This Week's Acquisitions

These are in fact from the previous week (more BEA snags, the ones that I shipped):

- Prophet's Prey: My Seven-Year Investigation into Warren Jeffs and the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints by Sam Brower (Bloomsbury, 2011). BEA.

- The Revisionists by Thomas Mullen (Mulholland Books, 2011). BEA.

- The Apothecary by Maile Meloy (Putnam, 2011). BEA.

- Calling Mr. King by Ronald De Feo (Other Press, 2011). BEA.

- House Secrets: A Joe DeMarco Thriller by Mike Lawson (Grove Press, 2011). BEA.

- Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius by Sylvia Nasar (Simon & Schuster, 2011). BEA.

- Explorer's Guide Maine Coast & Islands: A Great Destination by Christina Tree (Countryman Press, 2011). BEA.

- Agent 6 by Tom Rob Smith (Grand Central, 2011). BEA.

- Tides of War by Stella Tillyard (Henry Holt, 2011). BEA.

- Great House by Nicole Krauss (W.W. Norton, 2011). BEA.

- The Maid: A Novel of Joan of Arc by Kimberly Cutter (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011). BEA.

- True Grit by Charles Portis (Overlook Press, 2011). BEA.

In other news, the move went very smoothly, and twelve hours after the movers left I flew to Charlottesville for the first sessions of Rare Book School. I'll have more to say on both those topics soon!

Auction Preview: June Sales

- There will be a Bibliophile Sale at Bloomsbury London on 2 June, in 376 lots.

- PBA Galleries will sell Charles Bukowski & His Circle: The Collection of Ross Runfola, in 343 lots.

- Also on 2 June, Swann has Maps, Atlases, Natural History and Ephemera, in 321 lots.

- Sotheby's London will sell Music and Continental Books & Manuscripts on 8 June, in 376 lots. The top-estimated lot is Mahler's own copy of his Third Symphony, with his autograph revisions. It is estimated at £100,000-150,000.

- Also on 8 June, Christie's London has Valuable Printed Books and Manuscripts, in 81 lots. The most spectacular of these (and in fact the most spectacular thing I've seen at auction in a very long time) is the Pillone Library, a collection of eighteen works in seventeen volumes, all with painted fore-edges or drawings on vellum by Cesare Vecellio. These are really remarkable pieces of artwork, created for members of the Pillone family in the 1580s. The volumes will first be offered as a single lot (estimated at £1,100,000-1,600,000); if they don't sell that way, the volumes are going to be sold separately. There are some other important volumes in the sale, as well as an interesting collection of manuscript journals written by Nassau William Senior (1790-1864), estimated at £50,000-80,000.

- At Christie's London on 13 June, Printed Books and Manuscripts, in 399 lots.

- On 14 June at Bloomsbury London, Books from the stock of the late John Sperr of Fisher and Sperr London, in 169 lots. A complete set of Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie (1751-1780) is estimated at £10,000-15,000; William Curtis' The Botanical Magazine in 167 volumes could fetch £15,000-20,000.

- PBA Galleries will sell Fine Literature, Illustrated & Children's Books, and Fine Books in All Fields, in 446 lots.

- At Sotheby's New York on 17 June, Fine Books and Manuscripts, in 172 lots, and this is quite a sale! A Marc Chagall sketchbook rates a $600,000-900,000 estimate, while the opera glasses Lincoln took to the theater on the night of his assassination are estimated at $500,000-700,000. Robert E. Lee's 20 April 1861 letter to his brother in which Lee notes his resignation from the U.S. Army could fetch $400,000-600,000, and a flag from the C.S.S. Alabama is estimated at $200,000-400,000. An archive of René Magritte letters rates a $150,000-200,000 estimate. A 1684 first quarto edition of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" could sell for $12,000-18,000. Lots more goodies in here - do browse the catalog.

- Christie's New York will sell Fine Printed Books & Manuscripts on 23 June. Preview to come.

Book Review: "The Story of 'Charlotte's Web'"

If you're anything like me, you know E.B. White's Charlotte's Web pretty well. I read the book many times when I was younger, and even read it out loud during a family vacation a few years ago. But I wasn't aware of much of the book's backstory, so when I saw Michael Sims' The Story of Charlotte's Web: E.B. White's Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic (Walker & Company, forthcoming) I knew it was a must-read.

Sims has done a fantastic job here, writing a short biography of White's life and career but really digging into the author's process of creating Charlotte's Web. Drawing on White's papers (at Cornell) and looking carefully at his drafts, research notes, designs and inspirations for the book, Sims has managed to write as much a biography of the book as of the man who wrote it.

White's childhood, college days, career, and his life as a Maine farmer with a deep and meaningful relationship with the world around him all come into play here, but it's that final aspect (his love of animals and his understanding of how they fit into the world) that really played into the creation of his story. Sims' partial reconstruction of White's research process by examining the notes he took on various spider reference sources while trying to pin down Charlotte's identity and life story was riveting, and White's own sparkly writing is used to great effect.

If you've ever enjoyed White's masterpiece, or like to know the "story behind the book," this is a title you should be sure to add to your shelves. It's a keeper.

Links & Reviews

- An update on what's happening with the Digital Public Library of America.

- The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich is digitizing its extensive collection of bookplates: check out the first bunch here.

- Catalogers made a really neat find in Sir Walter Scott's library recently: "The Grotesquiad," a 9,000-word poem by James Beattie.

- From the NYTimes, a look at trends and takeaways from BEA.

- Some interesting (and possibly very big) metadata news from the Library of Congress.

- Lambuth University (soon to close) sold off its book collection and other items at auction this weekend.

- A profile of the Voynich Manuscript ran last week in the Telegraph.

- Huge congratulations to the team at Transcribe Bentham: they received an Award of Distinction in the Digital Communities category of the Prix Ars Electronica.

Reviews

- Joshua Kendall's The Forgotten Founding Father; review by Jesse Sheidlower in the NYTimes.

- David McCullough's The Greater Journey; reviews by Stacy Schiff in the NYTimes; Janet Maslin in the NYTimes; Wendy Smith in the LATimes.

- Geraldine Brooks' Caleb's Crossing; review by Susan Salter Reynolds in the LATimes;

This Week's Acquisitions

Pardon the slight delay, and also note that this is only about half the list, since I shipped a few of the books directly from BEA to Maine, to avoid extra schlepping:

- Just My Type: A Book About Fonts by Simon Garfield (Gotham, 2011)

- The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt (W.W. Norton, 2011)

- The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris by David McCullough (Simon & Schuster, 2011)

- Pure by Julianna Baggott (Grand Central Publishing, 2011)

- Those Across the River by Christopher Buehlman (Ace, 2011)

- Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend by Susan Orlean (Simon & Schuster, 2011)

Coming Soon!

Back from BEA, which was great fun; it was nice to catch up with publishers I've emailed with for a long time, see what they've got coming up and what they're excited about!

The travel-madness continues: we're off to Cleveland this afternoon for a wedding, back to Boston Monday afternoon. Wednesday afternoon I'll head up to Portland to meet the movers with all our stuff on Thursday morning ... and then Friday morning it's off to Charlottesville for the first round of Rare Book School!

With all that, posts may be few and far between, but I'll get things up as I can.

Book Review: "Mr. Chartwell"

I can't bring to mind another book quite like Rebecca Hunt's Mr. Chartwell (Dial Press, 2011). Young librarian Esther Hammerhans and the retired Winston Churchill are united here by a mysterious and not-entirely-welcome stranger, the black dog Mr. Chartwell. Imaginative, different, and filled with an interesting cast of characters and some improbably humorous moments, Mr. Chartwell is a neat read about an unexpected topic.

BEA in New York

I'm in New York for Book Expo America this week, talking to publishers about LibraryThing and how we can work with them (and enjoying the tremendously impressive exhibition floor and all the cool things happening there). And, I learned tonight, the hotel where I'm staying (Herald Square Hotel) was the headquarters of LIFE magazine from 1894 - fun, right?

I'll post some pictures, &c. from BEA tomorrow night, time permitting.

Book Review: "The Devil's Mask"

Christopher Wakling's The Devil's Mask (Faber and Faber, 2011) is a historical mystery (think something along the lines of David Liss' books, though this one is not at the same level), set in Bristol during the first years of the nineteenth century. The slave trade has been abolished, but young lawyer Inigo Bright discovers that the practice may not be quite eradicated. When he gets too close to some uncomfortable truths, he finds his very life may be in danger.

While an entertaining, fast read, The Devil's Mask lacked contextual details, and some of the side-plots went undeveloped (Bright's relationship with his bride-to-be and her family could have used some fleshing out, for example). Short interludes from a different perspective pretty much give away the game right from the outset, so by the end there's little mystery left.

Overall, good for a weekend afternoon's entertainment, but there are certainly better books in the genre.

Links & Reviews

- Parts of Jane Austen's unfinished manuscript of her novel The Watsons will be sold at Sotheby's London on 14 July, with estimates of £200,000-300,000.

- Last September I noted that book thief Sean Cowie had skipped bail and was on the lam; this week the Stirling Observer reported that Cowie (now back in police custody) has told police he has cancer, but his former girlfriend says he's simply lying.

- The University of Pennsylvania libraries have received a $300,000 NEH grant to digitize approximately 1,000 European and American manuscripts from 1601-1800. The digitized manuscripts will be added to the Penn in Hand: Selected Manuscripts site.

- Google Books announced this week that it's making available a selection of 16th and 17th-century books in full color: and they're quite nice, actually.

- Art book collector Arthur Jaffe is profiled in the Orlando Sun-Sentinel.

- The LATimes has a "summer reading guide" out today, with recommendations from a wide variety of genres.

- Since 2007 this blog has followed the murder case of Missouri book collector Rolland Comstock. This week reports emerged that the case was before a Greene County grand jury, but that no indictments were handed down. The Columbia News-Leader ran a retrospective and update on the Comstock story as well.

- John Hendel covers the 125th anniversary of Linotype, writing for The Atlantic (it includes the trailer for Doug Wilson's "Linotype: The Film," which looks tremendously interesting.

- At Salon, Paul Shaw looks at "Fonts that could have been great."

- Amazon announced that Kindle book sales have surpassed sales of print books for the first time. Michael Lieberman at Book Patrol has the best take on this I've seen yet.

- A new list of recent and forthcoming books on early American topics is up on the Society of Early Americanists site.

- From the Fine Books Blog, Rebecca Rego Barry looks at some recent auction consignments by historical societies.

Reviews

- Jacqueline Yallop's Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves: How the Victorians Collected the World; review by Mary Crockett in the Scotsman.

- Michael Parker's The Watery Part of the World; review by Emily Barton in the New York Times.

- Frank McLynn's Captain Cook, Master of the Seas; review by Roger Hutchinson in the Scotsman.

- Revolutionary Founders (ed. Alfred F. Young, Gary Nash and Ray Raphael); review by Mary Beth Norton in the New York Times.

- Daniel Richter's Before the Revolution; review by J.H. Elliot in the NYRB.

Auction Report: Recent Sales

Okay, where to begin? The 18 May Sotheby's Paris sale of Books and Manuscripts brought in a total of €2,022,300; full results are here. The Robespierre and Philippe le Bas papers were pre-empted by the Archives Nationales de France, for a combined bid of €979,500; a news release reports "tumultuous applause" when the documents were saved for the nation. Marcel Pagnol and Jean Cocteau manuscripts were also pre-empted, by the BNF and Paris History Library respectively.

Andy Warhol's 1¢ Life (1964) fetched €108,750, while the typescript copy of Le Petit Prince(1943) brought in €70,350.

The Printed & Manuscript Americana sale at Christie's New York on 19 May brought in $1,103,125, with 159 of 210 lots selling. The top lot ended up being a collection of Jackie Kennedy Onassis letters, which sold for $134,500. The Peter Force Declaration of Independence made $17,500. The Breeden-Raedt aende Vereenichde Nederlandsche Provintien and Franklin's copy of Dryden and Lee's Oedipus (1735) did not sell.

The Sanford B. Dole family archive archive of letters and clippings made $9,000 at PBA Galleries on 19 May.

And now on to yesterday's event: the third round of Copley sales at Sotheby's New York. The third selection of American Historical Documents brought in a total of $2,472,258; full results are here. Many of the top-estimated lots didn't meet their reserves: the Dwight Eisenhower letters to his wife Mamie, as well as the archives of material relating to John Charles Frémont, the 1865 Hampton Roads peace conference, the assassination of President Garfield and the trial of Charles Guiteau all failed to sell, as did the first edition of The Federalist (New York: 1788) in contemporary boards.

Washington's letter to Nathaniel Gorham celebrating the ratification of the Constitution did better than expected, selling for $182,500, and the Lincoln letter to the House of Representatives from May 1864 made $68,500. Three copybooks kept by Tobias Lear during his time as U.S. Consul at Algiers fetched $80,500.

Last but certainly not least came the two John Lansing notebooks from the Constitutional Convention, which ended up selling for $902,500 once premiums are factored in. I was watching the sale online, and the buyer appeared to be in the room, but no word has yet come through on the identity of the notebooks' new owner.

This Week's Acquisitions

Another week without new books; aren't you proud of me?

Next week, however, I'll be at Book Expo America, so the trend cannot possibly hold. I will, however, be able to ship things directly to the new house, so as to save packing and schlepping!

Kelmscott Chaucer Census Blog

William S. Peterson and Sylvia S. Peterson, co-authors of the just-released The Kelmscott Chaucer: A Census (Oak Knoll Press, 2011) have started a blog, The Kelmscott Chaucer, to track updates and additions to their census. I've added a link to the sidebar.

As I've said before, I am a huge fan of book censuses, and absolutely support this effort. I urge anyone with information on the Kelmscott Chaucer to pass it along, and keep an eye on this blog for what I'm sure will be fascinating updates. I'm looking forward to browsing the book as well, when I can.

Good stuff!

Auction Report: May 10-15 Sales

- The Sotheby's London Travel, Atlases, Maps & Natural History sale on 10 May brought in £1,393,000. Full results here. The Egyptology items did particularly well: the unexpected top lot was a first edition of Ippolito Rosselini's I Monumenti dell'Egritto e della Nubia (1832-1844), which made £169,250. Champollion's Monuments de l'Egypte et de la Nubie (1835-1845) fetched £85,250. A copy of Description de l'Egypte did much better than expected, fetching £99,500 over estimates of £20,000-30,000. The Egyptian archive of embroidery templates and artwork sold for £73,250. Gould's Birds of Europe was the only non-Egypt-related high seller; it made £56,450. The 1570 Paolo Forlani world map and the first edition of Purchas his Pilgrimes did not sell.

- Watch the summer Fine Books & Collections for my full take on the 11 May Michel Wittock sale at Christie's Paris on 11 May, but full results are here. Of the 80 lots, 57 sold, for a total of €1,738,037. That spectacular copy of Description de l'Egypte was by far the top lot, reaching €1,095,400. Several of the fine bindings also sold well.

- The Importants Livres Anciens, Livres d'Artistes, et Manuscrits sale, also at Christie's on 11 May, saw 192 of 238 lots sell, realizing €3,282,250. Four of the top five lots, all hammered down at more than €100,000, where John Gould works: his Birds of Australia (€199,000); A Monograph of the Trochilidae (€151,000); The Birds of New Guinea (€111,400); and Birds of Asia (€109,000). The other top lot was a Mozart music manuscript, which fetched €115,000.

- Swann's Literature; Art, Press & Illustrated Books sale on 12 May saw a copy of the Jasper Johns/Samuel Beckett Foirades/Fizzles as the top lot, making $16,800.

- At Bloomsbury London's Continental & English Literature and Manuscripts, the top lot was two A.E. Housman manuscript poems, which made £10,000.

For what's coming up in the second half of May, see my preview post.

Links & Reviews

First, a couple things I forgot to mention last weekend:

- The May Fine Books Notes is out, with a feature by Nick Mamatas on Lovecraft's Providence, Nick Basbanes on collecting ephemera, Ian McKay on recent auction highlights, and more.

- A special issue of Common-place is up as well, "American Food in the Age of Experiment," edited by David Shields. Great content, as always!

- Ian has a sum-up of last weekend's MARIAB fair in Wilmington, MA.

- Booktryst has the great story of bookseller Vic Zoschak's eBay find of five hand-written ledgers containing the records of the Senate Appropriations Committee from 1879 to 1909. The ledgers will be going home to the Library of the Senate.

- New Tumblr: Biblio-Tech, on, well, biblio- and tech- stuff!

- Some spaces are still available in this summer's London Rare Book School courses.

- The Passage author Justin Cronin talks to the Cleveland Plain-Dealer about his literary roots.

- Yale announced this week that millions of digital images of objects in its museum, archive and library collections will be made available to the public through a new open-access policy. More than 250,000 images are already online in the new Yale Digital Commons catalog.

- One of those great book-find stories this week: a South African tourist picked up a €3 book at a Limerick flea market and sold it for more than €8,000. It was a first edition of Wuthering Heights.

- More from Yale: Joanne Freeman's American Revolution course is online at YouTube, in 25 lectures. [h/t @RagLinen]

- Harvard professor Leah Price is profiled in the Harvard Gazette about her work on books as physical objects: she's got a book coming out later this year, Reader's Block: The Use of Books in Nineteenth-Century Britain.

Reviews

- Suzanne Marrs, ed. What There is to Say We Have Said: Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell; review by Richard Eder in the Boston Globe.

- Geraldine Brooks' Caleb's Crossing; reviews by Matthew Gilbert in the Boston Globe and Jane Smiley in the NYTimes.

- N. John Hall's Correspondence: An Adventure in Letters; review by Rebecca Rego Barry in Fine Books Notes.

- Molly Peacock's The Paper Garden; review by Andrea Wulf in the NYTimes.

- Erik Larson's In the Garden of Beasts; review by Philip Kerr in the Washington Post.

This Week's Acquisitions

Nothing new this week; weeded a bunch in preparation for the move.

Book Review: "Liberty's Exiles"

I'll just say right at the outset that Maya Jasanoff's Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (Knopf, 2011) is going to be in my list of 2011's best books. As I read it, I couldn't help but make the comparison to Pauline Maier's Ratification: like Maier, Jasanoff has accomplished something remarkable, writing a concise and readable narrative account of a complex process that had been written about in small pieces before but never pulled together in a comprehensive way.

Jasanoff's subject is the loyalist diaspora, the emigration of some 60,000 free people (and another 15,000 slaves "exported" by their masters) from the rebellious American colonies during and after the American Revolution. By focusing on the entire spectrum of loyalist destinations, and by using specific individuals and families as case studies to frame the narrative, Jasanoff is able to tell the loyalists' stories in a way that no prior work has done, and no future work is likely to do nearly as well.

One of the most salient points from Liberty's Exiles is the heterogeneity of the loyalists' views: as Jasanoff writes, "They agreed on one thing: they upheld the authority of the king--at least as long as the king did his part by them in turn. ... [M]onarchism would be about the only principle binding together a disparate population of American refugees" (p. 199). Or, put another way, "A commitment to 'British rights' could be held with equal sincerity by people with otherwise divergent views of what those rights actually were" (p. 199). When certain loyalists came to feel that their rights as British citizens were being violated, they responded, often in ways that bear a striking resemblance to their patriot counterparts in the years leading up to the Revolution.

Peopling her tale with a cast of characters from across the loyalist spectrum, Jasanoff is able to put a human face on the diaspora. There are some familiar names, like Anglican minister Jacob Bailey of Maine, a Harvard classmate of John Adams' whose parishioners forced him from the pulpit and into exile in Nova Scotia, and Elizabeth Lichstenstein Johnston, whose peregrinations back and forth across the Atlantic in search of a happy and safe harbor for herself and her family make for heartbreaking reading. Then there's the large Robinson family of New York, members of which end up at all corners of the empire, as well as free black George Liele and escaped slave David George, whose travels lead them in very different directions.

Jasanoff examines loyalist migrations not just to Britain and Canada, but also to East Florida (from which residents were forced to leave again after the Treaty of Paris), the Bahamas (where, I was fascinated to learn, Lord Dunmore served as governor), Jamaica, and Sierra Leone. By including in her story the whole range of loyalists: white, black (free and slave), even Indian, the account becomes much richer and more interesting than most previous treatments.

In her conclusions, Jasanoff takes a wide-angle view of the diaspora, noting that while a shared folklore or language of lamentation about the departure from America never caught on among the loyalists (as there was with the exile of the Acadians, for example), and that by 1815 or so most had been absorbed into the empire in some way (or had returned to what was the United States), many had experienced severe hardship, oppressive authority, and recurring displacements. Just as there was no uniform brand of loyalism, there was no uniform experience among loyalist emigrants; some landed on their feet, while others struggled for years.

Liberty's Exiles is enhanced by Jasanoff's deep research, drawing on a wide variety of archival sources (including detailed records of slaves exported from the colonies and the later records of the Sierra Leone settlements, the claims filed by loyalists in London for compensation, and tax-exemption documents required for loyalists in Jamaica). An appendix gives new and useful quantitative information on the numbers of loyalist departures, while the notes and bibliography take up more than sixty pages; I've already found some great sources there for use with a few of my own projects.

While I think that in very few cases Jasanoff takes the loyalists' protestations of ill-treatment in the years leading up to the Revolution without the necessary grain of salt, overall this is as good a book on the loyalists and their lives as we're ever likely to see.

Links & Reviews

- From BibliOdyssey, some 18th and 19th-century writing blanks.

- Over at Notes for Bibliophiles, a neat look at "analog ASCII art"

- I quite like how Whitney Trettien incorporates Twitter and illustrations into her blog posts: here's a good example from this week, about aspects of book/print culture which may resist digitization.

- Something I didn't know (thanks to @mercpol for the tip): the first 55 volumes of Studies in Bibliography are available for free online.

- Launched this week, Archive, a new open-access journal on archives in the digital age.

- A blog post, on historically-important call slips at the NYPL, launched a long discussion on Ex-Libris and in the comments thread about the appropriateness of releasing researchers' call slips.

- An unfinished Scots dictionary compiled by James Boswell has been rediscovered at the Bodleian Library, after having been incorrectly cataloged. Lexicographer Susan Rennie, who made the find, has started a new site to highlight Boswell's effort.

- Australian book collector Iain Herriot's library will be auctioned for charity today in Brisbane.

Reviews

- Andrea Wulf's Founding Gardeners; review by Paula Deitz in the NYTimes.

- Joshua Kendall's The Forgotten Founding Father; review by Nicholas Basbanes in the LATimes.

- Daniel Richter's Before the Revolution: America's Ancient Pasts; review by Charles C. Mann in the WSJ.

- Arthur Phillips' The Tragedy of Arthur; review by Daniel Ulin in the LATimes.

- Geraldine Brooks' Caleb's Crossing; review by Abigail Deutsch in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Auction Preview: May Sales

- Sotheby's London will sell Travel, Atlases, Maps & Natural History titles in 210 lots on 10 May, including a Paolo Forlani world map (1570), estimated at £100,000-150,000; a first edition of Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625-6), estimated at £60,000-80,000; an archive of embroidery templates and artwork from the workshop of Egypt's Dar al-Kiswah, estimated at £60,000-80,000; and a first edition of John Gould's Birds of Europe (1832-1837), estimated at £45,000-60,000.

- The fourth part of the collection of Michel Wittock will be sold at Christie's Paris on 11 May, in 80 lots. Watch for a full writeup of this in the summer Fine Books & Collections. The top-rated item in this sale, but a wide margin, is a fantastic copy of Description de l'Égypte ou Recueil des observations et des recherches qui ont été faites en Egypte pendant l'expédition de l'armée française (1817-1830), in 22 volumes and with its own wooden storage/display case. The copy was previously owned by Jean-Joseph Courvoisier, Justice minister to Charles X. It's estimated at EUR 500,000-700,000. Some other fine bindings and artist books are included in this sale.

- Also at Christie's Paris on 11 May, 238 lots of Importants Livres Anciens, Livres d'Artistes, et Manuscrits. Some important John Gould titles are among the top-estimated lots: a Birds of Australia (1840-1869), estimated at EUR 120,000-180,000; A Monograph of the Trochilidae (1880-1887), estimated at EUR 100,000-150,000; and Birds of Asia (1850-1883), estimated at EUR 80,000-100,000. Other key illustrated natural history books are included, as well as a fair number of interesting incunables.

- Swann will sell Literature; Art, Press & Illustrated Books on 12 May, in 479 lots. A numbered copy of Dalí's Die Göttliche Komödie (1974) is estimated at $7,000-10,000; a copy of the Vincent FitzGerald edition of Joyce's Epiphanies with Susan Weil and Marjorie Van Dyke rates an $8,000-10,000 estimate.

- At Bloomsbury London on 12 May, Continental & English Literature and Manuscripts, in 532 lots.

- At Sotheby's Paris on 18 May, Books and Manuscripts, in 107 lots. A collection of Robespierre papers rates the top estimate, at EUR 200,000-300,000. A first edition of Andy Warhol's 1¢ Life (1964) is estimated at EUR 100,000-150,000, and a typescript copy of Le Petit Prince (1943) could fetch EUR 40,000-60,000.

- Christie's New York will sell Printed & Manuscript Americana on 19 May, in 210 lots. The top-estimated lot is a very cool one, a copy of the first edition of the first publication relating to New Netherland (Breeden-Raedt aende Vereenichde Nederlandsche Provintien. Antwerp: Francoys van Duynen, 1649.) No copy has sold at auction since the Streeter Sale in 1967, and this one is estimated at $70,000-100,000. Among the other goodies in this sale are a copy of Peter Force's 1833 printing of the Declaration of Independence, estimated at $15,000-20,000. Also on the block will be a copy of Dryden and Lee's Oedipus (1735), from the library of Benjamin Franklin (estimated at $12,000-18,000).

- Also on 19 May, PBA Galleries will sell Americana, Maps and Atlases, in 376 lots. The top lot is an extensive archive of letters and clippings related to Sanford B. Dole and his family, estimated at $10,000-15,000.

- Sotheby's New York will host the third round of sales from the James S. Copley Library on 20 May. I've previewed this sale here.

This Week's Acquisitions

Another round of review copies:

- Prophecy by S.J. Parris (Doubleday, 2011). Publisher.

- The Story of Charlotte's Web: E. B. White's Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic by Michael Sims (Walker & Company, 2011). Publisher.

- Indigo: In Search of the Color That Seduced the World by Catherine E. McKinley (Bloomsbury, 2011). Publisher.

Early Librarian Libraries Database Desiderata

So say, just hypothetically (hrm, hrm) that there were to be a searchable/browsable database of early (pre-1825) American private libraries (in effect taking some of the data collected here and presenting it in a more robust way, including unitemized libraries, proposed libraries &c., all in one place).

What info would you like to see included? What ways would you like to be able to search, sort, and/or browse the data? (I'm intentionally leaving this open-ended instead of laying out what I've got so far in order to get the widest range of responses and thoughts). Drop me an email, or a comment here. Would very much appreciate your suggestions and thoughts.

Links & Reviews

- Ian Kahn headed to Paris this weekend for the Antiquarian Book Fair there, and is filing dispatches about books, touring, and some mouth-watering food!

- Adrian Johns' talk "The Promise and Peril of Universal Libraries", delivered at the 2011 California International Book Fair, is now available online via the ABAA website.

- The May AEMonthly is up, featuring pieces on a few upcoming auctions, &c.

- A composer/law student has created the Internet Music Score Library Project, which includes more than 100,000 scores to date.

- Philip White has a short piece, "A Bibliovore's Dilemma," on The Historical Society blog.

- Arthur Phillips talks about The Tragedy of Arthur on this week's NYTimes Book Review podcast.

- A column in the Missourian makes the point that microfilm is still a better preservation method than digitization ...

- Alejandro Lopez de Haro writes for the Columbia News Service about how rare books and the rare book market will likely remain vibrant, even in the age of the e-book.

- The NYTimes Diner's Journal blog covered the NYPL's menu-crowdsourcing effort this week.

- An interesting blog, NYPL Librarians, offers short biographical sketches of New York Public Library branch librarians, 1901-1950.

- The Guardian posts a gallery of bookplates from the BL's collection.

Reviews

- Arthur Phillips' The Tragedy of Arthur; reviews by Carlo Wolff in the Boston Globe and Stephen Greenblatt in the NYTimes.

- Gary Gallagher's The Union War; review by Eric Foner in the NYTimes.

- Geraldine Brooks' Caleb's Crossing; review by Sam Sacks in the WSJ.

- William Deresiewicz' A Jane Austen Education; review by William Pritchard in the Boston Globe.

- Maya Jasanoff's Liberty's Exiles; review by Thomas Bender in the NYTimes.

This Week's Acquisitions

Just two review copies this week (and due to the impending move, the flow's going to need to start going in the opposite direction now!):

- Witches of East End by Melissa de la Cruz (Hyperion, 2011). Publisher.

- The Devil's Mask by Christopher Wakling (Faber and Faber, 2011). Publisher.

Auction Preview: Copley at Sotheby's

The final round of the sale of the James S. Copley Library will be held at Sotheby's New York on 20 May, in 252 lots.

A major highlight will be John Lansing's notebooks from the Constitutional Convention, covering 25 May through 10 July, 1787. These are estimated at $600,000-900,000. See the full description here [PDF].

An impressive archive of Dwight Eisenhower letters to his wife Mamie, totaling 240 pages, is estimated at $400,000-600,000. A complete copy of the first book edition of The Federalist (New York: 1788) in contemporary boards, could fetch $200,000-300,000. Several other significant archives will be offered: a collection of materials related to John Charles Frémont is estimated at $100,000-150,000, while documents about the 1865 Hampton Roads peace conference could bring $80,000-120,000. Letters and documents about the assassination of President Garfield and the trial of Charles Guiteau are estimated at $50,000-80,000.

Three major single letters for sale include a 21 July 1788 George Washington letter to Nathaniel Gorham celebrating the ratification of the Constitution (est. $80,000-120,000); a letter from Abraham Lincoln to the House of Representatives from May 1864 (being a transcription in his hand of a letter sent to Montgomery Blair on 2 November 1863), estimated at $70,000-100,000; and an August 1808 letter from Thomas Jefferson to NH governor John Langdon (est. $60,000-90,000).

Links & Reviews

First, a quick note, to partially explain the fewer posts than usual lately: there's much going on, I've been busier than I usually am (and I'm usually pretty busy), and on top of all that, we're thinking about moving up to Portland (ME), so my brain has gotten well filled with the completely draining madness of apartment-hunting (which is hard enough as it is, and harder when you have accumulated as many books as I have). So bear with me - I'm sure things will settle down eventually ...

- The NYPL launched a neat new crowd-sourcing project this week, What's on the Menu? Folks can choose a menu and easily transcribe the dishes listed there (so far, more than 50,000 dishes have been transcribed). I did a few menus myself - it's rather addictive, quite fun, and entirely useful. Good stuff.

- Writing in the Chronicle, Robert Darnton offers "5 Myths about the 'Information Age'"

- Ben Ehrenreich's LA Review of Books piece "The Death of the Book" is well worth a read.

- Sarah Werner posts a fantastic binding mystery for us: a copy of John Smith's 1624 Generall historie with what appears to be George Villiers' family arms stamped atop those of James I.

- Swann posts top lots from their 22 April autograph sale.

- Happening this week at Brandeis: Steven Whitfield and Michael Gilmore will discuss the manuscript of Heller's Catch-22, donated to Brandeis by Heller himself. Details here.

- Rick Ring notes the arrival at Trinity's Watkinson Library of a special display case for their copy of Audubon's Birds of America. Having been at Union when the custom-made cases for that copy arrived, I can certainly vouch for the size of the things!

- The British Library has purchased the email archive of author Wendy Cope, paying £32,000 for some 40,000 emails.

- Jill Lepore writes in today's NYTimes about Ben Franklin's sister Jane Mecom, calling her story "a reminder that, especially for women, escaping poverty has always depended on the opportunity for an education and the ability to control the size of their families."

- Paul Collins pens another letter to the editors of the OED, and tweets about a 1956 plan for heating homes through the wallpaper.

Reviews

- Arthur Phillips's The Tragedy of Arthur; review by Michael Dirda in the WaPo. By far the best book review I've read in a long time.

- Eleanor Brown's The Weird Sisters; review by Tom DeHaven in the NYTimes.

- Wendy McClure's The Wilder Life; review by Jonathan Yardley in the WaPo.

- Simon Schama's Scribble, Scribble, Scribble; review by Phillip Lopate in the NYTimes.

- Sarah Vowell's Unfamiliar Fishes; review by Nicole Cammorata in the Boston Globe.

- Adams Goodheart's The Civil War Awakening; review by Debby Applegate in the NYTimes.

This Week's Acquisitions

New this week:

- Reporting at Wit's End: Tales from The New Yorker by St. Clair McKelway (Bloomsbury, 2010). Brookline Booksmith.

- Confessions of a Young Novelist by Umberto Eco (Harvard University Press, 2011). Amazon.

- A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House by Danny Heitman (LSU Press, 2008). Amazon.

- The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster's Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture by Joshua Kendall (Putnam, 2011). Amazon.

- The Other British Isles: A History of Shetland, Orkney, the Hebrides, Isle of Man, Anglesey, Scilly, Isle of Wight and the Channel Islands by David W. Moore (McFarland, 2011). Publisher.

- The King's Friends: The Composition and Motives of the American Loyalist Claimants by Wallace Brown (Brown University Press, 1965).

Auction Report: Doyle

Doyle New York's Books, Photographs and Prints sale was held yesterday, in 506 lots. The big seller, and a surprise one, was a manuscript music album compiled by Arnold Wehner, Director of Music at the University of Gottingen (1846-1855). Presale estimates pegged it at $8,000-12,000, but it was hammered down for $158,500!

Several top-notch items from the library of Ezra Pound's son Omar Shakespear Pound also did very well: a copy of A Draft of the Cantos 17-27 (London: John Rodker, 1928) printed on vellum and accompanied by a collection of proof sheets sold for $59,375, while a copy of A Draft of XVI Cantos (Paris, 1925) inscribed by Pound to his son made $27,500 and a signed copy of A Lume Spento (Venice, 1908) fetched $28,125.

Full results available here.

Links & Reviews

Housekeeping note: Thanks to a timely reminder, I've cleared out the list of links on the right sidebar, more than a few of which had gone kaput since the last time I went through them. There were some there that still contain interesting posts even though they're not being updated currently; I made a note of those as well. And I added a few new links that I've subscribed to in my Google Reader but which had not been listed on the sidebar.

- Exile Bibliophile found a particularly cool eBay lot this week: a horse-drawn library wagon! Anybody got a spare $15K?

- A fascinating guest post at Anchora this week on some manuscript notes in a copy of Thomas Lupton's A Thousand Notable Things.

- Construction is slated to begin this week on a new version of the Boston Tea Party museum.

- Ground was broken at Mount Vernon this week for the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington.

- The UK government abandoned plans to compel newspaper publishers to archive paywalled content with the country's main libraries.

- Ken Sanders was surprised recently when a man brought a 1494 Nuremberg Chronicle into a local appraisal event.

- LSU received a donation of some 94 letters written by Baton Rouge planter Armand du Plantier and his family to other family members in France. The letters date from 1777-1844.

- Jennifer Howard reported in the Chronicle about a scholar's discovery of a cache of documents in the National Archives penned by Walt Whitman during his time as a federal clerk.

- Rebecca Rego Barry reviews Brian Cassidy's latest catalog [PDF], which you certainly should read through if you have a chance - there's some great items in there!

- Check out the Interactive Album of Medieval Paleography - very nifty! [via @wynkenhimself]

- The Penn Libraries have received a major gift of some 280 medieval and renaissance manuscripts from Lawrence and Barbara Schoenburg; a Schoenburg Institute for Manuscript Studies will be established to highlight the collection.

- In case you missed it, the Berkleyside obituary for Serendipity Books' Peter Howard is a must-read.

Reviews

- Joshua Kendall's The Forgotten Founding Father; review by Barton Swaim in the WSJ.

- Gary Gallagher's The Union War; review by Jonathan Yardley in the WaPo.

- John Pollack's The Pun Also Rises; review by P.J. O'Rourke in the NYTimes.

- Andrea Wulf's Founding Gardeners; review by Lauren Winner in the WaPo.

This Week's Acquisitions

The new pile:

- Lost States: True Stories of Texlahoma, Transylvania, and Other States That Never Made It by Michael J. Trinklein (Quirk Books, 2010). B&N.

- On Rare Birds by Anita Albus (Lyons Press, 2011). B&N.

- Sir Walter Ralegh's Library by Walter Oakeshott (Bibliographical Society, 1968). William & Nina Matheson Books, Inc.

- "Well Acquainted with Books": The Founding Framers of 1787. With James Madison's List of Books for Congress by Robert Allen Rutland (Library of Congress, 1987). Matheson Books.

- Readers & Libraries: Toward a History of Libraries and Culture in America by Kenneth E. Carpenter (Library of Congress, 1996). Matheson Books.

- The 1764 catalogue of the Redwood Library Company at Newport, Rhode Island (Yale University Press, 1965). Matheson Books.

- The first four volumes in George R.R. Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire" series, so I can re-read before the fifth volume comes out. Amazon.

- Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2011). Amazon.

Book Review: "The Dewey Decimal System"

Before I even get into my review of Nathan Larson's The Dewey Decimal System (Akashic Press, 2011), let me just simply point out that if you are planning to read it because you think it has something to do with books, or libraries, it doesn't. The main character happens to live in the abandoned main branch of the New York Public Library, for which he has earned the nickname "Dewey Decimal." That's the only connection.

Now that that disclaimer is out of the way, let's get to the book. Our setting is a New York of the near future, but after a series of terrorist attacks have led to the near-abandonment of the city and its takeover by a mix of criminals, government agents, and petty thugs. Dewey Decimal, sometime "fixer" for the D.A., gets orders to rub out a union boss. Naturally, things get complicated, and Dewey finds himself drawn into an increasingly-dangerous plot peopled with war criminals, gun-toting muscle, and one alluring woman who's not at all what she seems.

Quick, dirty, and dark, this one. Dewey's an interesting character, well drawn (and the way Larson has him narrate the book in "real time" adds a certain urgency to the book that keeps it moving very nicely). It reminded me of Jeff Vandermeer's works, and I suspect we'll be seeing more of Mr. Decimal in the future.

Auction Report: Heritage, Sothebys, & Swann

Swann held a Fine Books and Manuscripts sale on 7 April, in 136 lots, of which all but 25 found buyers. As expected, the top lot here was indeed the deluxe copy of the Golden Cockerel Press Gospels, one of twelve copies printed on vellum and this copy inscribed by Eric Gill to Virginia Woolf. The hammer price of $132,000 nearly doubled the presale estimates of $60,000-75,000.

At Swann's 11 April Early Printed Books, including Armenian Books sale, all but 28 of the 273 lots were sold; the top lot was a copy of John Pine's The Tapestry Hangings of the House of Lords, representing the several Engagements between the English and Spanish Fleets in the memorable year MDLXXXVIII (1739), which made $16,800. The 1621 Armenian manuscript of the Gospels did not sell.

The Heritage manuscript sale (7-9 April in New York) saw some big prices: an archive of letters between Dwight Eisenhower and his brother Edgar sold for $56,762; a Thomas Jefferson letter to his daughter Martha made $50,787; and a George Washington letter to Robert Morris fetched $35,850 (as did a TR letter in which he uses the line "speak softly and carry a big stick"). A small collection of J.D. Salinger letters sold for $33,460. Full results for this sale are here.

Heritage's rare books sale (also 7-9 April) saw a Kelmscott Chaucer sell for $44,812, a 1497 Missal fetched $41,825, and a set of Peter Force's American Archives made $26,290. A first American edition of Moby-Dick sold for $29,875. Full results here.

Sotheby's New York sold Original Illustration Art from the Collections of Kendra and Allan Daniel on 11 April, in 193 lots. Full results are here, and the sale total was $1,330,634. Jessie Willcox Smith's "How Doth the Little Busy Bee" was indeed the top lot, making $386,500 (slightly above the estimates).

Report from the Fair: NY ABAA 2011

Yesterday I had a good but much too short trip to New York for the 51st Annual New York Antiquarian Book Fair, held at the Park Avenue Armory. While there was much else going on, including a book auction at Heritage Auction Galleries and the "shadow show" downtown (more on this at the Fine Books blog), I decided I'd better focus on the main event since I had only about five hours on the ground in New York.

Having only been to the Boston ABAA fair before, it was interesting to compare the two shows. There were quite a few more European dealers in New York, including many Italian, French and German dealers we don't see in Boston every year (and who had some pretty amazing things in their booths, too). While it's only anecdotal, I think it very likely that the average price for an item at the New York fair was significantly higher than in Boston (a few dealers were guessing the total retail value of all the stock in the room; all agreed that it was well into the hundreds of millions).

There were wonderful and fascinating things, from a copy of the first recorded English book auction catalog (for the 1676 sale of clergyman Lazarus Seaman's library) to Thomas Jefferson's copy of William Neilson's Greek Exercises to a delightful faux-scholarly treatise on the human turd (from Brian Cassidy). A book from Roger Williams' library, some beautiful early American bindings ... great stuff all around.

It was also lovely to see old friends and meet some longtime correspondents for the first time, including Rebecca Rego Barry (editor of FB&C), as well as the magazine's publisher. Always nice to put faces to email addresses! And of course there was something of a Rare Book School reunion going on all around, since staff, students and faculty were wonderfully (and strongly) represented on the fair floor.

For more on the fair, see the dispatches from Ian Kahn of Lux Mentis, who may be voiceless and broken-toed, but remains utterly indomitable; and Rebecca Rego Barry's reports on the Fine Books Blog. Next year, I'm going to make sure I can make a weekend of it and do more while I'm in town; if you can make it too, please do! It's a wonderful way to meet dealers, see and handle some amazing books, and spend time with like-minded biblio-folks.

Links & Reviews

- The April Fine Books Notes is out!

- From Adam Hooks at Anchora, "Breaking Shakespeare."

- Matthew Battles will speak on "A Brief History of the Spectre of the Internet and the Death of Writing," on 20 April at Harvard's Geological Lecture Hall. Info here.

- Some exciting news from Boston this week: a replica 18th-century printing office will be opening on 15 April, adjacent to Old North Church.

- Writing for The Millions, Rebecca Rego Barry comments on the tenth anniversary of Nicholson Baker's Double Fold.

- There's now an iPad app for Reif Larsen's The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet.

- A single page from a 16th-century Shanameh sold for £7.4m this week at Sotheby's, setting a new record for an Islamic manuscript.

- In The New Yorker, Laura Miller profiles George R.R. Martin.

- John Chalmers noted this morning on ExLibris-L that the first copyright statute took effect 300 years ago today.

- Borders presented a recovery plan to creditors this week, but the NYTimes reports that publishers described the blueprint as "unrealistic."

- Deborah Harkness talks to the LATimes about the inspiration for her new novel A Discovery of Witches.

- A significant collection of Washingtoniana will be going on the auction block (some sold this weekend in New York, more to sell in late May at Heritage in Dallas). Also, the George Washington Papers team is now on Twitter, @PapersofGW.

- Craig Fehrman writes in the Boston Globe about the impact of the Civil War on American literature.

Reviews

- Richard Buel, Jr.'s Joel Barlow; review by Sam Hasselby in The Guardian.

- Louis Bayard's The School of Night; review by Kathy Blumenstock in the WaPo.

This Week's Acquisitions

Here's what arrived this week. And now, I'm off to NYC for the day, to see the fair!

- The Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery by Wendy Moore (Broadway, 2006). Borders.

- Kingdom of Ants: José Celestino Mutis and the Dawn of Natural History in the New World by Edward O. Wilson and José M. Gómez Durán (Johns Hopkins University Prss, 2010). Borders.

- Death of a Pirate: British Radio and the Making of the Information Age by Adrian Johns (W.W. Norton, 2010). Borders.

- Miss New India by Bharati Mukherjee (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011). Publisher.

- Edward Bancroft: Scientist, Author, Spy by Thomas J. Schaeper (Yale University Press, 2011). Publisher.

Book Review: "Unfamiliar Fishes"

Sarah Vowell's newest is Unfamiliar Fishes (Riverhead, 2011), in which she continues her practice of combining history, travelogue, and a healthy dose of snark. Here those ingredients are blended well to create a funny, fascinating, and always enjoyable history of Hawaii from the time of the arrival of the first American missionaries in 1820 to the islands' annexation by the United States in 1898.

Vowell recounts her own experiences visiting natural and historical sites in Hawaii, researching in the archives there, meeting and speaking with descendants of early missionaries and native Hawaiians. Her enthusiasm and interest in the subject are contagious, and as usual she's able to find the quirky in everything. It helps that the cast of characters here includes the ambitious and hardy New England missionary families who settled in Hawaii to convert the islanders, their commercialized descendants who ended up overthrowing the monarchy in a coup, and (most fascinatingly) the Hawaiians themselves.

While the discussions of the machinations which led to the annexation of Hawaii made for great reading, I found myself most drawn to Vowell's focus on the arrival of printing in Hawaii, and the fairly fast acceptance of the written Hawaiian language (developed by the missionaries and promoted by the Hawaiian royal family). She quotes a Hawaiian historian as noting that between 1822 and 1863, the islands went from having no written language to having "seventy-five percent of all Hawaiians learning to read and write" (p. 101).

I like how Vowell's able to mix scholarship and satire, and I am also delighted that she's provided a list of recommended titles for those who want to dig more deeply into Hawaii's past after reading Unfamiliar Fishes. There's certainly much worth digging into.

Auction Report: Swann & Christies

Swann sold Printed and Manuscript Americana on 31 March, in 362 lots. Full results are available here. The archive of 16 documents by and related to Jonathan Edwards was the top seller, at $50,400.

At the Christie's London Travel, Science and Natural History sale on 6 April, 176 of 213 lots sold, for a total of £772,425. The top seller was a pair of 1820s library globes, which made £37,250. The ~1690 French microscope fetched £16,250. Among the books, Jacques Le Hay's work on Turkish dress was hammered down at £18,750; Maarten Houttuyn's 1791-95 treatise on woods made £8,125; and Lyell's Principles of Geology sold for £6,000.

Links & Reviews

- Coming up this week on the Fine Books Blog, previews of the book fairs and auctions coming up in New York City next weekend, including the ABAA's New York Antiquarian Book Fair. Very excited to actually be going to the NYC fair this year for the first time!

- Jennifer Howard's at the ACRL meeting in Philadelphia, and reports in on discussions there about the Google Books Settlement, orphan works, and associated topics. Ursula LeGuin posted some thoughts on GBS, copyright and the differences between "out of print" and "out of copyright" on her blog this week, and the NYTimes editorial board weighed in as well. Another good piece on this appeared this week from Ivy Anderson. Robert Darnton posted on the NYRB blog six reasons why the settlement failed and offers some possible ways forward.

- From Jerry Morris, the stories behind two hurt books and their previous owners.

- Another reminder, from David Barnett in the Guardian, of how not to respond to a negative review of your book.

- In Slate, Nathan Heller asks why Simon Winchester's books are so popular.

- A rare book of cloth samples collected by Captain Cook has been sold at auction in Devon, making a whopping £130,000.

- From Laura at The Cataloguer's Desk, an excellent primer on why people collect first editions.

- Ralph Luker has a good roundup of links related to the William Cronon email story, or as he calls it, L'Affaire Cronon.

- Typefoundry looks at Claude Garamont and his typefaces (currently known as Garamond).

- J.L. Bell examines Michiko Kakutani's review of Edward Lengel's Inventing George Washington

- Over at Nigel Beale, an audio interview with Rare Book School Director Michael Suarez on the importance of open-shop antiquarian bookstores.

Reviews

- Philipp Blom's Wicked Company; review by Suzi Feay in the Independent.

- Sarah Vowell's Unfamiliar Fishes; reviews by Kaui Hart Hemmings in the NYTimes and Allegra Goodman in the WaPo.

- Jonathan Steinberg's Bismarck: A Life; review by Henry Kissinger in the NYTimes.

This Week's Acquisitions

Here's what arrived this week:

- Other People's Books: Association Copies and the Stories They Tell (Caxton Club/Oak Knoll, 2011). Oak Knoll.

- The Sojourn by Andrew Krivak (Bellevue Literary Press, 2011). Publisher.

- The Bibliographical Society of America, 1904-79: A Retrospective Collection (BSA/UVa, 1980). Publisher.

Scholar Discovers Lost Longfellow Translation

It's been languishing on library shelves for more than half a century and was thought lost to scholarship, but now a graduate student has stumbled upon Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's manuscript translation of Dante's Divina Commedia, a find sure to result in world-wide media coverage, along with a publication deal for the scholar.

"I just filled out a form, and they brought it right to my table," said Robert Watkins, a doctoral candidate at St. Mary's University writing his dissertation on 19th-century American translations of Italian verse. "It was an unbelievable feeling, to have right in front of me pages not seen by anyone since Longfellow wrote on them!"

Longfellow's translation of Dante's masterpiece, the first by an American, was published in 1867 and is still in print.

Librarians at Harvard University's Houghton Library were understandably thrilled at Watkins' find. "We're all very proud of Mr. Watkins for this amazing discovery," said James Underhill, curator of modern literary manuscripts, reached via email. "We know just how difficult our online catalog can be for researchers," he explained, noting that searching by author sometimes even requires that the name be entered with the last name first, followed by the first name.

The Longfellow manuscript has been at Houghton since 1954, when the Longfellow House Trust placed it on deposit with the library along with the rest of Longfellow's papers. "We've exhibited it several times, parts of the translation have been digitized and are available online, and of course it's listed in the finding guide to the collection," Underhill said. "But until Mr. Watkins called for it last week, obviously we had no idea that it was important."

Watkins says that while he's in Boston he plans to visit the Boston Public Library. "I read somewhere that they might have a book that John Adams wrote in," he said. "Wouldn't it be amazing to find that?!"