Sunday, April 26, 2020

Links & Auctions

- If you need a few minutes' daily respite from <  all this  > I heartily recommend Sandi Toksvig's "Vox Tox" YouTube channel. She's doing a short segment each day from home, usually featuring some interesting bits she's found amongst her books. They are pure delight. I've also been enjoying my school-librarian aunt's readings of childrens' books, and Mary Chapin Carpenter singing songs from her kitchen (both on Facebook). And if ghost stories are your jam, Robert Lloyd Parry has been posting videos of his readings on the Nunkie Films YouTube channel.

- Today is Audubon's birthday, and over on the Library of Congress blog, Ashley Cuffia has some suggestions for "Celebrating John James Audubon with Citizen Science."

- Harvard invites crowdsourced transcription help for the recently-digitized Colonial North America collection. Get started here.

- Lisa Fagin Davis' webinar "Fragments and Fragmentology in the Twenty-First Century" is now available on YouTube.

- Also newly available on YouTube, the 9 March "Feminist Bibliographies" event at UCLA.

- Penn Today highlighted the "American Contact" conference, held virtually this week with pre-circulated video papers and then Zoom discussion sessions. The papers were excellent, and though I didn't get to join as many discussion sessions as I would have liked, those I did see were also great.

- David Pearson guest-posts on the Middle Temple Libraries "Provenance Mysteries" blog about frustrations in provenance research.

- Over on Notabilia, Eric White on some new finds among the Princeton binding fragments.

- From the Princeton Graphic Arts collection blog, "Lord Temple and His Stolen Stationery."

- Scott Ellwood writes for the Grolier Club blog about eighteenth-century Yorkshire bookseller Isabella "Tibby" Tinkler."

- The Bodleian blog highlights a new catalogue of the papers of post Edward Blunden.

- From Erin Blake at The Collation, "The 'Greco Deco' Folger Shakespeare Library."

- Devin Fitzgerald is in the "Bright Young Librarians" spotlight over on the Fine Books Blog.

- More on the continuing Dirk Obbink fallout over on the ARCA blog.

- From the Cambridge University Libraries Special Collections blog, Sally Kent on "An Earthen Pot of Bones: True Crime in Sutton."

- On the BL's Untold Lives blog, "Solving a Provenance Puzzle: Papers of Henry and Robert Dundas, Viscounts Melville."

- Over on CNN, "Solving the 1,000-year-old mystery of rare blue medieval paint." And here's the Science Advances article.

- The Book Collector has launched a podcast, featuring articles from the journal's archive.

- From Sarah Werner, "Picture Books." I love the subhead: "Pictures. That's it. Just pictures of things so you can rest your brain."

Upcoming Auctions (online)

- From the Curious to the Extraordinary at Chiswick Auctions on 28 April.

- Modern Literature, Childrens', Private Press and Original Illustrations at Forum Auctions on 29 April.

- Literature, Americana, History, Collectible Books at PBA Galleries (timed sale, no reserves) starts ending at 11 a.m. PDT on 30 April.

Saturday, April 18, 2020

Links & Auctions

- "The Booksellers" documentary is now available for streaming rental, and if you rent via this link, 50% of the proceeds go directly to the ABAA. I'm looking forward to watching later today!

- Yesterday afternoon's BSA webinar "What is a Feminist Practice in Bibliography?" was excellent. It was largely based on small-group discussion (and thus not particularly suited for video) but I found it really inspiring to hear about the great projects folks are working on.

- Dirk Obbink was arrested in March on suspicion of theft and fraud, according to the Guardian. Background and more on the ARCA blog. The arrest was first reported by the Oxford Blue, but at the time of writing their article is not currently available.

- Dawn Hoffman writes for The Collation, "Hooked on Book Furniture ..." Clasps and bosses and corners, oh my!

- Also in The Collation, Bénédicte Miyamoto on "Marks in Manuals" and Caroline Duroselle-Melish on "The Many Different Ways to Make a Lacemaking Pattern Book."

- Abram Van Engen is giving a virtual book talk about his new book City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism at the MHS on 1 May. Register (free) here.

- From Kathleen Monahan on the John J. Burns Library blog, "Virtual Reference, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Local Note."

- Over at Early Modern Female Book Ownership, a look at Thomas and Isabella Hervey's copy of Thomas More's Utopia.

- The Royal Library of Belgium has digitized 213 manuscripts from the Library of the Dukes of Burgundy.

- From the Cambridge University Library's Special Collections blog, "Spreadsheets, Shelflists & Scones: Special Collections Works from Home."

- Rebecca Rego Barry notes the ongoing celebrations marking the 500th birthday of Christophe Plantin.

- Ellen Gleason writes for the Clements Library blog about her work processing two recently-acquired whaling logbooks.

- The BL's Medieval Manuscripts blog highlights a 1547 inventory of the possessions of Henry VIII, including several extant books and manuscripts.

- From Medieval Manuscripts Provenance, the first part of a series on "A Recently Dismembered Copy of Giordana Ruffo, De Medicina Equorum."

- The Marian Library's exhibition "Mary in Miniature: Books of Hours in the Marian Library Collection" is now available for online viewing.

- Video from the ILAB seminar on COVID-19 and the antiquarian bookselling world is now available.

Upcoming Auctions (online)

- Rare Books, Autographs & Maps at Doyle New York ends on 22 April.

Historical Manuscripts at Heritage Auctions on 22 April.

- Autograph Seeker: The Estate of Gary Combs at Doyle New York on 23 April.

- Americana from the George E. Steinmetz Collection (with additions) at PBA Galleries on 23 April.

- Books and Works on Paper at Forum Auctions on 23 April.

- Miscellaneous Books at PBA Galleries on 30 April (no catalog yet)

Sunday, April 12, 2020

Links & Auctions

- CABS 2020 has been cancelled.

- Rebecca Rego Barry summarized this week's ILAB webinar about the effects of COVID-19 on the antiquarian bookselling community for the FB&C blog.

- Brian Cassidy talked to the AbeBooks "Behind the Bookshelves" podcast this week.

- Over on the Beinecke's blog, Michael Morand offers "Some Early Notes on Teaching Online with Special Collections in a Time of Quarantine."

- From Past is Present, Jeff Cooper on "Hidden Histories and the Digitization of New England's Earliest Manuscript Church Records."

- Don't miss the excellent "At Home with Books" catalog put out this week by Heather O'Donnell, Ben Kinmont, Simon Beattie, and Justin Croft.

- Devon Eastland writes about the "long s" for the Swann blog.

- Two new stories this week about the opening of Emily Hale's letters from T.S. Eliot at Princeton: James Parker writes for the Atlantic on "The Secret Cruelty of T.S. Eliot," and Princeton's Daniel Linke writes about the robust security (literal metal bands around the boxes!) used to keep the letters secure until they could be released.

- From Matt Kirschenbaum, "Bibliologistics: The Nature of Books Now, or a Memorable Fancy."

- Mike Widener has a post on the Yale Law Library's rare books blog about "Epidemics and Quarantine in 17th-century Rome."

- Hannah Alpert-Adams has a Medium post about "What the Humanities do in a Crisis."

- Over on the library blog for Catholic University, Henry Granville Widener has a post about Brazilian incunabula.

- From the BL's Medieval Manuscripts blog, "Illuminating the Worms Bible."

- From Jay Moschella, "Notes From a Lost Renaissance Library."

- More useful resource compilations, this one on #VastEarlyAmerica from the Omohundro Institute.

- Over on the Met's "In Circulation" blog, Mindell Dubansky offers some "Reminiscences of a Bookbinder."

- From Lisa Fagin Davis, "Fragmentology Under Quarantine." (Also, Lisa's "Breakfast Paleography" threads on Twitter are great, too!)

- At Medieval Manuscripts Provenance, "A Collector's Mark Re-Interpreted."

- From the Middle Temple Library blog, another fascinating provenance mystery for us to mull over.

- Over on the Princeton Graphic Arts collection blog, "Museum of the History of the Recorded Word."

- Elizabeth DeBold writes for The Collation on "All the Purposes of a Library: A Piece of Blue Ephemera."

Upcoming Auctions (online)


Fine Books and Manuscripts at Potter & Potter on 18 April.

Sunday, April 05, 2020

Links & Auctions

If you can support your favorite bookstores and booksellers and publishers in any way during all this, please do. It's rough out there. Oh, and if you're a library administrator, close the library for now, please.

Courage, friends.

- Probably inevitably, London Rare Books School has cancelled its sessions for 2020.

- The Sammelband post for April is "Teaching Materiality with Virtual Instruction." 

- Over in the Ransom Center blog, "Picturing the Plays of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries."

- Scott Ellwood has a post on the Grolier Club's blog about what seems to be Sir Thomas Phillipps' earliest book catalogue.

- Don't miss Aaron Pratt's "Sometimes You Want Your Blank Blank."

- From the Middle Temple Library blog, "Provenance Mysteries: Injury by Beard."

- Some great, timely character sleuthing by Keith Houston at Shady Characters in "Miscellany No. 87: A Coronavirus Conundrum."


- The Bewick Society blog highlights a new book by Nigel Tattersfield, Dealing in Deceit: Edwin Pearson of the 'Bewick Repository' Bookshop, 1838–1901.


- From Laura Cleaver at History Matters, "The Sauce of the Middle Ages."

- Elizabeth Ryan writes for the Stanford Hidden Treasures blog, "Encounters with Binder's Waste in Stanford Libraries' Conservation Department." 

- From Penn's Special Collections Processing blog, Cory Austin Knudson offers "Some Thoughts on my Favorite Dissertation Ever Written."

- April's Rare Book Monthly articles are up.

Upcoming Auctions (online)

- Jiao Bingzhen Album at The Potomack Company on 8 April.


- Fine Books and Manuscripts at Potter & Potter on 18 April.