has received a $498,942 grant to catalog the Cavagna Collection of rare Italian books.
- John Overholt noted a neat column in the October 1876 Atlantic Monthly, "A Librarian's Work."
- Heather Wolfe writes about "Hard hands and strange words" (or, the trials and tribulations of paleographers) at The Collation.
- The schedule for the AAS's Digital Antiquarian conference (29-30 May 2015) is now available.
- Jonathan Kearns will open his own rare books and curiosities shop in the new year.
- Videos from the Case Western colloquium on the future of special collections are now available online.
- FB&C profiles Eric Johnson for their Bright Young Librarians series.
- There's an interview with Phillips Library director Sid Berger about his new book for ALA Editions, Rare Books and Special Collections.
- Yale researchers have identified Samson Occom as the author of a 1776 manuscript account of a young Mohegan woman's deathbed words (there's much more to this story: read the whole report).
- The MHS has completed digitization of six Civil War photograph collections.
- Manuscript Road Trip visits New Jersey, covering manuscripts at Princeton and Rutgers.
- Simon Beattie highlights the Russian edition of Dickens' No Thoroughfare, published in London for Christmas 1867 and passed by the imperial censor in Russia on 3 January 1868. Simon notes that this speed of transmission seems extraordinarily fast.
- The NYTimes has a piece on the renovation of the nave at Yale's Sterling Library.
- Ellen Terrell has a very neat post on the LC's Inside Adams blog about researching the Scrooge & Marley firm.
- A Havard Medical School study suggests that e-reading in bed may be bad for your health.
- Researchers have found that J.R.R. Tolkien, sent home from the WWI front with trench fever, barely escaped a massive German bombardment of his unit's position.
Reviews
- Jill Lepore's The Secret History of Wonder Woman; review by Helen Brown in The Telegraph.
- Adam Nicolson's Why Homer Matters; review by Bryan Doerries in the NYTimes.
- E.O. Wilson's The Meaning of Human Existence; review by Richard Di Dio in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
- Nick Bunker's An Empire on the Edge; review by J.L. Bell at Boston 1775.
- Kathryn Harrison's Joan of Arc; review by Sarah Dunant in the NYTimes.
- Janice Hadlow's A Royal Experiment; review by Andrea Wulf in the NYTimes.
- Molly Guptil Manning's When Books Went to War; reviews by Janet Maslin in the NYTimes and Emily Cataneo in the CSM.
- Jeffrey Richards' The Golden Age of Pantomine and Linda Simon's The Greatest Shows on Earth; review by Jacqueline Banerjee in the TLS.
- Bradford Morrow's The Forgers; review by Michael Dirda in the WaPo.
