My goodness, you all have been very busy. Missed a week (I was at the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair last weekend) and just look at all the links that piled up!
- Two missing/theft reports: one 1734 cookbook that has gone missing in transit, and two works by Poe and Dickens reported stolen through credit card fraud.
- Missed this from when I was traveling: a judge blocked the sale of a volume of Rhode Island colonial court records on eBay.
- Ben Breen writes about one of my favorite characters for Public Domain Review: good old George Psalmanazar, the "False Formosan."
- Robert Darnton talked to Publishers Weekly about his new book A Literary Tour de France and the current state of the publishing industry.
- You can now submit paper proposals for the APS' "Past, Present, and Future of Libraries" conference, coming up in late September. Deadline is 15 May.
- Now on display at the BL, while the Lindisfarne Gospels has gone off public display for a rest until the autumn, "A Bible fit for a king."
- At Connexion, a report on the French government's blocking the sale of a 12th-century Mont-Saint-Michel manuscript.
- The Library of Congress has released a digital version of its collection of Benjamin Franklin's papers.
- Also from LC, the Japanese Censorship Collection, comprising more than a thousand "marked-up copies of monographs and galley proofs censored by the Japanese government in the 1920s and 1930s."
- Over at Medieval Manuscripts Provenance, a bit more on a Cistercian Missal once owned by Otto Ege.
- A New Zealand bookseller has inherited a collection of some 6,000 mountaineering adventure books from a Massachusetts collector; Bill Nye of Adventure Books plans to build an exhibition and research area for the collection in his shop.
- Richard Ovenden writes for the Financial Times: "The Windrush scandal reminds us of the value of archives."
- Simon Beattie highlights what certainly seems to be an 18th-century dust-wrapper (and possibly the earliest documented example?), used to protect a set of unbound plates.
- Alison Flood writes for the Guardian about the discovery of the first known example of a palimpsest text in which a Coptic text of Deuteronomy appears beneath a Qur'an text. It sold at Christie's on Thursday for £596,750.
- For Penn Today, Peter Stallybrass talks about five books that shaped his teaching.
- Richard Davies from AbeBooks has launched a podcast, "Behind the Bookshelves."
- Over on the Trinity College Dublin blog, "The Fascination of Fore-Edges," by Helen McGinley.
- Kate Bolick writes for the NYTimes Material Culture column on "Who Bought Sylvia Plath's Stuff?" See also Peter Steinberg's post on his experience with the Plath sale.
- There's an update on the very fascinating Prize Papers Project on the National Archives (UK) blog.
- Andrew Keener writes for the HRC magazine about his work there as a research fellow working on bilingual and multilingual works printed in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
- Sarah Hovde surveys a few of the items in the Folger's collection attributed to Shakespeare's spirit.
- From the BL's Medieval Manuscripts blog, a look at what may be the oldest English writing in the BL's collections.
- The Providence Athenaeum has received a $100,000 anonymous gift to develop the library's special collections.
- Ina Kok has been awarded the 17th ILAB Breslauer Prize for Bibliography.
- Rebecca Rego Barry notes the 25 April sale at Doyle of items from the estate of Dr. Leo Hershkowitz, well known as an "archival scavenger." The Ratzer Map sold for $150,000.
- From Laura Kolb at The Collation, "The itemized life: John Kay's notebook."
- Stephen Mielke writes for the HRC magazine on "The archivist's archive: Visions of the future past."
- Barron's previews the 14 June Birds of America sale at Christie's.
- Pradeep Sebastian writes about bibliomysteries in The Hindu.
- A. N. Devers notes on the Fine Books Blog the acquisition by London bookshop Any Amount of Books a large number of file copies from Orion Books.
- Two men have pleaded guilty in Moscow to carrying out a series of rare book thefts from 2001 to 2008.
- Hester Blum quibbles about AMC's "The Terror" for Avidly.
Reviews
- The Multigraph Collective's Interacting with Print; review by Abigail Williams in THE.
- Alex Johnson's Book of Book Lists, Stuart Kells' The Library, and Alberto Manguel's Packing my Library; review by Sarah Laskow at Atlas Obscura.
- Margit J. Smith's The Medieval Girdle Book; review by Nicholas Yeager in The Bonefolder.
- Benjamin Park's American Nationalisms; review by Skye Montgomery at The Junto.
- Alexander Bevilacqua's The Arabic Republic of Letters; review by Jacob Soll in TNR.
- Lynne Murphy's The Prodigal Tongue; review by Lionel Shriver in the TLS.
- Michael Dirda surveys some classic and contemporary creepy tales. This one definitely added a few to my reading list.
Upcoming Auctions
- Fine Books and Manuscripts at Leslie Hindman Auctioneers on 1 May.
- Rare Book & Collectors' Sale at Fonsie Mealy Auctioneers on 2 May.
- Graphic Design at Swann Galleries on 3 May.
- Fine Literature: The Fred Bennett Collection (with additions) at PBA Galleries on 3 May.
- The Original Working Manuscript for the Alcoholics Anonymous 'Big Book' at Profiles in History on 5 May.
