Another Boston Book Fair in the books (my thirteenth, I realized). Still—and I suspect, always—my favorite fair. Chilly this year, but that didn't stop people from coming out for the main fair or the very busy shadow show. There wasn't time enough to pack in everything I wanted to do in Boston this trip ... I'll just have to go back soon!
- Princeton has acquired a 1483 Horace which happened to contain as binding waste a leaf from a previously unknown ~1457 edition of Donatus' Ars minor (printed with the same type used for the Gutenberg Bible).
- Ian Jackson, Nick Aretakis, and Ben Kinmont have issued a very nice biography of bookseller Bernard Rosenthal.
- Molly Hardy has a really useful update on various projects linking printing trade prosopographies.
- UVA Today highlights some recent work on the SNAC Cooperative (Social Networks and Archival Context).
- Mike Widener's new exhibition at the Yale Law School's Lillian Goldman Law Library, "Around the World with Law's Picture Books," is featured in the New Haven Independent.
- Nora Benedict is featured in the FB&C "Bright Young Collectors" series.
- The BL has launched a new crowdsourced transcription project for its historical playbills collection.
- A quiz about books? You bet! I hadn't heard of Nemo's Almanac before, but editor Ian Patterson's piece in the Guardian had me intrigued right away. Anybody collecting these?
- An annotated copy of Ben Jonson's Workes has been placed under a UK export ban until at least February, to see if a domestic buyer can be found.
- Daniel Witek, a one-time volunteer at the Buffalo History Museum, has been sentenced to six months time served and a $2,100 restitution payment for the theft of documents from the museum, which he then attempted to sell.
- Michael Greshko writes for National Geographic about the possibility of biblical forgeries lurking in the collections of the new Museum of the Bible.
- At Clements Library Chronicles, an attempt to locate some Revolutionary War trunks used to transport the Thomas Gage papers.
- Elizabeth Savage posts on the Leiden Special Collections blog about a frisket sheet fragment recently found during conservation at Leiden University.
- Houghton Library undergraduate fellow Mario Menendez talks about his work on a fictional biography of William Henry Ireland.
- A series of what could be 300 auctions to sell the Aristophil collection will begin on 20 December at Drouot.
- Another great APHA panel review by Paul Gough on "Illustrating Typography and Typos," which featured papers by Lynne Farrington, Vince Golden, and Michael Russem.
- The Princeton Graphic Arts Collection recently acquired a great piece by two 18th-century woman printmakers, Isabella Piccini and Angela Baroni.
- A 1659 Blaeu map showing Australia has gone on display at the National Library of Australia.
- William & Mary's Swem Library has received by donation the Civil War diary of a Union soldier captured and held prisoner at the college.
- Ben Breen asks at Res Obscura, "What Did 17th-Century Food Taste Like?"
- At Echoes from the Vault, the first in a series on "Visualising the Biographical Register of the University of St. Andrews."
- AAS student page Emily Isakson gives a brief overview of forgery-related material in the AAS collections.
Reviews
- Martin Puchner's The Written Word, Matthew Kirschenbaum's Track Changes, and Thomas Mullaney's The Chinese Typewriter; review by Thomas Hale in the Financial Times.
- Kevin Young's Bunk; reviews by Jonathan Lethem in the NYTimes and Colin Dickey in the LATimes.
- John Crowley's Ka; reviews by Michael Dirda in the WaPo and Elizabeth Hand in the LATimes.
Upcoming Auction
- Library of M. R*** at Pierre Bergé on 22 November.
