- The BPL has released the results of a year-long external review of the library's Print Collection by Simmons College professor Martha Mahard. Mahard has now been tasked with conducting an item-by-item inventory of the department. The full report is available here (below the press release text).
- The Criminal podcast this week ("Ex Libris") features booksellers John Crichton, Ken Sanders, and Garrett Scott, talking about the John Charles Gilkey book thefts and Allison Hoover Bartlett's The Man Who Loved Books Too Much. Scott describes the ongoing Gilkey saga as "a low-level brush fire that's never going away," and the podcaster reveals that Gilkey was only recently arrested again on charges related to passing bad checks.
- Big, and excellent news from the American Antiquarian Society: they are no longer requiring permission or licensing agreements before images from their collections can be published. See their Obtaining Digital Images page for the new policy.
- The University of Edinburgh's Centre for the Book has posted a series of short instructional videos about book history, including films on bibliographic format, watermarks, and collation statements.
- The president of the ALA has called on President Obama to nominate a librarian to head the Library of Congress.
- For the first time since 2008, the New York Public Library will receive an increase in city funding for fiscal year 2015.
- The DPLA has received $3.4 million from the Sloan and Knight Foundations to open new service hubs and promote continued expansion.
- Speaking of the NYPL, Scott Sherman has a piece in the Chronicle drawn from his new book about the NYPL, Patience and Fortitude.
- From Bloomberg, "Discovering Harvard's Hidden Treasures," a short video about the Houghton Library and some of the fantastic things in its collections.
- Jay Moschella writes for the BPL's Collections of Distinctions blog about a volume of manuscripts in the library's collections which may be from the library of England's first printer, William Caxton.
- Oxford's Somerville College is crowdfunding the conservation of John Stuart Mill's personal library.
- Emily Levine has a piece in the LA Review of Books, "The Afterlife of a Manuscript."
- German publisher Tredition has released an open-access handbook, Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies: An Introduction.
- AAS Curator of Newspapers Vince Golden talked to the Worcester Telegram & Gazette for their "Sunday Sit-Down" interview.
- The Freedmen's Bureau Project seeks to make 1.5 million documents from the Freedmen's Bureau archives available and searchable online by the end of 2016.
- A set of Chipotle's Cultivating Thought series of short texts by famous authors on the restaurant's paper cups and bags has been donated to Yale's Beinecke Library.
- A copy of the Tyndale New Testament (1537) will be sold at Sotheby's on 15 July; the current owner purchased the volume in 1966 for 25 shillings.
- Andrea Mays talked at the D.C. bookstore Politics and Prose about her book The Millionaire and the Bard last week. Listen here.
- From Ken Kalfus for the New Yorker, "A Book Buyer's Lament."
- Sarah Werner announces at Wynken de Worde that she's left the Folger to work on her Handbook for Studying Early Printed Books, 1450–1800 and developing an open-access website to accompany the book.
- A preprint of Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass' essay "Shakespeare Between Pamphlet and Book" is now available via academia.edu (click "Download" at the upper right).
- Over on the Royal Society's blog The Repository, Fiona Keates highlights Benjamin Franklin's "magic squares" in the Society's collections.
- The University of Iowa has received nearly 18,000 science fiction books from a Sioux Falls collector.
- From Madison Johnson at The New Republic, an interview with photographer Yuri Dojc about his Last Folio project.
- At FiveThirtyEight, David Goldenberg writes about his attempt to get information from the ALA about their statistics on attempts to ban books, which raises good and important questions about how the ALA presents these issues.
- A new website, Transcribing Early American Manuscript Sermons, launched this week.
- Roger Wieck has been named head of the Morgan Library & Musem's Department of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts.
- Jennifer Maloney writes in the WSJ about the new fonts both Amazon and Google are pushing for their e-reading devices.
- Noah Charney talked to Dave Davies of "Fresh Air" about his new book The Art of Forgery.
Reviews
- The Morgan Library & Museum's new exhibition, "Alice: 150 Years of Wonderland"; review by Randy Kennedy in the NYTimes.
- Thomas Kunkel's Man in Profile; review by John Williams in the NYTimes.
- Stephen Jarvis' Death and Mr. Pickwick; review by Wendy Smith in the WaPo.
- Elif Shafak's The Architect's Apprentice; review by Bruce Holsinger in the WaPo.
- Hugh Aldersey-Williams' In Search of Sir Thomas Browne; review by Jeffrey Collins in the WSJ.
- Alberto Manguel's Curiosity; review by Duncan White in the Telegraph.
- Scott Sherman's Patience and Fortitude; review by Maureen Corrigan for "Fresh Air."
