I'm more likely than usual to have missed relevant links this week, since I had the great pleasure of taking a Rare Book School course (The History of European & American Papermaking, taught by Tim Barrett and John Bidwell), and was thus paying less attention than usual to whatever was crossing the transom. So feel free to send along anything I missed and I'll be sure to add it next week. The course was absolutely fantastic!
- David Leonard, the director of administration and technology at the Boston Public Library, was named interim BPL president this week. Board member John T. Hailer was chosen as the new chair of the library's board. Author Dennis Lehane also submitted his resignation from the BPL board this week.
- Rebecca Rego Barry has a piece in the Guardian this week about the planned sale of Edwin Booth's copy of the Second Folio at Sotheby's on Friday. The volume was consigned by the Manhattan's Players Club, but failed to find a buyer.
- At the same sale, which realized more than $3.5 million, the Gutenberg Bible fragment sold by the Jewish Theological Seminary did better than anticipated, fetching $970,000, and a copy of Virgil signed by Declaration of Independence signer Thomas Lynch, Jr. sold for $43,750.
- The WSJ ran a piece on the "value" of a Gutenberg Bible, a complete copy of which hasn't been to auction since 1978.
- Two books stolen from the National Library of Sweden by a senior librarian there in the 1990s were repatriated this week at a ceremony in Manhattan. Both had been acquired by New York booksellers between 1999 and 2001 from the German auction house Ketterer Kunst; one had been sold on to Cornell University. The library maintains a list of the books still missing. The librarian, Anders Burius, committed suicide in 2004 after confessing to the thefts.
- From Yale, a more detailed story on the recent hyperspectral analysis of the 1491 Martellus map.
- The debate over the play Double Falsehood continues, with a new linguistic study outlined in a New Yorker blog post by Alastair Gee. The study, based on the use of particular "function words," finds that Shakespeare and John Fletcher's linguistic fingerprints predominate in the play's text.
- From Eric Kwakkel, "Medieval Letter-People."
- New to me: the Library of Virginia has launched a crowdsourced transcription project, allowing folks to work on small segments of the library's collections.
- The University of Michigan has digitized a collection of more than 2,000 political posters.
Reviews
- Robert Hutchinson's The Audacious Crimes of Colonel Blood; review by Jessie Childs in the TLS.
- Deborah Lutz's The Brontë Cabinet; review by Claudia Fitzherbert in the Telegraph.
