- It's not often that vellum makes headlines anymore, but it has recently done so: after an announcement last week that the British government had determined that the practice of printing laws on vellum would be ended in April (which got coverage in the NYTimes) word today that the decision may be reversed, with the Cabinet Office offering to pick up the £80,000 annual tab.
- DCRM(C)—that is, Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (Cartographic)—for all your map-cataloging needs, is now available as a free PDF.
- Over at The Culture-ist, Ryan Bradley goes on a bookstore tour of Boston.
- From Cabinet, Geoff Manaugh writes on the 2003 case of a book thief who snuck into the locked library of a monastery using a long-forgotten secret passage he found on a floor plan. More from Atlas Obscura.
- Audio recordings of Anthony Grafton's Sandars Lectures, delivered in January, are now available.
- Alison Flood reports for the Guardian about a recent translation of early textbooks used to teach Latin to Greek speakers.
- At the Chapel Hill Rare Book Blog, Liz Ott with the first in a series on their current Wordsworth exhibition (which sounds like it must be fantastic, given the great new collection!).
- At JHIBlog, Brooke Palmieri writes on John Dee's library and the current exhibition on same at the Royal College of Physicians.
- Alison Booth has been appointed academic director of the Scholars' Lab at UVA.
- Hampshire College has received a $1.2 million Mellon grant to "reinvent" the college's library.
- Laura Massey at Alembic Rare Books has posted a primer on "How to start collecting rare books."
Reviews
- "The Private Jefferson" exhibition at the Massachusetts Historical Society; review by Mark Feeney in the Boston Globe.
- Brian Copenhaver's The Book of Magic; review by Diane Purkiss in the TLS.
