Links & Auctions

- New and excellent: Book Owners Online, a directory of English book owners, 1610–1715 (with plans to expand). Spearheaded by David Pearson with support from CELL and the Bibliographical Society.

- Registration is now open for the Brooklyn Antiquarian Book Fair (virtual) on 11–13 September, which will include a series of webinars and an exhibition.

- The Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair will also be held online, 12–14 November. Some details are now available.

- Travis McDade has a piece on the Pittsburgh Carnegie Library thefts in the September Smithsonian.

- There were many stories this week about the recent discoveries of books and manuscripts beneath the attic floorboards at Oxburgh Hall in Norfolk (most but not entirely having been used as rodent nesting material). See also Matthew Champion's fascinating and well-illustrated Twitter thread on the finds.

- Meanwhile, the National Trust's "restructuring" plans, which would eliminate many curatorial positions, are coming in for much justified derision.

- From Peter Kidd, "Another Hachette-Lehman-Yale Cutting."

- Garrett Scott has launched Antiquarian Bookseller Wiki, beginning with a series of biographical sketches of women active in the antiquarian book trades.

- Over on the Princeton Graphic Arts Collection blog, "Frances Mary Richardson Currer, Important Early Bibliophile."

- William Harris writes for the FDR Library's blog: "Unpretentious History: Alma Van Curan and the FDR Library Logbooks."

- The AAS' PHBAC has release their fall schedule of virtual events (plus videos of their spring/summer talks, all of which were excellent).

- From the BL's Medieval Manuscripts blog, "How did the Cotton Library grow?"

- Jeffrey Hamburger writes for the Houghton blog, "An 'Old Prayer Book,' Yet not a 'Dull' one: The Liber Ordinarius of Nivelles."

- Many congratulations to the Grosvenor Rare Book Room at the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library, which recently completed its collection of Kelmscott Press publications!

- From Elizabeth Gettins on the LC blog, a post highlighting the recent digitization of historical title pages submitted for copyright purposes.

- J.L. Bell has begun a series of posts on John Adams' library, including comments from the current Quincy mayor who is apparently going to try and bring the books back to Quincy from Boston ... see "When John Adams Gave Away His Library," "'The most appropriate and useful place for the collection'," and "Looking at John Adams's Things Today," with more to come.

Upcoming Auctions

- Books and Works on Paper at Forum Auctions on 27 August.

- Vintage Posters at Swann Galleries on 27 August.

- Fine Books with Americana, Travel & Arthur H. Clark Publications at PBA Galleries ends on 27 August.

- Rare Books, Art & Ephemera at Addison & Sarova on 29 August.

Links & Reviews

- An Alexander Hamilton letter stolen from the Massachusetts Archives before 1950 is now in the custody of the FBI after an auction house employee charged with researching the provenance alerted the Massachusetts Archives and law enforcement. See coverage in the AP, NYTimes, Smithsonian, and the WaPo.

- From Aaron Pratt on the HRC blog, "Gutenberg Misbound."

- The National Library of Israel has received a tranche of some 5,000 Max Brod documents from Germany. These had been stolen from the apartment of Brod's secretary, Esther Hoffe, about a decade ago.

- The judge's copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover, sold at auction last year, is now subject to a temporary export ban to allow a UK buyer to match the £56,250 price. English PEN has launched a crowdfunding effort, which has raised more than £18,000 as of this morning. 

- In The Yale Globalist, Alma Bitran on "The Voynich Manuscript: Finding Meaning in Meaninglessness." And in other—completely unsurprising—Voynich news, Bristol University is now walking (running?) back claims that a researcher based there had solved the mystery of the manuscript. See the Bristol University statement as well.

- A report in the Ithaca Journal reveals that National Book Auctions is the subject of a state attorney general's investigation, which has determined that the auction house defrauded at least 115 customers of sums totaling more than $1 million.

- Liz Broadwell writes for the Penn Rare Books blog about finding some Bohemian silver coins tucked into a numismatic treatise!

- Over on the New Zealand National Library blog, Simon Grigg writes about the process of digitizing the music magazine Rip It Up.

- A manuscript diary documenting the last days of seventeenth-century Dutch statesman Johan van Oldenbarnevelt has turned up, nearly two centuries after it was last documented.

- At Medieval Manuscripts Provenance, "A Dismembered Book of Hours Once Owned by Count Durrieu," "Another 'Spanish' Forger?" and "Another 'Spanish' Forger?: An Addendum."

- From Simon Newman at The Collation, "'Run away': a life in 78 words."

- On the BL's Medieval Manuscripts blog, "Cataloguing the Harley manuscripts."

- Abbie Weinberg offers a great book snakes primer at The Collation.

- Author Ian Rankin has donated his personal archive to the National Library of Scotland.

Reviews

- Leo Damrosch's The Club; review by Jenny Uglow in the NYRB.

- Brenda Wineapple's The Impeachers; review by John Fabian Witt in the WaPo.

Upcoming Auctions

- Reliures Originales & Livres Illustrés Modernes at ALDE on 28 May.

- Rare Books & Works on Paper at Chiswick Auctions on 29 May.

- Fine Books, Manuscripts and Works on Paper at Forum Auctions on 30 May.

- Fine Books & Manuscripts – Food & Drink at PBA Galleries on 30 May.

- Autographs & Memorabilia at Chiswick Auctions on 30 May.

Links, Reviews & Auctions

- The Library of Congress launched a new crowd-sourced transcription tool.

- A man was arrested this week after attempting to steal a copy of Magna Carta from a display case at Salisbury Cathedral.

- A. N. Devers writes for the Fine Books Blog about Elizabeth Young's new Brooklyn bookshop.

- Sam Lemley, a doctoral student at UVA, won this year's National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest.

- Ken Sanders talked to France 24 in a short interview about his many years of tracking down book thieves, and about material he's handled relating to disappeared poet Everett Ruess.

- Over at Res Obscura, Ben Breen highlights isochronic maps.

- On the American Scholar's "Smarty Pants" podcast, "The Future is Feminist Book Collecting."

- The Washington Papers editorial project celebrates its fiftieth birthday.

- An unpublished Sylvia Plath story will be published in January by Faber, the Guardian reports.

Review

- Benjamin Balint's Kafka's Last Trial; review by Lev Mendes in the NYTimes.

Upcoming Auctions

- Bibliothèque de François Mitterand: Livres Modernes de 1900 à nos jours - Première partie at PIASA on 29 October.

- Bibliothèque de François Mitterand: Livres Modernes de 1900 à nos jours - Seconde partie at PIASA on 30 October.

- Travel Literature and Sporting Books from the Library of Arnold 'Jake' Johnson at Doyle New York on 30 October.

- Sotheby's single-item sale of one of just three known copies of a 1932 poster for The Mummy starring Boris Karloff ends on 31 October.

- The Adventure & Exploration Library of Steve Fossett, Part I at Leslie Hindman Auctioneers on 31 October.

- Autographed Documents, Manuscripts, Photos, Books & Relics at University Archives on 31 October.

- The Joel Harris Collection of Original Illustration Art and Illustrated Books (with additions) at PBA Galleries on 1 November.

- Rare Books & the Harrison Forman Archive at Addison & Sarova on 3 November.

Links & Reviews

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.

Links & Reviews

- Rare Book School scholarship and fellowship applications are now available, with a due date of 1 November.

- The Brooklyn Antiquarian Book Fair is coming up on 8–10 September. Purchase of an opening night preview ticket benefits the RBS Scholarship Fund. Hope to see some of you there!

- Scans of the Library of Congress' collection of Alexander Hamilton papers are now available online.

- A hard drive containing unpublished works by Terry Pratchett was destroyed by steam roller this week, per the author's wishes.

- Ithaka S+R and the Mellon Foundation have released a report on employee diversity in ARL libraries.

- Jeanette Lerman writes on the current LCP exhibition "The Living Book" for the Philadelphia Inquirer, highlighting the (utterly wonderful) leaf books of Joseph Breintnall.

- David Fuchs talked on "Morning Edition" this week about Walter and Graham Judd's Flora of Middle Earth.

- Miriam Katazawi reports in for the Globe and Mail from an ongoing inventory at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto.

- Books from Vivien Leigh's library will go on the auction block on 26 September at Sotheby's London.

Reviews

- Two Walt Whitman texts recently identified and edited by Zachary Turpin; review by Ted Genoways in the NYTimes.

- David Williams' When the English Fall; review by Abigail Deutsch in the NYTimes.

- Lawrence P. Jackson's Chester B. Himes: A Biography; review by Robert B. Stepto in the WaPo.

- Helen Pilcher's Bring Back the King and Ursula K. Heise's Imagining Extinction; review by Colin Dickey in the LARB.

- Carol Berkin's A Sovereign People; review by Monica Rico in the LARB.

Upcoming Auctions

- Printed Books, Maps & Documents at Dominic Winter Auctioneers on 6 September.

- Rare Books & Manuscripts, with the Fred Bennett Collection of the Book Club of California at PBA Galleries on 7 September.

- Eric C. Caren – How History Unfolds on Paper at Cowan's Auctions on 8 September.

- Books and Ephemera at National Book Auctions on 9 September.

- Fine Books and Manuscripts at Leslie Hindman Auctioneers on 13 September.

- Books at Heritage Auctions on 14 September.

- The Glory of Science at Bloomsbury on 14 September.

- Rare Cartography – Americana – Travel & Exploration at PBA Galleries on 21 September.

Links & Reviews

- Rebecca Fishbein offers "A Brief History of the Strand," founded ninety years ago this year.

- David Laskin writes for the NYTimes Travel section on "The Hidden Treasures in Italian Libraries."

- A nicely illustrated 1819 ship's log sold at Swann last week for $20,800.

- Keith Houston highlights a new punctuation mark ("a Dutch interrobang") and interviews the typographer behind it.

- Tawrin Baker writes for the Huntington's blog on "Visualizing the Anatomy of the Eye."

- Maggs Bros. new shop gets the Architectural Digest treatment.

- Over at Past is Present, an interview with Chris Phillips about his research at AAS.

- Edward Whitley asks "Where did Leaves of Grass come from?"

- On 15 July, the Massachusetts Historical Society will host a "Transcribe-a-thon" to mark John Quincy Adams' 250th birthday.

- The Chicago Tribune reports on the upcoming $11 million renovation at the Newberry Library.

- Ellen G.K. Rubin's collection of movable books is featured in Atlas Obscura.

- Ian Ehling has been appointed Director of Fine Books & Manuscripts at Bonhams New York.

- Bookseller Garrett Scott offers up a really fascinating probate inventory featuring a detailed library list.

- In the TLS, Stuart Kelly on "Writing beyond the grave."

- If you have bought from or sold to ebay user davius-9srhw8rb, please contact the ABAA.

Reviews

- Yael Rice reviews the Sackler Gallery's recent exhibition "The Art of the Qu'ran" in the LARB.

- Erica Benner's Be Like the Fox; review by Edmund Fawcett in the NYTimes.

- Rüdiger Safranski's Goethe: Life as a Work of Art; review by Michael Hofmann in the NYTimes.

- Joe Berkowitz's Away with Words; review by Allan Fallow in the WaPo.

- The British Museum's exhibition and catalog on Hokusai; review by Peter Maber in the TLS.

Upcoming Auctions

- Books, Autographs and Works at Paper at Bloomsbury on 22 June.

- Fine Judaica at Kestenbaum and Company on 22 June.

- Books and Ephemera at National Book Auctions on 24 June.

Links & Reviews

- This week's Sotheby's sale of a remarkable collection of Hamilton manuscripts garnered a NYTimes report and a Fine Books Blog post by Rebecca Rego Barry.

- The BPL has digitized their copy of Moxon's Mechanick Exercises (1683).

- Over at Literary Hub, Rebecca Rego Barry previewed the sale of some important pieces of Doubleday publishing history at Doyle this week.

- A "Book History Unbound" section has been added to the SHARP website, as a space for Book History contributors to post additional materials.

- ILAB released a warning this week about a book circulating with a forged Darwin inscription.

- The California International Antiquarian Book Fair celebrates fifty years this February; I'm looking forward to attending for the first time!

- Early American bookplates are the order of the day on the Princeton Graphic Arts Collection blog.

- A new digital collation tool is now available for download.

- Bruce Springsteen's archive is going to Monmouth University.

- The Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture at the University of Wisconsin Madison will host what looks like a fascinating conference in September, "BH and DH: Book History and Digital Humanities." See the page for the call for papers, &c.

- The new journal Libraries: Culture, History, and Society is now accepting submissions for the second issue.

- Nancy Campbell writes on the "Beauty of Books" for the TLS.

- On the OUP blog, James Cortada asks how map reading has changed over the past several centuries.

- A new podcast from AAS features interviews with AAS research fellows.

- A Watertown, NY woman was arrested after attempting to steal rare books from the Flower Public Library in Watertown.

- From Michiko Kakutani, "Obama's Secret to Surviving the White House Years: Books," as well as the transcript of the interview for the piece.

Reviews

- A new translation of Dumas' The Red Sphinx; review by Michael Dirda in the WaPo.

- Ruth Franklin's Shirley Jackson and Miles Hyman's recent graphic adaptation of "The Lottery"; review by Emilie Bickerton in the TLS.

- Kevin Dann's Expect Great Things; review by John Kaag in the NYTimes.

Upcoming Auctions

- Alexander Hamilton: An Important Family Archive of Letters and Manuscripts at Sotheby's New York, 18 January

- Books, Art and Ephemera: Whaling, Horror, 16th Century, &c. at National Book Auctions, 21 January

Links & Reviews

- An employee of the French National Library has been detained in connection to the theft of more than forty engravings from the Library's Richelieu-Louvois branch. Twenty maps were also reported missing from the same branch earlier in the summer. The missing engravings were reported and the "trail ultimately led to a Belgian bookseller who had purchased 20 engravings from a Dutch collector. In turn, that collector identified the employee who had sold him the works."

- A librarian at the library of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts is accused of replacing some 140 paintings with his own forgeries. Xiao Yuan sold some of the paintings at auction between 2004 and 2011 for millions. He said he realized how rampant forgery and theft were at the library when he noticed that some of his own forgeries had been replaced by forgeries by others!

- A House committee chairman has proposed eliminating the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.

- David Weinberger writes about the "library-shaped hold in the Internet" for the Boston Globe. Don't miss this one.

- The Lambeth Palace Library is working to document the provenance of the books once held in the Sion College Library (now in the Lambeth collections).

- From Erin Blake at The Collation, a look back at a preservation technology of the past: photostats.

- A 1,500-year-old scroll found at Ein Gedi has been "digitally unrolled," revealing the text within (from the book of Leviticus). More scrolls found at the same site may be deciphered next by the same team.

- NYPL post-doctoral fellow Mark Boonshoft writes about two recently-digitized business letterbooks from late 18th-century New York.

- What may be the oldest known Koranic fragments have been identified at the University of Birmingham: scholars think that the manuscript may "take us back to within a few years of the founding of Islam."

- NYU's Tamiment Library has acquired the editorial archives of The Nation.

- The National Library of Medicine has digitized more than 200 ESTC items from its holdings, and has announced a three-year partnership with the USTC to digitize the "rarest European materials" in the NLM's collections.

- George Mason University has launched a graduate certificate in Digital Public Humanities.

- Margaret K. Hofer has been named Vice President and Museum Director at the New-York Historical Society.

- Cambridge University has digitized several examples of early Chinese texts and printing for inclusion in the Cambridge Digital Library. One text included is a rare 17th-century example of color printing, considered so fragile that it has been completely unavailable for scholarly study.

- Over at Past is Present, Paul Erickson highlights a letter in the AAS collections from Moses Paul to Samson Occom.

- Yale's Beinecke Library is digitizing more than 2,000 videocassettes for preservation and cataloging.

- Amy Brunvand, a librarian at the University of Utah, has a piece in the new C&RL News, "Taking Paper Seriously: A Call for Format-Sensitive Collection Development." Very much worth a read.

- The University of Iowa Libraries are beginning to digitize items from their extensive collections of fan fiction.

Reviews

- Anthony Amore's The Art of the Con; review by Wendy Smith in the WaPo.

- Matthew Battles' Palimpsest; review by Mark Kingwell in the Globe and Mail.

Links & Reviews

- The DPLA has received a $999,485 grant from the IMLS to fund an expansion of the DPLA's service hubs network.

- Mozart's manuscript score of his Piano Sonata in A has been found at the National Szechenyi Library in Budapest.

- Martha Carlin writes in the TLS about a ~1643 manuscript description of Southwark which mentions Shakespeare and his contemporaries having carved their names into the panelled walls of the Tabard Inn.

- The Telegraph reports on the restoration of Mrs. Gaskell's house and gardens.

- Over at Aeon, David Armitage and Jo Guldi ask "how did history abdicate its role of inspiring the longer view?"

- A new exhibition has launched at Harvard's Houghton Library, "InsideOUT: Contemporary Bindings of Private Press Books."

- From Amanda French, "On some books in Edna St. Vincent Millay's library."

- Historian James McPherson talks books for the NYT's "By the Books" feature.

- The winners of the 2014 National Collegiate Book-Collecting Contest have been announced.

- An IMLS grant will fund the digitization of nearly 200 rare volumes from the Clark Art Institute's Julius S. Held Collection of Rare Books.

- Steve Moyer has a piece in the current issue of Humanities about artist John Gould and Ralph Nicholson Ellis, Jr., whose efforts to collect Gould's works nearly bankrupted him.

- The Boston Globe highlights the coming installation of a Poe statue in Boston, and BU professor Paul Lewis' long push to get the city to recognize Poe as a native son.

- Speaking of Poe, Susan Jaffe Tane spoke to FB&C about her collection of Poe, some of which is currently on display at the Grolier Club.

- A collection of Ray Bradbury's books, art, ephemera, &c. made $493,408 at auction last week.

- Arion Press, for their one-hundredth publication, will produce a new fine-press edition of Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

- News in June, but new to me: Bowdoin College has acquired a 328-volume collection of Sarah Wyman Whitman bindings, donated by collector Jean Paul Michaud.

- The NYT Arts Beat blog reported that some reviewers received copies of an ARC of Anthony Horowitz's new book Moriarty containing authorial back-and-forth with copy editors.

- The Royal College of Physicians will host a 2016 exhibition titled "Scholar, courtier, magician: the lost library of John Dee."

- Hannah Bailey guest-posts at The Junto about the importance of French archives for early American historians.

- Three 17th-century Japanese scrolls are now available digitally through the Princeton University Digital Library.

- First Folio thief Raymond Scott is back in the news after the prison where he committed suicide has come under scrutiny for not providing better mental health care. More coverage from the BBC and ChronicleLive.

- Also at The Junto, Sara Georgini provides an inside look at the process that goes into creating the Adams Papers editorial project volumes.

- From Jim Ambuske at the Scholars' Lab blog, "Visualizing Early America through MapScholar and Beyond."

- Author James Patterson plans to donate £130,000 to more than 70 independent bookshops across the UK. The funds will be used to promote programs designed to "inspire children to become lifelong readers."

- From Rare Books Digest, "Rare, Signed and Forged," in which the author lays out some suggested criteria for buying (or selling) signed books.

Reviews

- Michael Farquhar's Secret Lives of the Tsars; review by Hank Cox in the WaPo.

- Ellen T. Harris' George Friedrich Handel: A Life with Friends; review by Weston Williams in the CSM.

- S.C. Gwynne's Rebel Yell; review by Allen Guelzo in the WSJ.

- Robert Darnton's Censors at Work; review by Felipe Fernández-Armesto in the WSJ.

Links & Reviews

Apologies for the radio silence and the once-again epic roundup post of links and reviews. I've been down the delightful Rare Book School rabbit-hole for the last couple weeks, far too busy to manage to keep up with things here. But I've been saving up links and here they all are, before Google Reader goes away:

- Petrina Jackson from UVA Special Collections posted on their blog about the Rare Book School season there, which is great fun. (And yes, you can even see the back of my head in the final picture).

- Something not to be missed: Leah Price's essay "Books on Books," at the great site Public Books.

- New from Meredith Neuman at Clark University, Sermon Notebooks Online.

- Library and Archives Canada purchased the Sherbrooke Collection of War of 1812 documents at auction in London for $573,000.

- A new study suggests that the Voynich Manuscript may actually contain meaningful text, but skeptics remain unconvinced.

- Jerry Morris has posted about the process of cataloging (and recataloging) the library of James Boswell (on LibraryThing).

- Jennifer Lowe pointed out this week some new information on the de Caro thefts in Italy: recent police raids on bookshops in Florence, Rome, Milan, and Turin resulted in the recovery of more stolen books.

- A proof copy of the first bifolium from the Kelmscott Chaucer was up for grabs last week at PBA Galleries, but went unsold.

- Hathi Trust and the DPLA have announced a partnership, which will make some 3.5 million public-domain books available through the DPLA site.

- A Sternean mystery (the date of the original publication of the first volumes of Tristram Shandy) has been solved at last.

- The BL acquired several lots at the sale of the Mendham Collection.

- Yale's recent acquisition of the Anthony Taussig collection of legal books and manuscripts is highlighted in the NYTimes.

- New work on William Henry Ireland? Yes, please! Heather Wolfe and Arnold Hunt report on Shakespeare's personal library as curated by Ireland in his forgeries.

- In the LATimes Jacket Copy blog, Hector Tobar reports on Matthew Haley's recent comments about the state of the book trade in the digital age.

- Founders Online launched earlier this month, and there was a report on this in the Washington Post. J.L. Bell has a quick note on this here, including fears for the long-term health of the NHPRC.

- A copy of the first newspaper printing of the Declaration of Independence sold this week at Robert Siegel Auction Galleries for $632,500, the largest sum ever paid for a historic newspaper. More on this here. The buyer was David Rubenstein.

- German authorities have recovered more than 15,000 books stolen from libraries (including the Bad Arolsen library) by a former official in the Hessian Ministry of Science. Some 2,000 books remain to be returned to their owners.

- On the Princeton Graphic Arts blog, Julie Mellby gives some love to the twenty-one artists who designed engravings for Baskerville's 1773 edition of Orlando Furioso.

- Nate Pedersen interviewed Joseph Felcone about his Printing in New Jersey 1754-1800: A Descriptive Bibliography.

- The National Archives will open a new David M. Rubenstein Gallery and Visitor Orientation Plaza this fall.

- Starting on 15 July, Guernsey's will be holding a seven-day sale of the Harrisburg Collection, some 8,000 items purchased by a former mayor with an eye toward creating a number of museums around the city.

- Ralph Gardner recently visited the Grolier Club and wrote about his trip in the WSJ.

- Four volumes of a copy of Don Quixote once owned by Thomas Jefferson failed to sell this week at a Virginia auction.

- All the libraries and museums in the United States, mapped. [h/t Tom Scheinfeldt]

- From the BBC Magazine, a report on early fashionista Mattheus Schwarz.

- Several books were reported stolen from Wentworth & Leggett Rare Books in North Carolina. See the full list and full contact information here.

- Peter Steinberg writes on the MHS' Beehive blog about some great detective work he's been doing to identify and reconnect pamphlets removed from Harbottle Dorr's newspaper volumes.

- Over at Booktryst, Stephen Gertz highlights a nice association copy of Common Sense which sold for $545,000 at a Sotheby's auction earlier this month. More on the sale over at Jacket Copy. At the same sale, seven books from George Washington's library fetched $1.2 million.

- The John Carter Brown Library is making its own publications freely available online.

- There's a really excellent guest post at The Collation about an annotated copy of The Roaring Girl.

- Also at The Collation, Erin Blake offers up part two of her series on proof prints.

- I was very pleased to see J.L. Bell's excellent response piece Paul Revere and the Sociologists.

- Another installment in the Anchora series on leaf books, this one focusing on a particularly annotated leaf from the Coverdale Bible.

- From the Appendix blog, a look at a 1680 sex manual that even made Pepys blush.

- Turkish media reports indicate several smugglers have been detained in Ankara with manuscripts stolen from Syrian repositories and illegally removed from the country to be sold on the black market.

- James Schmidt comments on Anthony Pagden's The Enlightnment and Why It Still Matters.

- Book collector Tom Johnson is profiled in the Springfield, MO News-Leader. Johnson's library, accumulated over three generations, is now the heart of the nonprofit Johnson Library and Museum, affiliated with Missouri State University.

- From the Houghton Library blog, Leslie Morris reports on the return of a volume from the library of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, gone missing from the Widener stacks at some point.

- Book Patrol notes the Morgan Library's publication of a new facsimile edition of the Van Damme Hours.

- At Medieval Fragments, David Ganz remembers master palaeographer Malcolm Parkes.

Reviews

- Nat Philbrick's Bunker Hill and Richard Beeman's Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor; review by Joyce Chaplin in the NYTimes.

- Neil Gaiman's Ocean at the End of the Lane; review by Benjamin Percy in the NYTimes.

- Colum McCann's TransAtlantic; review by Erica Wagner in the NYTimes.

- Paul Collins' Duel with the Devil; review by Mark Schone in the LATimes.

- Joseph Ellis' Revolutionary Summer; reviews by Andrew Cayton in the NYTimes and Kirk Davis Swinehart in the WSJ.

- Travis McDade's Thieves of Book Row; review by Carolyn Kellogg in the LATimes.

- J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fall of Arthur; review by Andrew O'Hehir in the NYTimes.

- Allen Guelzo's Gettysburg; reviews by David Blight in the NYTimes and Ernest Furgurson in the WaPo.

Links & Reviews

Well that was one heck of a week, to put it politely. I'm relieved that it's over, and so very glad (and proud) that the city I know and love has shown such resilience and defiance in the face of Monday's tragedy. All credit to the those who gave of themselves this week, from the medical personnel to the tremendously efficient law enforcement officials to the responsible reporters who kept us up to speed all week long. My thoughts are with all those who lost loved ones this week and all those still recovering, and I look forward to walking down Boylston Street again soon.

- Some big news from the the Philadelphia library world this week: the Rosenbach Museum and Library and the Free Library of Philadelphia announced on Wednesday that they intend to merge and form The Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia Foundation. The Pew Charitable Trust will be providing some of the funding for the merger. Peter Dobrin reported on this for the Inquirer as well.

- From the Fine Books Blog "Bright Young Things" series, an excellent interview with Joe Fay, the manager of the rare books department for Heritage Auctions in Texas.

- At Public Domain Review, Marri Lynn writes on Vesalius' use of metaphor in his De humani corporis fabrica. And don't forget to support PDR before 1 May (I have done so, and hope others will too).

- Over at The Junto, Michael Hattem reflects on the year he worked on the Benjamin Franklin papers project at Yale.

- Whitney Trettien has a fascinating guest post at The Collation this week, on a particularly interesting interleaved Book of Common Prayer.

- At the Princeton Graphic Acts blog, Julie Mellby posts about an 1813 Old Bailey trial for book theft.

- A copy of the Kelmscott Chaucer was appraised on the Cincinnati "Antiques Roadshow" episode recently, and William and Sylvia Peterson, authors of the Kelmscott Chaucer census, would like to contact the owner so that they can document the copy.

- From Tablet, Batya Ungar-Sargon profiles the Voynich Manuscript and the quest to decipher it.

- And now for something completely ridiculous: CNBC's show "Treasure Detectives" aired a clip of "art forgery expert" Curtis Dowling on the supposedly widespread practice of forgers "faking" old books (including references to using walnut oil to fake smells and handling patterns, as well as something about painting bindings). At Bibliodeviant, Adrian Harrington's Jonathan Kearns calls this segment what it is: utter nonsense. Read the whole thing.

Reviews

- Clive James' new review of Dante's Divine Comedy; review by Joseph Luzzi in the NYTimes.

- Megan Marshall's Margaret Fuller; review by Kathryn Harrison in the NYTimes.

- Philip Gura's Truth's Ragged Edge; review by Michael Dirda in the WaPo.

Links & Reviews

- Your can't-miss post this week is Heather Wolfe's look at 17th-century filing practices.

- A fire broke out on Monday at the Walworth Town Hall building in Southwark, London, which houses the Newington Library and Cuming Museum in Southwark. There was some damage to the collections of the museum and library, but it sounds as though it could have been significantly worse.

- The Globe & Mail has published an update on the John Mark Tillman thefts case, including the little tidbit that Tillman's son Kyle, 23, also faces charges related to the thefts (obstruction of justice, possession of stolen property, and perjury). The CBC has posted a similar story, noting that the number of seized artifacts has now passed 2,000. And from the RCMP, a photo gallery of recovered items.

- They did it with menus, and now the NYPL has turned to crowdsourced transcription of playbills: head over to ensemble.nypl.org and help transcribe!

- Over at Fine Books Blog, Rebecca Rego Barry posted "Ten Reasons a Pessimist Can be Optimistic about the Future of the Book."

- Also from Canada, the Calgary Herald reports on the continuing troubles at LAC, which now include a troubling new "code of conduct" for archives staff.

- The New-York Historical Society's new Audubon exhibit is now open, and this week they also posted a very interesting piece that's also in the show: a Meiji-era woodcut depicting the episode when Audubon opens up a box of watercolors only to find they've been destroyed by rats.

- Jennifer Howard reported last week on the forthcoming edition of Willa Cather's letters. Read the whole thing, it's well worth it!

- And speaking of documentary editions, Jeff Looney of the Thomas Jefferson Papers was recently profiled in the Washington Post.

- From the Houghton blog, a neat new acquisition: a hollow-cut silhouette of Arthur Maynard Walter, one of the founders of the Boston Athenaeum. The silhouette was made by Moses Williams, one of the few known African-American silhouettists of the early 19th century.

- DPLA Director of Content Emily Gore is interviewed by Annie Schutte on the Knight Foundation blog.

- Dave Gary recently had the chance to visit and explore the library of William Seward, at his home in Auburn, NY. Not surprisingly, he found some absolutely great stuff.

- New developments in the de Caro case, too: he and fourteen accomplices have reportedly confessed to additional thefts from more libraries, including the Biblioteca dell’Osservatorio Ximeniano and the Biblioteca Scolopica San Giovannino, both in Florence.

- The Grolier Club's new exhibit on book thief Guglielmo Libri is reviewed by Eve M. Kahn in the NYTimes.

- There's a long profile of George R.R. Martin in the Telegraph.

- Others have already covered the Supreme Court's strong first-sale ruling more thoroughly than I need to, but do read Jennifer Howard's Chronicle report on the case.

- Bookseller Norman Kane (The Americanist) passed away on 23 March; he was 88. Fine Books Notes has a short notice, plus links to their profile and interview with Kane from 2011.

- A couple unpublished F. Scott Fitzgerald poems will go on the auction block this week.

- An update on a link I posted around this time last year: the 1555 copy of Vesalius containing the author's own annotations for a projected third edition is now being made available for study at the University of Toronto's Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, where it is on deposit. The library is planning an exhibition next year to mark the 500th anniversary of Vesalius' birth.

Reviews

- Steven Galbraith and Geoffrey Smith's Rare Book Librarianship; review by David Gary at Function Follows Forme.

- Joyce Carol Oates' The Accursed; review by Wendy Smith in the LATimes.

- Sandra Day O'Connor's Out of Order; review by Adam Liptak in the NYTimes.

- Andrea Stuart's Sugar in the Blood; review by Amy Wilentz in the NYTimes.

- Catherine Bailey's The Secret Rooms; review by Nicola Shulman in the TLS.

Links & Reviews

- An important dispatch from Travis: in the Brubaker case, he reports that the government has filed a Motion for Order of Forfeiture, and will be publishing information about how libraries who believe Brubaker stole from them can claim their missing stuff. So, if you work at one of these libraries and haven't yet done anything, the time for waiting has ended.

- In the Boston Globe today, an investigation into the business connections of the trustees of the Boston Public Library. Donovan Slack finds that three of the trustees who voted last fall to oust Bernie Margolis as president "have substantial business ties with the city, raising questions about their independence from Mayor Thomas M. Menino's administration." The trustees "also failed to disclose those ties as required by the state conflict-of-interest law." Slack adds "The outgoing library president, whose last day was June 30, said in an interview shortly after the vote that some trustees told him they could not vote to keep him for fear of jeopardizing their relationships with City Hall." The mayor's office maintains that "no one at City Hall attempted to use those financial relationships to sway library trustee votes."

- From BibliOdyssey, images from fencing master Achille Marozzo's 1536 work Opera Nova dell'Arte delle Armi, described as "the most important fencing manual of the 16th century and the first serious work to establish uniform rules for the use of weapons." Also, engravings from the "odd" Frauenzimmer Gesprechspiele (1646) by Georg Philipp Harsdörffer (including an interesting reworking of Arcimboldo's "Librarian."

- Via LISNews, a list of "100 Unbelievably Useful Reference Sites You've Never Heard Of" (you've probably heard of some of them, but it is definitely a good list).

- The Austin American-Statesman has a column on the Texfake saga, with some interesting backstory on old John Jenkins and his shenanigans. I've been meaning to write something up about Jenkins and his Union connection, which I will do upon my return from vacation. Apropos of this, another story in the A-S reports that two documents from the period of the Texas Revolution have been ordered returned to the state archives; they've been in private hands for some time after being "improperly removed" from the archives.

- This week's "Information Please" episode, from 1939, features writers Rex Stout and Moss Hart. I'm been enjoying these, they're witty and very amusing. This one includes write-in questions from Upton Sinclair and Ellery Queen, among others.

- From the new issue of College & Research Libraries News, a sampling of summer reading for various incoming college classes.

- In the LATimes, Louis Sahagun has an essay on Jefferson's Bible.

- Richard Cox comments on the recent debate over editing the papers of the 'founding fathers.' He writes "We have confusion here between scholarly historical research generated by documentary editors and access to the documents; one doesn’t necessarily require the other. Assertions about the problems of the “limited accessibility of the published volumes” (limited because of cost and residence in research libraries) still begs the question about just what degree the public wants access to such documents and confuses the needs of the public with that of scholars. ... Holding onto the continuing fiction that every American wants to read the entire correspondence of a Jefferson or Adams actually undermines the potential contributions of modern documentary editing."

- On NPR, author Edward Dolnick discusses his new book The Forger's Spell, about famed art forger Han van Meegeren.

- Paul Collins teases his new Believer article, "Bite Me: A Brief History of Dentistry and Music."

Reviews

- In the Christian Science Monitor, Joseph Wheelan's Mr. Adams's Last Crusade is reviewed.

- Ted Widmer's Ark of the Liberties: America and the World is reviewed by David Oshinsky in the NYTimes.

LAT on Founders' Papers

In today's LATimes, Sarah Wire covers the recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing about the Founding Fathers' Paper editorial projects, which I discussed at some length here. Wire's report centers on the question of the best way to mount the papers online: in annotated form through Rotunda (the University of Virginia Press' digital imprint) or by digitizing the unannotated documents along with the published volumes and making them available via the Library of Congress' website.

[Update: The audio from the 7 February Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on this topic is now available here (RealAudio).]

Editing the Founders

On Thursday morning, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing designated "The Founding Fathers’ Papers: Ensuring Public Access to our National Treasures." Witnesses included historians David McCullough and Ralph Ketcham, Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein, and Princeton professor Stanley Katz, chairman of the Founding Fathers Papers project (which represents the six ongoing editorial projects for the papers of Washington, Adams, Jefferson (Papers and Retirement Series), Madison and Franklin).

I'm going to write about the hearing and what was said there, but understand that I can't come at this topic from an unbiased standpoint: I work every day with the staff of the Adams Papers and understand the excellent, meaningful research and scholarship that goes into each and every volume of the Papers.

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the committee chairman, led off the hearing with a prepared statement, calling for digitization of the papers and making them freely available on the Internet. Not a bad idea if the resources can be arranged, but no replacement for the published volumes.

David McCullough delivered a ringing endorsement of the project, noting that the value of the published papers "is unassailable, immeasurable. They are superbly edited. They are thorough. They are accurate. The footnotes are pure gold - many are masterpieces of close scholarship ... Just this past week, for my current project, I wanted to find out what all was contained in the 80-some crates that Thomas Jefferson shipped back home to Virginia, in the course of his five years of diplomatic service in France - all the books, art and artifacts, the scientific instruments, and the like. The range and variety of the inventory would, of course, reflect much about the mind of the man. So I turned to the Jefferson papers hoping there might be something. And, sure enough, there it was, in Volume 18, the whole sum total in a footnote that runs nearly six pages in small type. I know what work had to have gone into that footnote, the care and attention to detail. There have been times when I’ve spent a whole day on one paragraph just trying to get it right, to be clear and accurate." Many of you probably know how I feel about footnotes (not to mention Jefferson's books) and will understand why this made me happy.

McCullough pushed back against strongly against calls for trying to speed up publication, noting that the editors "are the best in the business and the high quality of the work they do need not, must not be jeopardized or visciated in order to speed up the rate of production. There really should be no argument about that."

Stanley Katz submitted a lengthy document [PDF] containing various important data about the editorial projects, including publication histories, schedules, access notes, and several sample documents before and after the editorial process.

Deanna Marcum, Associate Librarian for Library Services at the Library of Congress, suggested in her testimony that the LoC could, with adequate resources, host a digital edition of the Founding Families papers. Rebecca Rimel, CEO of the Pew Charitable Trusts (a major funder of the projects), called for additional federal funding for the projects and consequent increased access while not forgetting the "essential steps of research, historical editing and annotating." Weinstein suggested that current volumes of the published papers be made available digitally, along with "unannotated transcripts of the raw materials for future printed volumes."

Ralph Ketcham's prepared statement praised the editorial projects, noting "I do not think that the present rate of publication, with present staff and funding, and providing that the focus of the staff remains on gathering, validating, editing, and preparing for publication of those papers according to the long-established and widely approved standards noted above, can be much hastened. Efficiencies and improvement of technique can, as they have often in the past, probably speed things up some, but the projects already do very well on that score; even new technologies are unlikely to be major factors. ... I would propose, then, that the best way to speed up public access to the treasured documents is to provide increased funding and staff for the existing efficient, highly skilled projects. Any effort to shortcut, bypass, or interfere with the work of the existing projects would, I think, only impede them, and in the long run diminish the useful access to their documents."

Stanley Katz also wrote two dispatches from the hearing for the Chronicle of Higher Education (here and here); he provides some more information about the purposes of the hearing, and adds "I felt yesterday and I feel now that a little sunshine is a very good thing for scholars who have nothing to hide and everything to gain from greater public awareness. ... And yes, Senator Leahy, we could use more federal funding. Thank you, sir, for your interest!"

There are a bunch of other aspects to all this that I won't get into here (at least not now) - I've read within the last few days some serious misconceptions about the editing process and the availability of the materials (both the primary documents on microfilm or the published volumes as they're released), for example - suffice it to say that while the pace of publication may not be frantic, it is deliberate, measured and effective. If the annotated volumes can be supplemented by digital editions without compromising the ongoing editorial projects, excellent.

The major reason these project have taken so long (they were begun in the 1950s) is that there is simply so much material to work with. Many of the Founders lived long lives and wrote voluminously right until the end. The only finished series is The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, published in twenty-seven volumes by Columbia University Press from 1961-1987. As Ketcham noted the other day, the chief editor of that project, Harold "Cy" Syrett, "once remarked that he considered dedicating his work to Aaron Burr, who 'made completion of the task possible.'"

From that angle, we should all be thankful that the other projects still have so many more writings to edit!