November Auction Preview

- On 4 November, Sotheby's London will sell Travels, Atlases, Maps and Natural History books, in 214 lots. Top estimates (£60,000-80,000 apiece) go to Basilius Besler's Hortus Eystettensis (1613), called the "earliest pictorial record of flowers from a single garden", and an interesting composite atlas in four volumes from around 1740.

- Christie's Paris will sell Importants Livres Anciens, Livres d'Artistes et Manuscrits on 9 November, in 193 lots. The lot rating the top estimate is a fragment of Saint-Exupéry's manuscript of Pilote de guerre, which could fetch €120,000-180,000 (there's also much more Saint-Exupéry material in the sale). A first edition of Descartes' Discours de la Méthode is estimated at €50,000-70,000.

- The annual Skinner Fine Books & Manuscripts sale will be held on 14 November, in 686 lots. A 1776 Exeter, NH broadside printing of the Declaration of Independence is expected to be the top lot, estimated at $300,000-500,000. This is an interesting piece, having descended through a single family. Another interesting Revolutionary broadside is a copy of the Declaration for Taking up Arms (est. $40,000-60,000). There's a very interesting Thomas Jefferson letter sending a copy of his plan for UVa to a new college, a collection of Edward Curtis's works on American Indians (being sold separately), and Audubon's White Pelican (est. $50,000-75,000).

- Bloomsbury London will sell the second round of books from the Richard Harris collection of Natural History and Colourplate Books on 19 November, in 353 lots.

- On 23 November at Christie's London, Valuable Printed Books and Manuscripts, in 91 lots. A collection of Alan Turing offprints rates the top estimate, at £300,000-500,000, but perhaps the lot that will attract the most attention is the original index cards of Nabokov's The Original of Laura, est. £100,000-150,000. Rating the same estimate is an example of the Apple 1, the first Apple computer (1976), with the original packaging, a letter from Steve Jobs, &c. There's also an Enigma Machine, which is pretty neat (est. £30,000-50,000).

- Sotheby's Paris will have a Books and Manuscripts sale on 24 November. I'll add a preview here when information is available. [Added: the catalog is now available here].

- Christie's London will sell Fine Printed Books and Manuscripts on 30 November, in 389 lots. The top lot is expected to be a J.K. Rowling manuscript poem about the (almost)-beheading of Nearly Headless Nick (cut from the manuscript of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets), which could fetch £25,000-35,000.

Links & Reviews

- Descartes was murdered, a German scholar believes. Another scholar believes he's found evidence that Robert Dudley's wife Amy was probably murdered too.

- A new exhibit at Washington & Lee University, "Beyond Text & Image: The Book as Art." The show opens on 25 February.

- And a new exhibit at my alma mater, Union College: "Dickens in America," which will run through early April.

- The French government has purchased the 3,700-page manuscript of Casanova's memoirs. BNF head Bruno Racine said it was "the most important purchase ever made by the library."

- Book Patrol has a new report on the "mummy paper" question.

- A CA paper profiles Auburn collector Bill Ewald, who has almost 700 different editions of Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast.

- Voting's now open for the 2009 Diagram Prize (weirdest book title). Go here, and the poll's about halfway down on the left margin. Here's some background on the shortlist.

- The Harry Potter plagiarism claims live on, the Telegraph reports.

- Salon's Jed Lipinski talks to Marilyn Johnson about her new book, This Book is Overdue!

- Writing in the NYRB, Jason Epstein offers some hints into the future of the publishing industry.

Reviews

- Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall: review by Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic.

- Perez Zagorin's Hobbes and the Law of Nature: review by Jeffrey Collins in the WSJ.

Links & Reviews

Made the Boston bookstore rounds yesterday, visiting the Brattle (you can follow them on Twitter now), Commonwealth, and Brookline Booksmith. Found a few things and chatted with the good folks on the front lines.

- More evidence that libraries are thriving these days, from an 11 March article in the NYTimes. Key paragraph: "Indeed, the bad news on the economy is good news for libraries — so long as they can escape the budget ax that is falling on many municipal services as cities and towns struggle with declining revenue."

- A scholar working with a fifteenth-century copy of the Polychronicon at Eton has discovered a marginal note reading (in translation from Latin): "Around this time, according to popular opinion, a certain outlaw named Robin Hood, with his accomplices, infested Sherwood and other law-abiding areas of England with continuous robberies." Dr. Julian Luxford says the annotation suggests that Robin Hood may have operated later than thought, too; the note comes during the reign of Edward I, rather than Richard I.

- A new blog to follow is AuntieQuarian, started by my friend and colleague Meredith Neuman to explore new archival finds and debate questions of book history and research in an informal way. Meredith, who was a long-term fellow at MHS this fall and is now working at AAS, does fascinating work, and I'm delighted that she's going to be posting about the interesting things she discovers. She's also invited me and some others to contribute occasionally, which I look forward to doing.

- If you're an undergraduate book collector from Rhode Island, please check out the John Russell Bartlett Society's Margaret B. Stillwell Prize - you could win up to $750! Entries are due 3 April.

- A blessedly small (and solved) book crime to report: a New York woman has admitted stealing rare books, silver and other items from a private residence in Amenia, NY back in October 2007. She was on probation for a prior larceny crime at the time, and is currently serving a 1-3 year sentence on those charges. She faces another 2-4 years in prison when sentenced on 31 March. The materials, which included an early biography of Handel and some manuscripts by the composer, were recovered.

- The AP notes that an early Superman comic sold for a whopping $317,200 to John Dolmayan, a comic book dealer and the drummer for the band System of a Down (who says he bought the comic for a client). About 100 copies of this issue (Action Comics No. 1) are known to exist.

- Rare Book Review reports that author Graham Swift's personal archive has found a home at the British Library, and the LATimes adds that Aldous Huxley's literary papers are going to UCLA.

- David Mehegan has some questions (but no tough ones) to Joyce Lee Malcolm about her new book Peter's War.

- Early machines, from BibliOdyssey.

- Laura's got a Scientific American slideshow of some of the anatomy illustrations she's been studying - very cool!

- The Houston Chronicle reported recently that an early Texas document (an order to print copies of the Texas Declaration of Independence) has been rediscovered and returned to the Texas state archives. [h/t Everett Wilkie, who comments "For once a story with a non-controversial, happy ending."]

- Bibliophile Richard Prince is denying reports that he is in negotiations with the Morgan Library to donate his collection: he tells ArtInfo "I have never talked to anybody at the Morgan about this possibility and have never talked to any reporter about this possibility."

- I'm jumping into this controversy mid-battle, but Lawrence Lessig and Michael Eisen have taken on a great fight against John Conyers over copyright. Lots of links to background at the bottom of that article.

- This is a little ridiculous. A paperback copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone sold for $19,120 at Heritage Auction Galleries in Dallas.

- The Typefoundry blog examines a Bodoni mystery.

Reviews

- Drood and The Last Dickens are jointly reviewed in The Independent. Seems like this always happens with Matthew Pearl: The Poe Shadow came out at just about the same time as The Pale Blue Eye, too. Weird.

- Eric Ormsby reviews Anthony Grafton's Worlds Made By Words in the WSJ. I didn't know Grafton had a new one out ... can't wait!

- James McConnachie reviews Andrew Robinson's Lost Languages in the Times.

Links & Reviews

Since we've had some major developments in several theft cases in the last few days I'll have a separate roundup on those later today. Here are the rest of the week's links:

- Author David Foster Wallace is dead at age 46, of an apparent suicide. Coverage from the NYTimes, LATimes.

- Google announced that it's begun a newspaper digitization project; their plan is to make newspaper archives searchable and browseable. AHA Today offers up links to some other similar projects. Digitizing newspaper archives is a good idea, but I wish they'd make sure their current efforts are on the right track before bouncing off and doing other things. Google Books still needs work, folks.

- Mick Sussman's NYTimes essay "Attack of the Megalisters" is getting lots of buzz in the biblioblogosphere, and rightly so; it's a good piece.

- The Houghton Library blog points out the new (and delicious-looking) Harvard University Press publication Audubon: Early Drawings, available this month.

- A short talk by Marcus Rediker - given at Mt. Vernon this summer when he accepted the George Washington Book Prize for his book The Slave Ship: A Human History - is reprinted in The American Scholar.

- The proposed Harry Potter Lexicon was ruled a copyright violation this week, giving JK Rowling a major legal victory. Coverage from TeleRead, Boston Globe, Jacket Copy, Reuters, The Guardian, GalleyCat.

- Paul Collins examines John McCain's frequent use of the phrase "my friends," and profiles a band of spelling reformers.

Reviews

- Bob Woodward's The War Within is reviewed by Josiah Bunting III in the Washington Post.

- Also in the Post, Fergus Bordewich reviews Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello.

- Olivia Judson reviews Richard Fortey's Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum in the NYTimes.

- Gavin Menzies' latest pseudo-historical tome, 1434: The year a magnificent Chinese fleet sailed to Italy and ignited the Renaissance, is reviewed by Damien Thompson in The Telegraph. Thompson: "Menzies is an exponent of misinformation disguised as scholarship with the aid of footnotes, dodgy citations and even dodgier logic."

Auction Report: Bloomsbury

Bloomsbury London held a Bibliophile sale yesterday, and the full list of results is available here. There were some bargains to be had, but there were also a few items which surpassed expectations:

- Lot 27, a third edition of Thomas Gage's New Survey of the West Indies (1677) bound with other travel accounts, made £3,000 (it had been estimated at £600-800).

- Lot 37, Willem Corneliszoon Schouten's Journal ou Relation Exacte du Voyage de Guille Schouten, dans les Indes (1618), described as "a disappointing copy of a rare book," sold for £4,600 (estimate £300-400).

- Lot 57, a very rare copy of Pufendorf's De Rebus a Carolo Gustavo ... (1729), including the "folding panoramic view of Stockholm on 13 joined sheets (c.4 metres in length), which depicts the funeral ceremonies of Charles X Gustav," fetched £3,800.

- Lot 172, Lord Byron's copy of an 1803 edition of Swift's Tale of a Tub, inscribed to the poet by his friend John Cam Hobhouse, made £3,200. The estimates on this (£400-600) seem quite low.

- And from the "are you kidding?" department, Lot 402, a first printing of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone which looks like it spent a couple years in an elementary school library (oh wait, it is an ex-library copy). It made £2,200, for reasons entirely passing understanding.

Bloomsbury London's next sale, Maps and Atlases, will be held on 11 September. There will be a Bibliophile Sale at Bloomsbury New York on 17-18 September, featuring a whopping 803 lots and including a large collection of Oziana, a first American edition of Jefferson's Notes, among other goodies.

Sixth Potter Flick Delayed

Warner Brothers will not release the sixth Harry Potter movie, "Half-Blood Prince" on 21 November as scheduled; it will now premiere in July 2009. Studio execs said they wanted a summer blockbuster, and blamed the writers' strike for "impacting other films." The HP movie is ready to go; WB head Alan Horn told the press "I've seen the movie. It is fabulous. We would have been perfectly able to have it out in November."

But they want to squeeze every last drop from the HP cash cow.

Amazon to Publish "Beedle the Bard"

Well we all knew it was coming, right? Amazon.com, the buyer of J.K. Rowling's Tales of Beedle the Bard (for almost 2 million GBP back in December) will publish two editions of the Tales this year, just in time for Christmas. The Collector's Edition ($100) looks like it'll be quite a production, and the Standard Edition ($7.59) will be a perfectly serviceable paperback copy. Net proceeds, Amazon says, will go to the Children's High Level Group, a charity started by Rowling in 2005.

My question: do those "net proceeds" start after the $4 million purchase price gets factored in?

Potter Prequel Sells

The Harry Potter prequel made £25,000 at last night's charity auction, The Guardian reports. They offer a bit more about the text: "Rowling's micro-story is set three years before Harry's birth and features the characters Sirius Black and James Potter, Harry's father. The story opens with a youthful Sirius and James cornered by two irate policemen at the end of a high-speed motorbike chase. After a cheeky exchange with the policemen, the two teenage characters make their escape - using broomsticks, "drumsticks" and just a little bit of magic."

Oh, and in August, the BBC adds, Waterstone's (the sponsor of the charity auction) will be publishing a book containing the texts on all thirteen of the cards sold ... so if you're desperate for your Potter fix, you'll be able to get it then.

[Update: Here's the text, courtesy of Waterstone's. How's that for (near) instant gratification?]

Links & Reviews

- Materials from the library of Technical University Delft, thought destroyed in a 16 May fire, have been recovered safely, Dutch papers reported this weekend. "A spokesperson of the University informed newspapers that thousands of historical books, prints, maps and drawings were salvaged. Everything seems to be intact, although they still have to be checked by specialists to make sure. The salvage took some time because the remainder of the building was about to collapse. Friday, specialized workers started salvaging the library collection." More here.

- PCWorld has an article on how the British Library's digitization projects will continue without support from Microsoft. Scanning of 40,000 more books as envisioned in the November 2005 plan with Microsoft will continue, as will 15 additional digitization projects which did not fall under the Microsoft umbrella.

- Everett Wilkie noted this story [link currently down] from Canada, where an antiques dealer has been acquitted of possession of stolen property charges after he tried to sell provincial records to the "Maritime History Archive at Memorial University in St. John's." Gary Murrin had bought the records (200 boxes of them) from a shredding company where they had been sent for destruction by the provincial archives. Provincial archivists claimed the materials were in poor condition and posed a health theft, while staff of the Maritime History Archive said they were interested in the materials, which they described as being in "good condition." This story looks to warrant a bit more investigation, so I may have more on it soon.

- Paul Collins offers an amusing Henry James moment (there's a sentence I didn't think I'd ever have cause to write ...).

- In the Globe today, Matthew Battles compares Harvard to Hogwarts.

- Murdered book collector Roland Comstock's (non-book) personal property was auctioned yesterday, MO news outlets report.

- Rick Ring notes an 1870 counterfeit detection manual (Heath's Infallible Counterfeit Detector), which was described as "the only infallible method of detecting counterfeit, spurious, and altered bank notes, and applicable to all banks in the United States and Canadas, as now in circulation, or that may be issued."

- Rare Books Review notes the results of an Oxfam charity auction at Bonham's last week. A copy of the first Sherlock Holmes story (A Study in Scarlet) made £18,600 at the sale.

Reviews

- A review of Scott Douglas' Quiet Please appeared this week in The Telegraph (mine here).

- For the Washington Post, Nora Krug reviews Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon's Plenty: Eating Locally on the 100-Mile Diet.

- In the NYTimes, Bryan Miller reviews several new books on wine, one of which (Benjamin Wallace's The Billionaire's Vinegar, about a bottle of wine believed to have once belonged to Thomas Jefferson), I'm quite excited to read.

- Also in the Times, the indomitable Mary Roach examines Adam Leith Gollner's The Fruit Hunters, another one I've been looking forward to. Keeping with this time, Andrea Wulf reviews Philip Pauly's Fruits and Plains: The Horticultural Transformation of America for the TLS.

Another Rowling Teaser

The Courier Mail reports today that J.K. Rowling has penned another not-for-publication item: a "Harry Potter prequel" of about 800 words, written on thirteen index cards a large "story card". Sotheby's will sell the item on 10 June (with no reserve); proceeds will go to English PEN, a charity promoting literacy, and to Dyslexia Action.

Rowling "is determined the latest instalment will not be developed further. She says at the end of the story, written on both sides of an A5 storycard: 'From the prequel I am not working on - but that was fun!'"

Other writers, including Sebastian Faulks, Nick Hornby and Tom Stoppard have also donated items for the auction.

I guess I'm glad that she's doing these things for charity, but I do think it's pretty rotten that she won't allow them to be shared.

[Update: The Potter prequel is on one card, not thirteen (thirteen authors total have donated the cards.]

[Further update: More here].

Auction Report

- The collection of William McGonagall poems (he's the poet dubbed the world's worst) sold in Edinburgh yesterday for £6600. The lot included 35 broadside poems, some signed by McGonagall himself. Both buyer and seller remain anonymous.

- A 1954 letter by Albert Einstein in which the famed scientist disparages religious beliefs ("The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this") sold at Bloomsbury for a whopping £207,600 (with premiums), just about quadrupling the previous Einstein auction record. Presale estimates were £6,000-8,000. The buyer, according to media reports, is a private collector. Bloomsbury managing director Rupert Powell "said the atmosphere in the sale room went from excitement, to disappointment as various bidders dropped out, to disbelief at the rocketing price."

- Also in the Bloomsbury sale, a copy of Thomas Rowlandson's The World in Miniature (1817) better than doubled its estimates, selling for £12,500. A first edition of Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) fetched £2,200, while a first of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone made £11,000. A rare second edition of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776) sold for £8,000. A first edition of the Nuremburg Chronicle (1493), with the plates colored, didn't quite make its estimate, but fetched £88,000. Last but certainly not least, a first edition of Vesalius' De humani corporis fabrica (1543) went for £120,000.

Mid-Week Links

My inbox runneth over.

- First, happy 175th birthday to the Peterborough (NH) Town Library, which was founded on 9 April 1833 and claims the honor of being the oldest free public library in the world. Some background here. [h/t LISNews]

- Amazon has begun a contest to show off its purchase of J.K. Rowling's Tales of Beedle the Bard. Entrants are asked to "creatively answer" (in 100 words or less) one of three questions: "What songs do wizards use to celebrate birthdays?; What sports do wizards play besides Quidditch?; What have you learned from the Harry Potter series that you use in everyday life?" Entry form, rules, &c. here. I still think there should be a trade edition, this all is getting a bit silly.

- J.L. Bell is examining that age-old question: how did the words "The British are coming?" ever get put into Paul Revere's mouth? See his first and second posts on the subject. John's one of the best historical mythbusters out there, and his work is always worth a read.

- Deeplinking has some samples from John Adams' marginalia, including some of my favorites.

- BibliOdyssey offers up a wonderful selection of printers' ornaments this week, along with a concise and interesting commentary on the use of such devices.

- Don't miss Kristin Ogden's Kenyon Review blog piece, "Antiquarian Book-Collector Wanna-be." [h/t Book Patrol]

- The Morris Library at Southern Illinois University Carbondale has received a copy of Phillis Wheatley's 1773 book Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. The book was donated by John LaPine, owner of Printers Row Fine & Rare Books in Chicago and SIUC alumnus. [h/t RBN]

- April's edition of Common-place is now available, and looks to be as excellent as ever.

- Scriptorium: Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts Online, has launched. This site "will comprise full digital facsimiles of at least twenty late medieval and early modern manuscript miscellanies and commonplace books, along with descriptions, transcriptions and bibliographical information; a set of research and teaching resources for students and scholars working on manuscript studies; and an enhanced version of English Handwriting: An Online Course, our interactive palaeography tool."

- The Telegraph reports that the only known copy of William Caxton's "Sarum Missal" (1487) (ESTC S93678) has been purchased by the National Trust "at a cost of almost £500,000". The book will be displayed at Lyme Park beginning next spring. "It is a mystery how many copies were printed but the National Trust's volume, bought from the Legh family of Lyme Park, Cheshire - who have owned it since at least 1508 - still has 243 of the original 266 pages."

Links & Reviews

Some weeks are full of noteworthy biblio-news. This was one.

- Ed Koster, the owner of David's Books (Ann Arbor, MI) has been charged along with three other men in a "book-selling scheme that involved hundreds of stolen textbooks from a nearby store." Police say Koster provided a "shopping list" of medical textbooks to be nabbed from Ulrich's Bookstore and several other local shops near the University of Michigan; the three suspects then allegedly stole the books and sold them to Koster "for cash to feed a heroin habit.""Koster, an Ann Arbor resident, faces up to 10 years in prison and/or a $25,000 fine if convicted. The others face the same potential sentences, along with a possible five-year prison sentence and/or $10,000 fine for the retail fraud charges." (h/t Shelf:Life)

- Travis comments on the charges brought against Mariners' Museum curator Lester Weber and his wife, Lori Child. Two posts: here and here.

- Simon Charles of the EEBO Text Creation Partnership reports that the partnership (between the Universities of Oxford and Michigan) is "is planning to extend its existing work to transcribe another 50,000 texts to add to the 25,000 full, searchable texts that will be online by next year." He writes: " In order to develop funding applications, the Oxford team of the EEBO-TCP is putting together a body of evidence to present to various funding bodies in the UK to demonstrate the importance of the full-text resource to the academic community. If you would like to show your support for these funding applications, please tell us whether you think the availability of additional texts would benefit the research community. Have you found the full texts useful in your work, in teaching or in research? Have you used them for any publications or projects? We are interested in how the EEBO full texts enrich the learning and research experience and would like to hear the views of users of the texts at all stages of study." Statements can be submitted here.

- At long last, Google Books has announced a feature by which users can flag unreadable pages. Dan Abbe reports "You'll now find a link next to all book pages on Google Book Search which allows you to submit an unreadable page to our team for review. There's no need to fill anything out – when you click this link, we'll detect the issue with the page you're looking at and get on the case." (h/t Dan Cohen)

- fade theory reports that Wayne Wiegand has received a fellowship to write A People’s History of the American Public Library, 1850-2000. Excellent news: good works on library history are few and far between.

- The Chicago Tribune notes that a "6-foot-high, 150-pound contemporary sculpture" known as Umanita (which has been in place outside the Newberry Library since 2005) was stolen last weekend. Police are investigating. (h/t NIUSC&RB)

- Scott Brown notes that Tim Toone's collection of 553 Harry Potter books (including translations into 63 languages) will sell in several lots at Bloomsbury on 28 February. More on Toone's collection here. Scott also has some thoughts on Ken Karmiole's shop in Santa Monica, CA, which he got to visit while in LA for the fair there. Ken's one of my favorite dealers to visit with at the Boston fair every year: great to talk to, excellent stock - a credit to the book-world. Scott also requests help in identifying a childrens' book artist, so contact him if you recognize the illustrations here.

- And one more Scott Brown bulletin: he has word that Quill and Brush has released a catalog [PDF] of some of the Rolland Comstock books they acquired after the collector's murder (which remains unsolved). The catalog includes an introduction by Nick Basbanes, who calls Comstock "easily one of the most unforgettable bibliophiles I have ever had the good fortune to meet."

- A copy of the death warrant for Mary, Queen of Scots will remain in England after the library of the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth Palace mustered up £72,485 in grants and donations to prevent its export. A private buyer had applied for permission to export the document in November, but was blocked by the government. Lambeth Palace librarian Richard Palmer said "The library is delighted to have played its part in saving this document for the nation. The warrant is now reunited with the papers with which it belongs and accessible for the benefit of all."

- Fragments of what is believed to be the "earliest dated Christian literary manuscript have been found at Deir al-Surian, an ancient monastery in the Egyptian desert," The Art Newspaper reports. The pieces are from the final page of "a codex written in Syriac (an Eastern Aramaic language) which was acquired by the British Museum library in the 19th century [ADD 12-150]." The document is a list of early Christian martyrs in Persia, and was written by a scribe in Edessa (in what is now Turkey). These new fragments were discovered along with hundreds of others "under a collapsed floor of a ninth-century tower." Much more background here. The Independent also wrote up the find this week, calling the fragments "the world's oldest missing page."

- The Philadelphia Bulletin profiles Katy Rawdon, archivist at the Barnes Foundation, which was founded in 1922 to "promote the advancement of education and the appreciation of the fine arts."

- Rick Ring made a fabulous find in the stacks this week, discovering some volumes of Romeyn Beck Hough's The American Woods, a thirteen-volume compilation "designed to contain specimens (in transverse, radial, and tangential sections) of all the native and naturalized species of woods in the united States and Canada." He also links to a digital version of Hough's work hosted by North Carolina State University.

- Ian Kahn has a first dispatch and a second dispatch from the Greenwich Village Book Fair ... more to come, surely.

- The Guardian profiles Colin St. John Wilson, the architect of the new British Library building, who died last year. (h/t Iconic Books)

- Edinburgh-based publisher Itchy Coo (how about that for a name?) wants to translate the Harry Potter canon into the Scots dialect, according to a report in The Scotsman. J.K. Rowling "has not yet been approached for the go-ahead."

- The Times prints an extract from Frances Wilson's The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, to be published in the UK by Faber & Faber in March.

- Staff at the the New York Public Library have started a blog. I've added a link. (h/t Jessamyn West)

Reviews

- In the TLS Kelly Grovier reviews a new edition of an 1821 edition of Goethe's Faust, published anonymously but now attributed to Samuel Taylor Coleridge by scholars Frederick Burwick and James C. McKusick (building off a case begun by Paul Zall in the 1970s). A fascinating backstory to this one.

- In the Boston Globe, Michael Kenney has a joint review of Edward Lengel's new edition of This Glorious Struggle: George Washington's Revolutionary War Letters and Mark Puls' Henry Knox: Visionary General of the American Revolution. J.L. Bell add his comments to Kenney's review here. I'm anxious to read both of these books.

- Richard Cox comments on another new title I'm keen to read as well: Bill Hayes' The Anatomist: A True Story of Gray’s Anatomy. Cox writes "Those interested in archives will be interested in the book because of the author’s exploration into the modest amount of material left behind by Gray contrasted with the extraordinary evidence about Gray in the extensive pile of letters and diaries provided by [H.V.] Carter [Gray's illustrator]. As it turns out, Carter’s archives have been little tapped by historians of medicine and other scholars, and Hayes provides considerable commentary on his observations about the nature of diary writing."

- Stacy Schiff reviews Jerome Charyn's Johnny One-Eye for the New York Times, concluding "Charyn hasn’t woven a taut narrative from a lurching plot. What he has done is to create a rollicking tale in which — true to the dictates of the genre [the picaresque] — our hapless rogue makes good."

- In the Washington Post, Thomas Ryan reviews How the South Could Have Won the Civil War, a new alternative history by Bevin Alexander. From the review, this sounds more like a paean to Stonewall Jackson than anything else, and this sentence is enough to keep me away from the book: "Alexander's opinions are firmly stated, but his assertions are not always well documented."

- Also in the Post, Stephen Budiansky reviews Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering, which has become a minor sensation as a scholarly book which seems to be selling well.

- For the Boston Glode, Matthew Price reviews Joseph Wheelan's Mr. Adams' Last Crusade, about JQA's post-presidential career in the House.

- Nick Basbanes' new collection of essays, Editions and Impressions, is reviewed by Martin Rubin in the LATimes. Rubin enjoyed the book: "The essays are radiant with [Basbanes'] joy in discovering and exploring the byways of the book world. And what a world it is, full of fascinating characters and interesting tales, which Basbanes, with his experience covering 'every imaginable kind of story as a newspaper reporter,' is perfectly fitted to evoke."

- In The Scotsman, Emma Crichton-Miller reviews Peter Ackroyd's Poe: A Life Cut Short.

- Marjorie Kehe reviews Thomas DeWolf's Inheriting the Trade for the Christian Science Monitor. DeWolf's relative James was "the head of the most successful slave-trading family in American history," and features prominently in Marcus Rediker's recent The Slave Ship. DeWolf's book complements a recent documentary film, "Tracing the Trade," made by another family member.

Links & Reviews

- I've added sidebar links to Chronicles of William Hone (which includes an interesting weekly podcast), librarian.net, Free Range Librarian and Cliopatria.

- [Update]: Just after I posted I read Ian's terrific news that he's been voted into the ABAA/ILAB. Many congratulations to him and to the other new members!

- The Victoria Times-Colonist reported this week that a collection of letters written by Queen Victoria, including some composed soon after the death of her friend and servant John Brown, will be sold at auction in Canada. The archive of letters, written to the wife of a former royal chaplain, are expected to fetch up to $20,000.

- On NPR this week, a discussion of the Great Seal of the United States.

- A Lizzie Borden researcher believes she has found a new image of Borden as a young girl, Boston.com reports. The unlabeled photograph was discovered in the collections of the Swansea (MA) Historical Society.

- Ellen Chason has donated about 100 books from her father's extensive collection to the Mary & Harry L. Dalton Rare Book & Manuscript Reading Room at UNC Charlotte. The donation is valued at $100,000, and includes a 1599 "Breeches Bible."

- Michael Lieberman passes along a really delightful post from Brian Cassidy, who recently celebrated his first anniversary as a bookseller bookstore owner (corrected, see comment).

- Over at The Little Professor, Miriam Burstein has another dispatch from the Google Books trenches. Good, useful commentary as always.

- Rick Ring found a fascinating little book from 1862: Rhymed Tactics (military drills set to verse). The book is available digitally via, aherm, Google Books.

- Folks at Harvard have unveiled Theatrum Catalogorum, an annotated list of European library catalogs (with North American catalogs to follow). [h/t librarian.net]

- J.L. Bell comments on what I heard was an excellent talk at MHS on Friday (I was on duty, so missed it) by Edward Lengel on the process of editing George Washington's papers. Lengel has just published The Glorious Cause: George Washington's Revolutionary War Letters (HarperCollins).

- Travis has some relevant thoughts on People of the Book, tying one of its messages to an absolutely ridiculous argument made by Spiegelman's defense team (that, "as long as duplicate and photocopies of particular books exist, there is no loss to culture. ... His ignorant remarks were consistently and embarrassingly destroyed by people who actually knew what they were talking about, of course. But Brooks’ book does a great job of demonstrating what a book has to offer us, not just in beauty or sentiment, but actual concrete information, aside from just the words on its page.").

- John Overholt notes progress on the Johnson correspondence digitization project at Houghton. He reports that one of the newly-uploaded letters is one from Johnson to James Macpherson, the fabricator of the Poems of Ossian (which I discussed briefly here). Classic Johnson.

- At Cliopatria, Ralph Luker discusses Historians for Obama, which collects the signatures of more than 160 historians who've endorsed Obama's presidential candidacy. They include Joyce Appleby, David Blight, Robert Dallek, Anthony Grafton, David Hall, James McPherson, Barbara Weinstein and a whole host of others.

- James Oakes' The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics and Elizabeth Brown Pryor's Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters are the winners of this year's Lincoln Prize for Civil War Scholarship. Each author will receive $20,000.

- Tim has some thoughts on the ongoing J.K. Rowling-Harry Potter Lexicon lawsuit and poses an interesting theory.

Reviews

- The Washington Post has begun a series of reviews covering the umpteen gazillion Lincoln books that are going to appear in the runup to his 200th birthday next year. This week their reviewers tackle Brian McGinty's Lincoln and the Court (reviewed by Charles Lane), William Lee Miller's Lincoln: The Duty of a Statesman and Allen Guelzo's Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates that Defined America (reviewed by Michael Bishop).

- Richard Cox comments on Alan Dershowitz's Finding Jefferson, in which the lawyer discusses his collecting habits, his recent acquisition of an 1801 TJ letter, and his new plan to teach a seminar for first-year Harvard law students based entirely around Jefferson letters.

Auction Report: Lyon & Turnbull

Edinburgh auction house Lyon & Turnbull had a rare books sale on 16 January. A few highlights:
- Several views of London surpassed their estimates: an balloon-view of London taken in 1851 fetched £1050; a Matthias Merian prospect of the city c. 1650 made £1250, and a W. Hollar engraving of London and Westminster from c. 1700 sold for £1400

- An elaborately-decorated manuscript Qu'ran dated 1289 sold for £1200.

- A 1682 edition of Pierre Du Val's La Geographie du Temps made £2100, better than doubling its high estimate.

- A 48-volume Works of Charles Dickens from the library of Theodore Roosevelt sold for £1600.

- Signed copies of all seven Harry Potter books, sold to benefit a rugby club, made £5800.

- Twenty-two documents "relating to the position of John Gibson as Sir Winston Churchill's footman/valet" barely hit their estimate, reaching £320.

- The Mussolini telegram failed to sell.

News from Across the Pond

Some biblio-news from the British Isles and Europe today:

- The Edinburgh Evening News reports that 22 Winston Churchill documents and photographs will be auctioned at Lyon & Turnbull on 16 January, along with a 1929 telegraph from the mayor of Rome to Benito Mussolini.

- Also going under the hammer at Lyon & Trumbull's 16 January sale: a signed set of all seven Harry Potter books, donated by J.K. Rowling to fund the restoration of the Portobello Rugby Club's clubhouse, which was burned down by vandals. The books may fetch up to £3000.

- The University of Ulster and the Heritage Lottery Fund have joined forces to pay for a £740,000, three-year program to restore more than 5,000 books in the collections the Derry & Raphoe Diocesan Library. "The majority of the collection dates from between the 16th to 19th centuries. The project will simultaneously train a team of skilled book conservators and facilitate a range of education and outreach activities to allow groups and communities across Northern Ireland explore the books’ themes and history." Conservator Caroline Bendix called the collection "a relatively undiscovered historical resource – a Cinderella of the book world. It is one of the most significant libraries in Ireland and gives a fascinating insight into the history of Derry city."

- Nuremberg's municipal library has announced that it will return more than 10,000 books believed to have been stolen from Polish owners by the Nazis in World War II. "After the war the books were handed over to the local Jewish commune, which subsequently placed it on an unlimited-time deposit with the Nuremberg authorities."

Links & Reviews

Since I didn't get this posted on Sunday:

- Columbia University has joined the Google Books Project, and will allow the search giant to scan selected out-of-copyright books from its collections. "Among the hundreds of collections that are being considered for digitization are areas in which Columbia has particularly strong holdings, for instance architecture from the Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library; political science, sociology, and environmental science from the Lehman Social Sciences Library; Area Studies collections of history and literature materials from Eastern Europe, Central and South Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin and South America; or East Asian languages and history from the C. V. Starr East Asian Library." (h/t RBN)

- Homer Noble Farm in Ripton, VT, a house once occupied by Robert Frost and now owned by Middlebury College, was vandalized last Friday during what police are calling an "underage drinking party." "The intruders broke a window to get into the two-story wood frame building - a furnished residence open in the summer - before destroying tables and chairs, pictures, windows, light fixtures and dishes. Wicker furniture and dressers were smashed and thrown into a fireplace and burned, apparently to provide heat in the unheated building. ... The vandals vomited in the living room and discharged two fire extinguishers inside the building." No arrests have been made, but police say "they've tracked down some partygoers." Track them down, arrest them and throw the book at them, I say. (h/t Joyce)

- Michael at Book Patrol takes a year-end look at the three major book-networking sites, noting that Goodreads recently got a cash infusion of around $750,000 from some Internet gurus and wondering whether Shelfari can recover from their ill-advised spamming and astroturfing campaigns. He has some predictions for 2008, as well. I have been and will continue to be a LibraryThing fan so I can't pretend to be an objective observer of the debate.

- Richard Cox reviews and critiques Mark Y. Herring’s Fool’s Gold: Why the Internet Is No Substitute for a Library and Lucien X. Polastron's Books on Fire: The Destruction of Libraries Throughout History. He makes good points about each, and I recommend this post highly.

- Scott Brown notes the top ten auctions of printed items for 2007; the top 50 will appear in the March/April issue of FB&C. This year's top sale was of course that of the Magna Carta ($21 million); the second-place finisher was J.K. Rowling's Tales of Beedle the Bard ($4 million). Seven of the top ten made more than $1 million.

- Nick Basbanes' new book, Editions & Impressions (a collection of his essays) is now available in deluxe, numbered and trade editions from FB&C. You can also get the trade edition from Amazon.

- Salt Lake Underground profiles bookseller Ken Sanders, headlining it as "Ken Sanders: Pimp of the Printed Word" (and yes, the article does feature a photo of Ken in, er, pimp garb). It's a good article, and Ken's one of the nicest guys in the business (except when he's dealing with book thieves, and then all bets are off). (h/t Book Patrol)

- Garry Wills has an essay in the latest NYRB, "Romney and JFK: The Difference." He notes that the problems Kennedy faced down were political, while those Romney faces are theological. "Kennedy had to convince people that he would not let the Vatican push him around. Romney has let evangelicals know that he would let them push him around." More: "The Constitution never mentions God, but Romney has tried to sneak Him in when making this historically indefensible claim: 'Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.... Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.' He thus failed to state a fundamental democratic premise: that religious freedom should by definition include the freedom not to believe in a religion. ... Has Romney been able to 'do a Kennedy,' as his speech was billed in the press? Far from it. Kennedy was on the side of the future. He defied the Vatican's ban on American-style democracy, which was rescinded in the Second Vatican Council, convened after his election. Romney - looking to the past, and specifically to the current Bush administration's position - kowtowed to the religious right. Saying that he opposes religious tests, he passed that one." Pretty much what I said about Romney's recent religion speech, actually.

- On NPR, Maud Newton spoke recently about the books she thinks were most overlooked in 2007.

Reviews

- In the Boston Globe, Michael Astor reviews Michael Pollan's newest offering, In Defense of Food. Pollan also spoke about the new book on NPR recently. He told them the entire book - which has been described as a sort of eating advice manual - can be summed up in seven words: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

- In the NYTimes, Jeremy McCarter reviews the two recent books on Arthur Conan Doyle: Andrew Lycett's The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes and the letter collection edited by Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower and Charles Foley. Of the latter, McCarter writes "Marketing concerns presumably steered them away from a fitter if less salable title - like, say, A Massive Document Dump for the Conan Doyle Completist."

- Also in the NYTimes, Lorraine Adams reviews Arturo Perez-Reverte's latest novel to be released on this side of the pond, The Painter of Battles. She did not enjoy it.

Year-End Reading Report 2007

I read 135 books in 2007 - that's an average of one every 2.7 days. The raw number is down a bit from last year, but considering I wrote a masters' thesis this fall, I figure it's pretty decent. I had a very good reading year; picking a top ten for fiction and non-fiction was difficult, and even those at that bottom of the list really weren't awful (with a couple of exceptions). Books are in no particular order within the categories, and were not necessarily published this year.

Fiction Top Ten
The Last Witchfinder by James Morrow (review)
At Midnight on the Thirty-first of March by Josephine Young Case (review)
Stardust by Neil Gaiman (review)
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini (review)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling (review)
His Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman (review)
The Nijmegen Proof by S. Barkworth (review)
The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox (review)
Round the Fire Stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (review)
The Fourth Bear by Jasper Fforde (review)

Non-Fiction Top Ten
Hakluyt's Promise: An Elizabethan's Obsession for an English America by Peter Mancall (review)
Republic of Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of American Literature by Bryan Waterman (review)
Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England, 1600-1770 by Emily Cockayne (review)
Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary by Henry Hitchings (review)
The Minutemen and Their World by Robert Gross(review)
Patience & Fortitude: A Roving Chronicle of Book People, Book Places, and Book Culture by Nicholas Basbanes (review)
The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade 1450-1850 by James Raven (review)
Edmund Curll, Bookseller by Paul Baines and Pat Rogers (review)
Nature's Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick by Jenny Uglow (review)
Chasing the Sun: Dictionary Makers and the Dictionaries They Made by Jonathon Green (review)

Fiction Bottom Five
Ghostwalk by Rebecca Stott (review)
Mr. Foreigner by Matthew Kneale (review)
Labyrinth by Kate Mosse (review)
The Egyptologist by Arthur Phillips (review)
The Last Cato by Matilde Asensi (review)

Non-Fiction Bottom Five
Looking for Mr. Gilbert: The Reimagined Life of an African American by John Hanson Mitchell (review)
The Great Negro Plot: A Tale of Conspiracy and Murder in Eighteenth-Century New York by Mat Johnson (review)
American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, their Work by Susan Cheever (review)
Spellbound: The Surprising Origins and Astonishing Secrets of English Spelling by James Essinger (review)
The Shadow Club by Robert Casati (review)

Publisher of the Year
I'm going to add a little something extra to my year-end post this time around. Yale University Press is my publisher of the year, for their many excellent publications.

Happy New Year to all, and may your 2008 be filled with good books and good cheer.

The Beedle Buyer: Amazon.com

As I reported earlier, J.K. Rowling's Tales of Beedle the Bard sold for nearly $4 million this morning. We now know the high bidder: Amazon.com.

Amazon has posted this page with many large pictures of the book and a message board, where people are asking all manner of questions. In answer to "the big one," no, Amazon cannot print or sell the stories in any form, as the sale did not include publication rights. They will be adding "reviews" of each tale, they report. "Craig Berman, an Amazon spokesman, said the company plans a tour for the book of libraries and schools," according to the AP.

Beedle the Bard Hits the Stratosphere

The single copy of J.K. Rowling's Tales of Beedle the Bard sold at Sotheby's today ... for £1,950,000! That's, um, well over the presale estimates of £30,000-50,000.

Proceeds will go to The Children's Voice charity.

More very soon.

BBC reports "After a bidding war between six auction participants, the book was bought by a representative from London fine art dealers Hazlitt Gooden and Fox." Rowling: "I am stunned and ecstatic. This will mean so much to children in desperate need of help. It means Christmas has come early to me."

The other six copies of ToBtB were given to people "closely connected" with the Harry Potter series.

[More, from Sotheby's: "The price achieved today stands as the highest price ever achieved at auction for a modern literary manuscript, an auction record for a work by JK Rowling, and an auction record for a children’s book."]

[Later: We now know the buyer!]