- Rebecca Rego Barry has a bit more about the apparent theft of materials from the NYPL. Mitch Fraas has posted some court filings from the case and linked to the NYPL Bulletin issue from 1930 announcing the library's acquisition of the Franklin Work Book.
- The Gospels of Queen Theutberga of Lorraine, a ninth-century manuscript described as "pristine," will be sold at Christie's London on 15 July, estimated at £1.5 million. It was sold from the Beck Collection at Sotheby's in 1997 for around £1 million and has been in a private collection since then.
- The University of Pennsylvania has acquired a copy of what is believed to be the last full-length book printed by Benjamin Franklin, Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg's Petit Code de la raison humaine (printed at Passy in 1782).
- History of Humanities, a new journal, will be published by the University of Chicago Press beginning next spring.
- The British Library has launched a new guide to its collection of American newspapers.
- Carol Berkin talked to John Fea about her new book The Bill of Rights.
- The collection of Japanese internment camp artifacts recently pulled from auction have been acquired by the Japanese American National Museum in LA.
- The Obama Presidential Library will be located in Chicago.
- A new online database of the library of Robert Hooke has launched.
- Writing in the Washington Post, Hillary Kelly argues for a return to the serialization of novels.
- Scholars at the Mark Twain Papers project have identified a number of news stories written by Twain during his early journalistic career.
- Five volumes of manuscripts from the Paston Family correspondence have been digitized and are now available online.
- In The Guardian, David Shariatmadari offers "a history of cartography in 12 amazing maps."
- A signed first edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude stolen from a display case at a Bogota book fair was recovered after a week.
- In an editorial, the New York Times has called for needed funding increases for the city's public libraries.
- Cambridge University has acquired two books from the library of historian Edward Gibbon, and Liam Sims has written a thorough account of these new acquisitions as well as the rest of Gibbons' library.
- The Library Company of Philadelphia has joined the Provenance Online Project.
- Tracey Kry writes about some of the legal manuscripts in the AAS collections.
- Excerpts from John Palfrey's new book BiblioTech have been posted on Medium as "The Future of the Stacks." On LibraryCity, David Rothman has a long post on Palfrey's book at the DPLA.
- OPenn has launched, with the entire Schoenberg Collection and other digitized Penn manuscripts available for viewing/downloading/&c.
- A new book claims that Jane Austen's character Mr. Darcy was based on the real-life John Parker, the first Earl of Morley.
- Wired notes the launch of a new online viewer for the US Geological Survey's topographic maps.
- A collection of books, broadsides, and pamphlets associated with Ireland, from the collection of collector Tony Sweeney, will be sold at auction in Dublin on 12 May. See the catalog. Sweeney had tried to collect "the best possible copy of every book or pamphlet that could be shown to have a connection to Ireland before 1700."
- Illinois State University has acquired a collection of material related to animal trainer and circus owner Clyde Beatty. The collection was compiled by Dave and Mary Jane Price over some six decades.
Reviews
- The 2015 CODEX Book Fair and Symposium; review by Gregory Eow.
- Rosa Salzburg's Ephemeral City: Cheap Print and Urban Culture in Renaissance Venice; review by Alexander S. Wilkinson at Reviews in History.
- David McCullough's The Wright Brothers; reviews by Daniel Okrent and Janet Maslin in the NYTimes, Reeve Lindbergh in the WaPo.
- Charlotte Gordon's Romantic Outlaws; review by Cristina Nehring in the NYTimes.
- Joseph Ellis' The Quartet; review by R.B. Bernstein in the NYTimes.
- Cokie Roberts' Capital Dames; review by Elaine Showalter in the WaPo.
- Thomas Kunkel's Man in Profile; review by Michael Dirda in the WaPo.
- Phyllis Lee Levin's The Remarkable Education of John Quincy Adams; review by Glenn Altschuler in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
- Hugh Aldersey-Williams' The Adventures of Sir Thomas Browne in the 21st Century; review by Noel Malcolm in The Telegraph.
- Sabaa Tahir's An Ember in the Ashes; review by Marie Rutkoski in the NYTimes.
- Abigail Swingen's Competing Visions of Empire; review by Jessica Parr at The Junto.
- Bruce Holsinger's The Invention of Fire; reviews by Amy Gwiazdowski at The Book Report and Patrick Anderson in the WaPo.
- Matthew Pearl's The Last Bookaneer; review by Rebecca Rego Barry at Fine Books Blog.
