Links

A shorter selection of links this week, since I've got some longer posts I'm working on for later today.

- Bibliopolis has revamped their blog page, and it's lovely. A great selection of book blogs.

- Richard Cox comments on Bill Bryson's Shakespeare: The World as Stage. Cox writes "I was surprised how much of his brief biography concerned records and archives. ... Bryson provides various descriptions of surviving documents, accounts of interviews with archivists about the records, tales of discovering and losing documents, and the process of analyzing documents alleged to be by Shakespeare or to have connections with him."

- Travis notes a very strange federal grand jury indictment in New York: Daniel Spiegelman, the subject of Travis' The Book Thief, has been charged with making false statements on a passport application (including name, birth date, birth place and social security number) ... in 1999. Travis has been in touch with the U.S. Attorney on the case, who couldn't tell him much. More to follow as it becomes clear, but I agree with Travis that this seems really quite odd.

- Speaking of thieves, some of the map history listservs were alive this week with news that Gilbert Bland, the infamous map thief who is the subject of Miles Harvey's excellent book The Island of Lost Maps, may be back in business. I'll have more on this possibility when I can, but I want to try and hammer down some facts first.

- Lori at Brookline Blogsmith has a post up of Booksmith's top sellers for 2007.

- Central Connecticut State University has posted a list of America's Most Literate Cities for 2007 (Minneapolis is in the top slot; Boston sneaks in at number 10). (h/t Reading Copy)

- Norman Mailer's archive at the UT's Harry Ransom Center opened on Thursday, The Guardian reported. The collection includes "more than 1,000 boxes of manuscripts, letters, magazines, drawings, photographs and more." Mailer sold the materials for $2.5 million in 2005. (h/t Joyce)

Book Revew: "The Book Thief"

The Book Thief: The True Crimes of Daniel Spiegelman (Praeger, 2006) is an account of the theft of numerous rare books and manuscrips from the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscripts Library in the early 1990s, as well as the multi-year quest to bring the culprit to justice. Travis McDade, currently the Assistant Professor of Library Administration at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's College of Law, has written what must be considered the definitive monograph on this case, barring any further developments (much of Spiegelman's haul has still not been recovered, and since the man is now out of jail again, more shoes could yet drop).

What is remarkable about the Spiegelman case, McDade argues, is that the crime was taken very seriously by federal judge Lewis Kaplan, who went out of his way to depart from federal sentencing guidelines and add to Spiegelman's jail term. This was based largely on the efforts of Columbia librarians and other scholars, who through written and oral testimony made clear that Spiegelman's crimes should not be examined simply in light of any monetary value the stolen objects had, but also in terms of the cultural and scholarly implications.

McDade notes that this book began as a research paper, and it still retains that sort of feel. He does not have the talent of Nicholas Basbanes or Miles Harvey for telling a good story; thankfully the Spiegelman drama holds enough water on its own to make this book interesting even through a writing style which is somewhat clunky. Additionally, another round of copy-editing might have improved the book, which contains multiple typographical and grammatical errors. Nonetheless, for those concerned with the protection of our cultural heritage from people like Spiegelman, McDade has written a book well worth reading.