Links & Reviews

- The London International Antiquarian Bookfair (the "Olympia" fair) was held this weekend. On the Economist's Prospero blog, it was hailed as "An antiquarian obsession."

- On bookfairs: don't miss Garrett Scott's "A hasty and discursive meditation on the care and feeding of a book fair," or Lorne Blair's post on the recent inaugural Library of Virginia Book Fair. And definitely don't miss the first part of Lorne's new series on the importance of regional book fairs: "Six Days On the Road & I'm Gonna Make it Home Tonight." At the end of this post he asks some key questions, questions I think all of us concerned with these matters should be thinking about.

- A panel discussion was held at the NYPL this week on the much-debated renovations plan. Caleb Crain has a full rundown, with links to audio/video of the event as well. Robin Pogrebin covered the discussion for the NYT, including in a followup piece the little nugget that former employees of the library believe they've been silenced by "nondisparagement agreements."

- For the culinary codicologist: historiated initial cookies!

- Mt. Vernon's efforts to recreate George Washington's library got a writeup in the Washington Post this weekend. Unfortunately it opens with the line "Gently, gently, the librarian opens the first of the five books displayed on the large wooden table, and age seems to rise up from the pages like a wavy distortion above heated pavement." While I think the recreation is a neat idea (virtual is handy, but real is cooler), I'm not sure how I feel about the idea of Washington's books being "replicated with pages scanned from the Athenaeum's collection and put into an 18th-century-style binding with endpaper and leather and gold tooling." I certainly hope that means that the scans would be made available to all (as with the John Adams library); it just doesn't make much sense, today, to create scanned physical surrogates in bespoke bindings just for the sake of doing so. But, overall, I'm really glad to see the project going forward, and wish them great luck!

- Over at The Collation, Erin Blake examines the difference(s) between a colored print and a color print, and Heather Wolfe explores Shelton's tachygraphy, a common form of early modern shorthand.

- More on the Girolamini library thefts I mentioned last week: the former director, Mario Massimo de Caro, and four others have been arrested.

- Mike Widener notes a book in the Yale Law library's collections with the bookplate and signature of Johann Peter von Ludewig.

- Mary Norris of The New Yorker has a very amusing post about the printing of a thorn (þ) in a recent issue of the magazine.

- Dan Cohen muses on the "blessay." Make sure to read the updates, too.

- Glenn Fleishman posted this week on a recent visit to the Folger Shakespeare Library, where he talked to Sarah Werner about the physicality of books.

- Mark Anderson talked to the CSM about his new book on the Transit of Venus.

- The Russian State Polytechnical Museum Library in Moscow recently discovered some 30,000 pre-Revolutionary books hidden behind a false wall.

- Booksellers Adrian Harrington and Jonathan Kearnes star in a 15-minute video, "The Story of the Book." It's beautifully done. [h/t Book Patrol]

- At Boston 1775, J.L. Bell asks "How did people pronounce 'Faneuil Hall'?"

- A great new acquisition is highlighted on the Houghton Library blog: a 1741 book with a nifty five-ribbon bookmark.

- Queen Victoria's journals have been mounted online, free to the world through the end of June (and in the UK thereafter).

Reviews

- Wesley Stace's Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer; review by Miriam Burstein at The Little Professor.

- Peter Carey's The Chemistry of Tears; reviews by Andrew Miller in the NYTimes and Ron Charles in the WaPo.

- Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies; reviews by Martin Rubin in the LATimes; Charles McGrath in the NYTimes.

- E.O. Wilson's The Social Conquest of Earth; review by Thomas Maugh in the LATimes.

- Pretty much every major American birding field guide; review by Laura Jacobs in the WSJ.

Links & Reviews

- Arthur Souza, 52, was arrested this week for attempting to steal books from the Brooks Free Library in Harwich, MA. Souza is believed to have also stolen books from libraries in Hyannis, Brewster, Barnstable, and Yarmouth. Souza was discovered when a tipster spotted books with library markings being sold on eBay.

- From Jennifer Howard, a thorough and well-written piece on library offsite storage.

- A good reminder from Bookriot: "You Are Not Your Bookshelf."

- Over at Interview, John D'Agata talks about his new book (with Jim Fingal), Lifespan of a Fact.

- The Folger Shakespeare Library announced this week that it has acquired the theatrical archive of Lynn Redgrave.

- Skinner, Inc.'s new Director of Fine Books and Manuscripts, Devon Gray, talks about her background and her plans for Skinner in a short "meet the expert" interview.

- Alexis Madrigal points out a recent interview with Yale Librarian Susan Gibbons about open-access policies. [via Dan Cohen]

- I had the great pleasure to speak at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) this week, as part of their Digital Dialogues series. You can download a video or the Keynote version of my talk here, should you be so inclined. I discussed the Legacy Libraries project at LibraryThing, in particular the Libraries of Early America element of it. It was a real treat to see all the neat things the good folks at MITH are working on, as well!

- Nicholas Carr writes about the DPLA in Technology Review, as "The Library of Utopia."

- From BibliOdyssey, bookplates!

- Jason Epstein's "How Books Will Survive Amazon" is well worth a read.

- Last week's link to Mike Widener's post about including dealer descriptions in catalog records ended up prompting quite an interesting conversation on Twitter and elsewhere. Sarah Werner captured the discussion here, and Laura Massey weighed in over at The Cataloguer's Desk as well. I was pleased to see this take off, and I think it's led in some very interesting directions!

- Big news (and good news) from Harvard this week, with the release of open metadata for 12 million works from across its libraries. More.

- Over at Public Domain Review, Benjamin Breen discusses John White's sketches of the New World.

- Ian Kahn posted a wrapup (with some videos) from this year's NYC book fair. Another good post about the fair to add to your reading list is "Love is a Doing Word," from Bibliodeviancy.

- From Rick Gekoski, in The Guardian, "Book dealers court the press at their peril."

- From the OUP blog this week, a quiz on Shakespeare in America.

Reviews

- The new issue of WMQ features a critical forum on Pauline Maier's Ratification. [h/t Joe Adelman]

- Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy's The President's Club; review by David Greenberg in the WaPo.

- Joy Kiser's America's Other Audubon; review by Liesl Bradner in the LATimes.

- Robert Caro's The Passage of Power; review by Robert Draper in the WSJ.

Links & Reviews

- Over at "Cardiff Book History," Rhys Tranter interviews Robert Darnton about the future of books.

- New feature at the Houghton Library blog, "You've Got Mail," kicks off with a letter from Samuel Johnson to Hester Thrale.

- The Guardian covers that strange case of forged Ibsen works that I've mentioned here before.

- Don't miss "The Public Practice of History in and for a Digital Age," new AHA president William Cronon's first Perspectives on History column.

- The University of Georgia's new special collections building is now open for business.

- Vin Carretta's recent talk at the Mass Historical Society about his new Phillis Wheatley bio is now online. And this week, I added a Phillis Wheatley Legacy Library to LibraryThing.

- A must-read post at Typefoundry, "Type held in the hand."

- Johann Froben's publications are highlighted at The Private Library.

- Ian Maxted writes on the Baring-Gould library, with images of bookplates and inscriptions.

- Jennifer Howard expertly covers recently scholarship on the King James Bible.

- In the NYTimes, Anne Trubek explores "Why Authors Tweet."

Reviews

- Umberto Eco's The Prague Cemetery; review by Sinclair McKay in the Telegraph.

- Dava Sobel's A More Perfect Heaven; review by San Kean in the NYTimes.

Union's First Library Online

Last weekend I worked on finishing up a LibraryThing Legacy Library catalog for the first library of Union College: this one's near and dear to my heart; I went to Union, and spent the year after I graduated working in the special collections there. During that year I helped work on this collection, and quite literally turned every single page of the almost 800 volumes in the collection, noting down marginalia &c.

The library was the subject of my 2007 masters' thesis at Simmons, part of which was published in 2008 ... and ever since then I've been thinking about how the collection needed to come to LT. Now, in advance of a talk I'll be giving at Union later in the fall, here it is at last!

One of the really neat things about this library (purchased 1795-1799) is that more than half of the original copies still exist, as does almost all the "paperwork" surrounding the acquisition of the books. So we know where the books came from, how much they cost, and in many cases how they were used (a good example is the original set of Shakespeare's works, which contains a wonderful amount of marginalia left by generations of students).

One of my favorite marginal notations appears in William Russell's The History of America, published in 1778: where the text reads "it is now in the bosom of fate, whether France or Great Britain shall give law to America," a student has added in ink: "And is now concluded to be neither."

I've added a bunch of images of the books and marginalia to the gallery, and enhanced the catalog by adding a whole bunch of collections to note the original sources of the books, &c. Enjoy!

A Watchmaker-Polymath's Books

This morning I've finished adding books to the LibraryThing catalog of the books of Richard Cranch (1726-1811), the brother-in-law of John Adams (he was married to Abigail's sister Mary) and longtime friend of Robert Treat Paine (whose library I wrote about a couple weeks ago).

Cranch, born in Kingsbridge, Devonshire, moved to Massachusetts in 1746. He took up business as a card-maker, and later became one of the best-known watch repairmen in the Boston area. Cranch's interests varied widely (as you can see from the tag cloud for his books), extending far beyond horology and watch-making to encompass religious prophecy, the nature of the Antichrist, geography and navigation, history, languages (at least seven languages are represented in his collection) and classical literature

The library also reflects Cranch's interests in politics and government, in which he played an active role, serving two terms in the Massachusetts House of Representatives (1779-1783) and a term in the State Senate (1785-1787). He held the office of Justice of the Court of Common Pleas for Suffolk County from 1779 through 1793, along with several local offices at various times. Cranch was also a delegate to the Massachusetts convention to ratify the federal constitution, where he supported ratification.

Cranch was a supporter of the Harvard library, and the college granted him an honorary M.A. degree in 1780, placing him with the class of 1744. He was a founding member of the Massachusetts Charitable Society, and the Massachusetts Society for Propogating the Gospel in North America (in its 1787 iteration). He sat as a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, but declined membership in the Massachusetts Historical Society (he did donate a book to the Society's library, where it remains).

Thanks to the recent discovery* of a detailed inventory of Cranch's library taken by his grandson Richard Cranch Norton in January 1812 (in the Jacob Norton Papers at MHS), we can nearly reconstruct how the books were housed by Cranch: in two seven-shelf bookcases, with folio and quarto volumes on the lower shelves and books of smaller formats above (but not in much discernible order otherwise). Richard Cranch Norton also noted in his list which books he wished to purchase, and which books his father, Rev. Jacob Norton, had in his possession.

Another body of books from Cranch's library (including many legal titles) was given to his son William in 1797 after William's books had been seized by creditors. And there are various titles scattered here and there (as usual). But I fully expect to be adding more, as they appear in correspondence or in institutional holdings.

Interestingly, when I first glanced through the inventory of Cranch's books, I got an immediate impression of similarity between it and Robert Treat Paine's. So I wasn't all that surprised to find that the two collections are, both in terms of weighted and raw entries, extremely similar (see the "Members With Your Books" box on the left sidebar).

And now, on to the next!

*By Robert Mussey, who is working on a biography of Cranch and his family. I owe him huge thanks for collaborating with me on this project, and for his continued discoveries of books mentioned in family correspondence and notes.

Robert Treat Paine's Books

I've just completed another Library of Early America, this the collection of Robert Treat Paine (1731-1814). Probably best known today as a signer of the Declaration of Independence (the tenth one whose library we've now reconstructed), Paine also was at various times a school teacher, a merchant (he made a whaling voyage to Greenland), an army chaplain during the Seven Years' War, and an important legal official in Massachusetts (serving as Attorney General from 1777-1790, and as a justice on the Supreme Judicial Court from 1790 through 1804).

Paine's library is documented in a manuscript "Catalogue of Books beloging to Robt. Treat Paine," with the Robert Treat Paine papers at MHS. Paine started his catalog in 1768, organizing the books by format (folio, quarto, octavo, &c.). He added to the list as he acquired new titles, and then reorganized the catalog in 1805, supplementing the organization with the addition of some "subject headings" (Law, Theology &c., History, Physiology & Philology, and Poetry & Belles Lettres).

An interesting feature of the library catalog is a list at the end of "books lent and to whom," revealing that Paine frequently loaned titles to various friends and relations (and almost always got them back, too). An interesting example is William Law's A serious call to a devout and holy life, which Paine loaned to "Miss Sally Cobb" (who would in 1770 become his wife) and to her mother, "Mrs. Cobb." Another is James Garton's Practical gardener, borrowed by General William Hull. The notes on loans are included with each applicable record.

On to the next! On deck is completing the catalog of Richard Cranch (the brother-in-law of John Adams, and a longtime friend of Robert Treat Paine, to whom Paine loaned a few books). Then it'll be on to David Cobb's library (Paine's brother-in-law) and Thomas Paine (his father). That is, unless some other library crops up and distracts me (as they are wont to do).

[Update: 25 July 2010 - I've added 156 more titles, after stumbling across a section of pamphlets from RTP's library in the 1850 book catalog of his grandson, Charles Cushing Paine].

New LEA Libraries Added

I've added a few new (small) Libraries of Early America collections from the VA/MD probate inventories:

- William Triplett (1732-1802), landowner and friend of George Washington.

- Peter Presley Thornton (1750-1780), who served in the House of Burgesses 1772-1774, in the Virginia conventions of 1775, as colonel of a minute-man regiment 1775-1777, and as an aide-de-camp to Washington from 1777 probably until his death. Thornton's second wife was Elizabeth Carter, granddaughter of Landon Carter.

- Capt. John Belfield (1725-1801), commander of a troop of Light Continental Dragoons during the Revolution.

- Sarah Young Ball (~1682-1742), widow of Capt. Richard Ball, and holder of his lands following his death in 1726. A very small collection (Bible, prayer book, and Allestree's Whole Duty of Man).

- William Eilbeck (~1700-1764), among the wealthiest men in Charles County, MD at the time of his death. This collection is somewhat undercounted, since 70 titles are not itemized.

Signer Thomas Lynch and his Library

One of the (many) lots from Sotheby's Copley library sale on Wednesday that intrigued me was Lot 123, a book signed by Thomas Lynch, Jr., (1749-1779), a signer of the Declaration of Independence from South Carolina. The book sold for $40,625. Sotheby's cited in their catalog an article in the Spring 1960 Harvard Library Bulletin by Joseph E. Fields, "A Signer and his Signatures, or the Library of Thomas Lynch, Jr." (pp. 210-252), so I looked that up and found there a transcription of the portion of Lynch's inventory pertaining to books, plus a number of additional books known to contain Lynch's autograph. Using those lists, I've put Lynch's library online at LibraryThing, and you can browse it here. He's the eighth signer of the Declaration whose library we've documented so far (the others are Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Witherspoon, Elbridge Gerry, Lewis Morris, and George Wythe, and there are more to come).

Lynch (1749-1779) was the only Signer to have been educated in the classical English manner (Eton and the Middle Temple), and also has the distinction of being part of the only simultaneous father-son duo in the Continental Congress (for a few months in 1776). His father too could have signed the Declaration of Independence, but was too ill to attend sessions and died in December 1776 on the way home to South Carolina. Lynch himself was in seriously ill health and left Congress in October 1776, never to return. He and his wife were lost at sea when a ship carrying them to France in late 1779 (to take advantage of the French climate in the hope that it would improve Lynch's health) went down in the Caribbean.

Lynch's autograph is one of the rarest among the Signers, so because he had the habit of writing his name in his books, they have been pretty well mercilessly plundered for his signature. Of ~130 volumes known to have belonged to Lynch (amounting to 38 titles), nine remain intact; the rest have had the signatures clipped out (mostly by Lynch's nieces and nephews and their descendants in response to requests from autograph-hunters). When Signer-mania struck in the mid-19th century, even Lynch books then in the Apprentices' Library Society in Charleston (which later merged with the Charleston Library Society) weren't safe: Fields notes in his article that Charleston minister Samuel Gilman wrote to his friend the autograph-hound I.K. Tefft on 2 May 1845:

"Visiting the Apprentices' Library last evening, I asked the Librarian if he had any books with the inscription of T. Lynch Jr.'s name. He immediately brought me four volumes, from which I cut the enclosed. ... I have requested the Librarian to keep his eye on other books for the same signature, as he thinks there may be several in the Library." (Cringe-worthy, no?).

Clipped signatures from various of Lynch's books are now around the country in various institutional collections, mostly in collections of Signer autographs. One of the few remaining complete books was sold as Lot 9 of the third part of the Forbes Collection at Christie's in 2005, for $36,000. Some of the others were known to be in private collections in 1960, and any updates on their whereabouts (or on additional known Lynch books), will always be appreciated.

Michael Wigglesworth's Library

I've just finished entering into LibraryThing the library of Michael Wigglesworth (1631-1705), a minister/physician in Malden, MA and one of America's first bestseller poets. His 224-stanza poem about Judgment Day, The Day of Doom, sold 1,800 copies in less than a year ... and that was in 1662!

An inventory of Wigglesworth's library (which amounts to 91 titles so far) was printed in a short biography of him by John Ward Dean, and Dean ably describes the library as an "eminently practical one, consisting largely of books useful for reference .... It is rich in works upon theology and history; and there is also a good collection of medical books. Of classical literature there is little, and of English belles-lettres nothing. But what will excite most surprise is the dearth of poetry. Not even the poems of Mrs. Bradstreet, the pride of New England; nor of 'Silver-tongued Sylvester,' so much in repute with the Puritans of the preceding age; nor of zealous John Bunyan, a truly fraternal spirit; nor the grand epic of Milton, on such a subject kindred to his own, are there."

Dean also has some interesting comments on libraries in general: "Next to the books which an author composes may be placed those which he read as an index to his mind; and, as a general rule, we may infer that the books he possesses are those which he reads. True, it is not always safe to judge of a man's mental tastes by the contents of his library; for one sometimes comes into the possession, by gift or otherwise, of works in which he has little, if any, interest; but such books are not often sufficiently numerous to affect the character of a library of even moderate dimensions."

Thanks to Houghton's great provenance index I've located a few more Wigglesworth books there - a couple signed by Michael not in the inventory, and several of Michael's books which appear to have passed to his son Edward (as per Michael's will). I suspect, as usual, that others may be lurking out there, and as always will appreciate any leads.

Mob-Legacy-Project Today

As our first monthly mob-catalog of a Legacy Library, we're tackling the 1905 collection of the U.S.S. California today (until noon on Thursday). Three hours in, we're up to about 730 books (not bad at all!). More info in Tim's post, and if you want to jump in and help, sign up here!

[Update, 4 March: Along with the California's library, members jumped in overnight and cataloged the collection of the H.M.S. Beagle too!]

Joseph Stevens Buckminster's Library

Another Library of Early America is now complete, with the addition of the 1,200-title collection of Joseph Stevens Buckminster (1784-1812). Buckminster, who graduated from Harvard in 1800, was ordained the minister of Boston's Brattle Street Church in 1805. In 1806-07 he made a long tour to Europe (where he purchased a great number of the books in his library), and upon his return was very active in Boston's literary and historical communities. He was a founding member of the Anthology Society, from which sprang the Boston Athenaeum, and served as an editor of their publication, the Monthly Anthology. He was elected a member of the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1811, and was the same year named Harvard's Dexter professor of biblical criticism.

Sadly for the world, Buckminster suffered terribly from epilepsy from 1802 on, and died at the very young age of 28 on 9 June 1812. He had created during his short existence a massive library, consisting largely of classics, religious and philological texts. His LT catalog is mostly taken from the Catalogue of the library of the late Rev. J. S. Buckminster (Boston: Printed by John Eliot, Jun. 1812), a record of the auction in which his books were sold. Several other works had been presented to the Athenaeum prior to his death, and those are also included. Many of Buckminster's books ended up at the Athenaeum - where those are known I have noted it, but I suspect many others are in their collections.

A memoir of Buckminster appeared in the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1838. The author wrote "The services of him who descends to the grave, full of years as of honours, must be rememebred with gratitude; but a deeper and perhaps more lasting sentiment is excited when such ardent anticipations are blasted, as all his acquaintances indulged of our young friend. In the bright morning of his virtues, his fame, and his usefulness, - 'purpureus veluti cum flos, succisus aratro*,' - his fall is more justly bewailed than that of those who perish in the usual course of nature after exhaling all their fragrance."

Buckminster's papers are at the Athenaeum (finding guide). A two-volume edition of his works was published in 1839, and his sister Eliza Buckminster Lee published a memoir of her father and brother in 1849 (second edition in 1851). It includes many family letters, and much about Buckminster's life as a reader and book collector.



*"like a bright flower scythed by the plow" - from Catullus, via Virgil's Aeneid - thanks Google Books!

John Witherspoon's Library

I'm delighted to report that I've completed the entering of John Witherspoon's library (well, the remaining portion of it, anyway) into LibraryThing as a Library of Early America collection. I worked with staff from the Princeton University Rare Books & Special Collections on this project, as that's where the books are.

A great number of Witherspoon's titles are pamphlets bound into volumes; I've made a list of those here in case anyone wants to browse. More than half of Witherspoon's titles were religious in nature (536 of 933; by contrast, just 130 titles related to politics and government). You can see how Witherspoon's collection stacks up against the other LEA libraries by clicking here (by person) or here (by book).

Witherspoon biography here. If you know of any of his books not at Princeton, please shoot me an email so I can add them to his LT collection.

New Ways to Parse Legacy Data

Tim's made some super-cool changes to the way LT displays the Legacy Library statistics - see his blog post for all the gory details. One of the nifty new features is a top shared list for all the Legacies (it took me a little while to guess which book is the most-shared). We've also started creating slice-and-dice options so you can categorize the Legacies (Signers of the Declaration of Independence, scientists, actors - you can help out with this, here). There's an LT discussion thread for bugs and comments and things here, too, so please feel free to chime in.

What I've Been Up To

It's been a busy week. Lots of meetings and other things, but also because I've been trying really hard to finish up a project which I'll be speaking about on Saturday at the New England Historical Association meeting in Portland, ME. That's George Wythe's library, which is now just about all into LibraryThing (here).* The reason this is interesting is because not very much at all was known about Wythe's library until fairly recently (last November or so), when a colleague from Monticello and I identified a list of books in the MHS' Coolidge Collection of Thomas Jefferson Manuscripts as an inventory of Wythe's library, which was bequeathed to Jefferson. The list is now online digitally and in transcribed form, with the LT-catalog as an enhancement (complete title information, edition information where we know it, what Jefferson did with the books he received, where the remaining volumes went, &c.). Hopefully you'll be seeing more about this in other venues soon, but for now that's what I can tell you!

And if you're in Portland on Saturday morning, come by and hear the talk (info here, PDF).


*I still have a few titles and other cool data to add, including some notes on where Wythe originally got the books, &c.

Off to Providence

I'm heading down to the Providence Athenaeum to speak on the Libraries of Early America Project tonight. We'll talk project history, goals, and all things LibraryThing (tags, works, &c.), and look at some of the completed and ongoing libraries. If I can figure out how a handy way to post slides and notes I'll do so.

Provenance via Auction Catalog

In my ever-expanding quest to find more Libraries of Early America (because I can't be content with the forty-six currently on my list to enter, apparently) I started poking through some old bound auction catalogs yesterday and making a list of the lots which list previous owners. I found a surprising number of books from the collection of George Read (1733-1798), a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and one of Delaware's first senators under the Constitution. The names of early Virginia poet Robert Bolling also appeared fairly often, as did Virginia historian William Stith. I even came across one book owned by the explorer John Ledyard.

I'm not sure how often I'll get a chance to go through more auction volumes, but as I do I'll continue to take notes and will probably mention any major finds. And if you stumble across any in your hunts, please feel free to shoot them my way (any Americans collecting prior to 1825).

This morning it's back to Countway to start a transcription of John Jeffries' library catalog so I can get his collection up and running fairly soon (the LEA's first balloonist!).

Providence Athenaeum: Founders' Library

Last weekend at the LT cataloging party we met John Chiafalo, a big fan of the Providence Athenaeum. John told me about a very interesting collection at the Athenaeum, their Founders' Collection. These are the books which survived a 1758 fire that destroyed most of the original collection of the Providence Library Company (which merged with the Providence Athenaeum in 1836).

John had started an LT profile for the Founders' Collection a year ago, but had run into the difficulties finding correct editions and so forth, so I offered to give him a hand and finish it off. I took advantage of this morning's snow day to do that, and am happy to report that the sixty-eight titles known to have survived the fire are now completely entered. Thirty-one of those still remain in the Athenaeum's care today (those will include a call number in the Comments field).

I added a notation to each record giving its listing in the 1768 catalogue of the Providence Library, which includes the price originally paid for each book. John reports that he may also add photographs of the books to their LT records as well.

Completely incidentally, there is a very nice piece in today's Providence Journal about the Athenaeum and its holdings.

Catalogs at Countway

I've spent parts of the last couple Thursday mornings at the Center for the History of Medicine at Harvard's Countway Library of Medicine. They have a few very interesting library catalogs that I've been scoping out as possible additions to the Libraries of Early America project, and I'll probably be spending some more significant time there later in the spring.

Among the items of interest are an 1816 manuscript catalog of the first Boston Medical Library (founded in 1805) and an 1823 printed catalog of their library. One of the founders of the Boston Medical Library was Dr. John Collins Warren (1788-1856), whose two-volume library catalog from 1830 delighted me immensely. One volume is organized by author, giving full bibliographic details about the books (we like those). The other volume is organized by subject, using a very extensive classification system (presumably devised by Warren himself). Jefferson's is the only other early American library I can think of offhand where such a scheme is deployed.

A third item of particular interest is the library catalog of Dr. John Jeffries (1744-1819), a Boston physician who served as a surgeon with the British army during the Revolution and lived in England until the late 1780s. While there he made several voyages by balloon, including one across the English Channel. He returned to Boston and lived out his days as a prominent medical figure in Boston. His books, or at least the medical portion of them, were left to his sons at his death, and a catalog was made of them. Later, some of the books were donated to Harvard Medical School, the Boston Medical Department, and the Boston Public Library. The Jeffries catalog is almost entirely medical books, some with, um, interesting names, like "Directions for ruptured persons" (which I presume is something like this title).

I'm excited to add some medical libraries to the project, and very thankful to the Center's public services librarian, Jack Eckert, for making me aware of these catalogs. I'm sure I'll have more to say about them soon when I've dived in a bit deeper.

Franklin's Library, Done

I can't tell you how many times I've questioned my own sanity in the last week, but I am more than a little delighted to report that Benjamin Franklin's library is now entirely entered into LT. All 3,742 titles of it. Some statistics are here, including info on languages (2,583 in English, 906 in French, 207 in Latin, plus some in Italian, German, and a few other tongues), and other interesting bits. As you can see, the last couple months have been busy ones: one other volunteer and I have entered 2,009 of the titles just since 1 January, and ~800 of them in the last ten days (hence the questioning of the sanity).

This project wouldn't have been possible without the hard work and gracious permission of both Kevin Hayes, the American Philosophical Society and the Library Company of Philadelphia, the author and publishers of The Library of Benjamin Franklin (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2006). Not only have they made the book available via Google Books (here), but they also gave us permission to enter the data from it completely, including the wonderful and incredibly useful annotations.

So, browse about, read Franklin's reviews, and enjoy. Some of the interesting titles/notes:

- The scrubs of Parnassus or, all in the wrong by Whackum Smackum, Esq.

- A book of common prayer stolen from Franklin's church pew. Franklin put an ad in the paper reading in part: "The Person who took it, is desir'd to open it and read the Eighth Commandment, and afterwards return in into the same Pew again; upon which no further Notice will be taken."

- John Whitehurst's An inquiry into the original state and formation of the earth, about which another correspondent wrote to see if BF had received the book: "Mr Whitehurst desired me to ask you if his book was got to your hands he sent it by some Compte or other whose Name I forget."

On to the next!

Links & Reviews

- If you're looking for something bookish to do next Saturday, LT's hosting another Flash-Mob Cataloging Party, at the Audubon Society of Rhode Island's Powder Mill Ledges Wildlife Refuge in Smithfield. Full info here. I'm going. You should too!

- The ABAA's San Francisco fair is going on this weekend. Coverage in the San Francisco Chronicle includes a top-line mention of our friend Ian Kahn (whose books arrived on time after all - whew!).

- Members of the Jeffersonville Carnegie Library Foundation, which oversees the Remnant Trust collection currently housed in Jefferson, KY, said this week that they are confident they can find a way to keep the collection where it is, problems with its present location notwithstanding.

- The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore has mounted an exhibit relating to the St. John's Bible, an ongoing project to create the "first handwritten, illuminated Bible to be commissioned by a Benedictine monastery since the advent of the printing press more than 500 years ago." The Bible is scheduled for completion next year.

- More than 24,000 pages of the papers of former first lady Bess Wallace Truman were opened to the public 13 February at the Truman Presidential Library and Museum, to mark the 124th anniversary of Mrs. Truman's birth. No bombshell revelations were reported.

- Paul Collins notes his Slate piece on CBS' "The Big-Bang Theory" and the question of whether Sheldon has Asperger's syndrome.

- Blood traces on a couch believed to be the very piece of furniture on which author Alexander Pushkin died are being tested to be determine if they're the real thing. Carolyn Kellogg has more at Jacket Copy.

- Scott Douglas has a new "Dispatches from a Public Librarian" up at McSweeney's.

- Carolyn Kellogg also pointed us this week to the Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts, a very decent and usefully-searchable database of manuscripts made available online by libraries around the world. I like it! Kellogg is right to note that link-collections are tricky, since URLs tend to be less stable than they should be, but hey, it's better than nothing.

- Some really scary news out of the Keystone State this week, where Gov. Ed Rendell's proposed 2009-2010 budget cuts fifty of fifty-seven positions at the State Library of Pennsylvania. Funding for the library would be slashed by fifty percent, to just $2.4 million. "The State Library houses an extensive general and legal reference collection and is perhaps the state's leading repository of Pennsylvania and U.S. government reports, from election results to postings of salaries of all state employees.It also contains a state-of-the-art rare-books room that preserves a collection of books and newspapers started by Benjamin Franklin." (That collection is now online at LT here). Awful news, and I hope that the state can figure out a way to keep the library going in a meaningful way. [h/t LISNews]

- The NYPL blog this week mentioned Premiere Issues, a site designed to archive "first issues" of magazines. It contains about 200 issues, mostly fairly recent (within the last twenty years or so). With wider coverage this could be extremely useful.


Reviews

- In the TLS, Richard Dawkins reviews Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True. He calls the book "outstandingly good," and concludes "The need was great; the execution is superb. Please read it." Given the recent poll numbers, it's hard not to agree.

- Coyne's book is reviewed alongside Desmond and Moore's Darwin's Sacred Cause by Thomas Hayden in the WaPo.

- Dan Simmons' Drood is reviewed by Robert Hughes for the WSJ.

- Lauren Groff's new collection of short stories, Delicate Edible Birds, is reviewed at Open Letters.

- Costica Bradatan reviews Ingrid Rowland's Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic in the Philly Inquirer.