- Paper fragments found inside a cannon recovered from the wreck of the Queen Anne's Revenge (Blackbeard's ship) have been identified as coming from a copy of Edward Cooke's Voyage to the South Sea (1712).
- Michael Winship's keynote from this fall's APHA conference, "Good, But Not So Fast or Cheap," is now available on the APHA blog.
- January Rare Book Monthly articles include Michael Stillman's overview of the top 500 auction prices for 2017, and Bruce McKinney on buying an obscure Munsell imprint.
- Registration for the Scientific Illustration Renaissance to the Digital Age Symposium on 15 March at the Library of Congress is now open. This looks like a great program.
- Rebecca Rego Barry notes at the Fine Books Blog the deaths of three booksellers this week: the Strand's Fred Bass, Charlie Cox, and Louis Collins. They will be much missed. More about Louis from the Seattle Review of Books; I had the great pleasure of meeting him at the Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair in 2016, and I'm very glad that I did.
- More on Fred Bass from Tom Vanderbilt on the NYRB blog and Tom Verlaine in the NYTimes.
- For the New Yorker, Paul Collins takes a look at a 1968 conference and associated book which looked ahead to 2018.
- Three major CLIR-Mellon Hidden Collection grants will allow the Penn Libraries to digitize Islamic manuscripts, the Marian Anderson archive, and records of early Philadelphia religious congregations.
- WBUR aired a remembrance of Harvard Law Library curator David Ferris this week.
- The University of British Columbia has acquired a copy (in fact, the only known copy) of the first edition of The Vancouver Weekly Herald and North Pacific News, believed to be the first item printed in the city of Vancouver.
- Urvashi Chakravarty surveys apprenticeship indentures at the Folger for The Collation.
- I missed this in December, but the BBC reports on recent work using digital tools to read Sonderkommando evidence buried at Auschwitz and discovered in the 1980s during excavations there.
- In the Harvard alumni magazine, a profile of Columba Stewart, executive director of the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library.
- Another one I missed in December (sorry!): Russell Maret on his weeks as the inaugural printer-in-residence at the Bodleian Libraries.
- The Association of European Printing Museums has launched a new map of printing museums, which looks to be quite handy. [via the Princeton Graphic Arts blog]
- Aaron Pratt writes for the HRC magazine about interactive designs (volvelles, &c.) in early printed books.
- Over at Making Manuscripts in the Medieval and Early Modern World, "Revealing the Secrets of an Early Coptic Manuscript." More on this project from Nicholas Wade in the NYTimes.
- Another good one in the Guardian books podcast: Stephen Fry on Saki's excellent "Sredni Vashtar."
Reviews
- Fiona Simpson's In Search of Mary Shelley; review by Rachel Cooke in the Guardian.
- Pradeep Sebastian's The Book Hunters of Katpadi; review by Rajdeep Bains in the Tribune. I'm looking forward to this one.
- Brenda Maddox's Reading the Rocks; review by Timothy R. Smith in the WaPo.
- Noah Feldman's The Three Lives of James Madison; review by Pamela Newkirk in the WaPo.
- Helen Smith's An Uncommon Reader; review by Michael Dirda in the WaPo.
Upcoming Auctions
- Fine Literature & Fine Books - Poetry from the Collection of Larry Rafferty - Miniature Books at PBA Galleries on 11 January.
- Rare, Out-of-Print and Used Books at the Lancaster Mennonite Historical Society on 12 January.
