Judges Declines to Increase Terms for Transy Four

In February, a three-judge panel of the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the goons who stole rare books from the Transylvania University (and assaulted the rare books librarian there) - we know them as the Transy Four - should have had some time added to their sentences since the trial court failed to factor certain elements of the crime into its sentence. They sent the case back to the trial judge, Jennifer Coffman, for further consideration.

The Lexington Herald-Leader reports this afternoon that Coffman has chosen to ignore the judgment of the Court of Appeals, saying "she would have imposed the same sentence even if she had considered the tougher sentencing guidelines."

Not exactly a surprise, but considering the original appeal was launched by the Four themselves in a bid to get less jail time, an additional bit would have been awfully appropriate.

Unpublished Poe Manuscript Surfaces

A recently-discovered Poe manuscript poem will be sold at Bloomsbury New York's 10 December sale of Important Books and Manuscripts, according to an auction house press release. An early version of Poe's poem "The Sleeper," this unpublished variant is titled "Irene," and is believed to be the "earliest extant version of a poem that Poe considered even better than 'The Raven.'"

Bloomsbury's press release goes on to note "The poem is an extraordinary discovery and contains ... one long stanza and other textual variants not found in the published versions. The provenance of this poem is impeccable and truly extraordinary."Poe copied this poem into the autograph album of a "Richmond belle," in 1830. [Kind of a creepy poem for that particular purpose, but hey, it's Poe].

The poem will go on the block with an estimate of $100,000-200,000. The Bloomsbury catalog with further details is not yet online, but I'll post a link to that when it's available.

Archimedes Palimpsest Dataset Released

The team working on the Archimedes Palimpsest has released a massive dataset, "weaving registered images in many wavebands of light with XML transcriptions of the Archimedes and Hyperides texts that are spatially mapped to those images." There's a full introduction to the digital project here (with video). Without a user interface it's a little tricky to navigate at the moment, but the group has made the image files and data available for anyone to work with through a Creative Commons license, so hopefully some enterprising soul will build a handy browse function.

Google, Publishers Reach Agreement

More than three years of litigation ended yesterday when Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers announced they had reached a settlement over the Google Books Project. According to Publishers Weekly, "As part of the $125 million settlement, Google will pay $45 million to settle the class action lawsuit brought by the Authors Guild. Authors whose books have already been scanned will receive at least $60 per work. Another $34.5 million will go toward the creation of a Book Rights Registry that will be responsible for building a database of rightsholders information and for disbursing all money generated through the use of books in Google Products and Services. (The remaining $45.5 million will go to legal and attorney fees)."

Lots of bits and pieces to digest here, but fundamentally the settlement seems to have hit the right notes. A book copyright registry is a very important step forward.

Approval of the settlement by a federal judge isn't expected before the middle of 2009.

Quite a few links about this story to pass along: Publishers Weekly, New York Times, The Guardian, librarian.net, Off the Shelf, Dan Cohen, settlement text and Authors Guild press releases, Google Books settlement page, Association of American Publishers settlement page, Settlement FAQ (surprisingly detailed).

Update: Beard Fired from ALPLM Post

After yesterday's news of his three shoplifting arrests, Richard Beard has been sacked from his position as head of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, the Chicago Sun-Times reports tonight. The Tribune has more, noting that Beard was notified of his firing over the phone.

"Jan Grimes, director of the Historic Preservation Agency, will run the Lincoln museum and library temporarily. In addition, former Historic Preservation Director Robert Coomer will fill in for Beard at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Foundation, the not-for-profit group that raises money to support the library."

Scott Lodges Legal Complaint Against Durham

Well here's a twist I didn't see coming: just days after the First Folio was returned to the UK, Raymond Scott (who took the stolen book to D.C. this summer) has filed suit to have the book returned to him. After filing the claim yesterday, Scott attempted to serve the papers on Durham vice-chancellor Christopher Higgins in person; Higgins was not available (check out the picture of Scott making his trek to the campus).

Scott told the Northern Echo "I want recovery of what I refer to as the Cuban copy of Mr Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories and Tragedies London 1623, delivered by me to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC. It is claimed by Durham University to be their copy, which was stolen in 1998. Experts appointed by me require access to the book to compare and contrast the Cuban with known records of the Durham copy. This is something we have been denied and this is the first stage in attempting to get the book returned to me. I am confident that there are sufficient differences in the two books so that, on the balance of probabilities, it will be decided that the book is not the one that was stolen in 1998."

Durham University officials said that the paperwork regarding Scott's legal claim had not yet been received as of last night, and that they would deal with any such documents in the appropriate manner. Once the legal papers are received, Higgins would have two weeks to respond. Durham police told reporters "As far as we are concerned, the folio believed to have been stolen from Durham University ten years ago was brought from America to the North-East at the weekend. It remains under lock and key and continues to be the subject of a criminal investigation."

Bizarre.

[h/t Shelf:Life]

Copy of Rare Emerson Broadside Found

In their latest catalog, M & S Rare Books of Providence, RI have a remarkable item: one of just (now) five known copies of a broadsheet edition on satin of Ralph Waldo Emerson's first separate work, his "Letter to the Second Church and Society" (1832). The other copies are at Harvard's Houghton Library (on deposit for the R.W. Emerson Memorial Association), the University of Florida, First and Second Church Unitarian-Universalist in Boston, and the Boston Athenaeum.

M & S' description of the broadside notes "Perhaps the Boston Athenaeum copy was in the trade prior to 1954 [when it was given to the library], but ours might be the only copy ever offered for sale." Three hundred copies of a pamphlet version of this letter were printed (of which just a handful survive), but it is not known how many copies of this broadside edition ever existed. The quote Emerson bibliographer Joel Myerson from his bibliographic entry on the U of FL's copy (from the Parkman Dexter Howe collection): "presumably the broadsides were printed and sent with the compliments of the printer, and were few in number."

Stephen H. Wakeman, a legendary collector of 19th century American writers, said of this text (which he had in pamphlet form) "In some respects, it is the most important document [Emerson] ever penned, it being the parting of the ways, - his valedictory - to his congregation on deciding to relinquish the Ministry and devote himself to other pursuits. It transcends all of his other writings in personal interest, and its extreme rarity makes it one of the most desirable items in this collection."

Not surprisingly, the price tag matches the extreme scarcity of the piece: $75,000. And yet, for what this is, even that seems a bargain.

Lincoln Museum Director Arrested for Shoplifting

Richard Beard, 61, the director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, IL, has been placed on paid administrative leave after news of three shoplifting arrests came to light late in August. Beard is charged with the theft of $300 worth of neckties from a White Oaks mall Macy's in February of 2007, plus the thefts of box sets of "Seinfeld" DVDs from Target in November 2007 and "House" DVDs from the same Target store in August of this year.

Beard has not yet been charged for the November thefts, but his trial for the August thefts is scheduled for 26 November. The earlier theft from Macy's resulted in Beard's receiving "court supervision" and a $200 fine.

Before becoming director of the ALPLM in late 2006, Beard worked at the New-York Historical Society and the Atlanta History Center.

Auction Report: Upcoming

A few book auctions are on the horizon:

- On 28 October, Swann Galleries will sell the Magic Collection of a Gentleman (300 lots).

- Bloomsbury NY will sell Russian Literature and Art (251 lots) on 29 October; Natural History, including the Trust of Lyman Abbott Collection (135 lots) on 11 November (this includes a first octavo of Audubon's Birds); and the Jay T. Snider Collection, featuring the History of Philadelphia and Important Americana (375 lots) on 19 November.

- Bloomsbury London will sell Important Manuscripts, Printed Books, & Original Artwork (251 lots) on 30 October.

- PBA Galleries will sell Americana, Travel & Exploration, and Maps on 6 November (373 lots) and the Medical and Science Library of Gerald I. Sugarman, M.D. (228 lots) on 20 November.

- Sotheby's London will hold a sale entitled Greece and the Levant: A Private Library (234 lots) on the morning of 13 November and a second sale, Natural History, Travel, Atlases & Maps (319 lots) on the afternoon and evening of the same day.

- Christie's London will hold a sale of Valuable Manuscripts and Printed Books (169 lots) on 12 November (lots of illuminated manuscripts in this one, very impressive) and a sale of Fine Books & Printed Manuscripts, Including Modern First Editions (331 lots) on 13 November.

- Skinner's Boston sale of books will be held on 15 November, but the catalog is not yet online.

Links & Reviews

Yesterday morning I presented a paper at the fall meeting of the New England Historical Association, as did J.L. Bell of Boston 1775 and several other friends and colleagues. Mine was an offshoot of the paper I worked on a year or so ago, about the provenance of several extant copies of John Eliot's Indian Bible. The conference was fun, and the papers I got to hear were excellent. I would have liked to hear more papers, but unfortunately was able to listen to just those on my panel and John's, since there were only two sessions with lots of simultaneous panels.

- Over at Boston 1775, a look at the early answers to the question of just what it is that the "V.P. does every day."

- If you haven't already made it a regular stop, Ed & Edgar should be added to your daily rotation. Ed's been and will continue to be very busy documenting his travels with Poe and his advocacy for Philadelphia's Poe Primacy. Also on the Poe front, Rick Ring pointed out that some Poe manuscripts sold at auction this week.

- Book Patrol passes along an essay by publisher David Godine on his principles of publishing.

- Playwright Alan Bennett has donated his archive to the Bodleian Library at Oxford University.

Reviews

- In the Washington Post, Michael Dirda reviews Timothy Ryback's Hitler's Private Library.

- Michael Kenney reviews Sarah Vowell's The Wordy Shipmates for the Boston Globe. Heller McAlpin reviews Vowell's book for the Christian Science Monitor.

- The two recent books about Han van Meegeren (The Forger's Spell and The Man Who Made Vermeers) are reviewed by Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker.

Book Review: "Once Again to Zelda"

Marlene Wagman-Geller's Once Again to Zelda: The Stories Behind Literature's Most Intriguing Dedications (Perigree/Penguin, 2008) is a series of forty-nine short essays (most under five pages or so) providing "the rest of the story" about modern book dedications (I say modern because she begins with Mary Shelley's dedication in Frankenstein, and only the first seven of the essays pertain to books published in the 19th century, while nine cover books published in the first few years of the current century).

It's an interesting concept, but since this is obviously a selection of dedications, it's easy to quibble with the choices the author chose. Many of those covered are hardly intriguing in any meaningful sense of the term (some are, but the vast majority of dedications to spouses and lovers are fairly conventional, even if the relationships themselves might have been anything but).

While this book could have stood for another round of editing, for very quick, rather formulaic introductions to various works of literature and those to whom they're dedicated, it will do fine (particularly if your interests run to modern literature). If you are expecting more, you may be disappointed.

This Week's Acquisitions

Just a few new arrivals this week:

- Son of a Witch by Gregory Maguire (Harper Paperbacks, 2006). Brookline Booksmith. Since Maguire's new one about the Lion looks good, I thought I'd better catch up.

- Mirth of a Nation: The Best Contemporary Humor; edited by Michael J. Rosen (Harper, 2000). Harvard Bookstore.

- The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation. Volume II: The Kingdom on the Waves by M.T. Anderson (Candlewick Press, 2008). Harvard Bookstore. I've been looking forward to this one since reading the first volume earlier this year.

Book Review: "City of Saints and Madmen"

City of Saints and Madmen is Jeff VanderMeer's collection of novellas, essays, faux-bibliographies, and other miscellanea pertaining to the fantastical and bizarre city of Ambergris. Like no other city, real or imagined, Ambergris is a strange place, where mysterious mushroom-people lurk in the dark corners, where King Squid hold positions of great importance and composers' deaths lead to civil unrest.

This is a somewhat top-heavy collection of writings, with three longer novellas at the front followed by a case study (of a troubled author who's come to think the fictional city he created might actually be real) and a lengthy appendix of detritus (in the best sense of the word): letters, pamphlets, short stories, glossaries, and other pieces. It's a difficult book to get a reading rhythm going in, as it moves along rather in fits and starts. VanderMeer's writings are, at times, utterly enthralling, although at other times I found the prose plodding and rather dull.

At the very least, every page of this book is imaginative and intriguing. VanderMeer has written into being a richly-textured place that makes for fascinating reading, even if it doesn't exactly lend itself well to thoughts of vacationing there.

Durham's First Folio Returned to UK

The Shakespeare First Folio stolen from Durham University in 1998 and found last July when Raymond Scott took it to the Folger for authentication, is back home in Durham, British media report. The book was flown to England this morning, where university librarians and police detectives were waiting to receive it. Police detective Mick Callan told reporters "The book will now be held in secure and controlled conditions while our inquiries into this matter continue." Scott remains free on bail.

On Leo Lemay

J.A. Leo Lemay, Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Professor of English at the University of Delaware, died on 15 October. He was 73. Lemay was a versatile author, whose books included Robert Bolling Woos Anne Miller, The American Dream of Captain John Smith, Did Pocahontas Save Captain John Smith?, "New England's Annoyances": America's First Folk Song, A Calendar of American Poetry in the Colonial Newspapers and Magazines and in the Major English Magazines Through 1765, Men of Letters in Colonial Maryland, and the first three of a projected seven volumes of a literary biography of Benjamin Franklin (the third volume of which was published earlier this month). He also edited the Library of America's great two-volume collection of Franklin's writings.

Even beyond the books, Lemay's Franklin website is well known as a tremendously useful resource about Franklin's life.

Lemay was a key figure in the development of the field of early American studies, and was very much involved with the creation of the excellent journal Early American Literature and the formation of the Society of Early Americanists.

The SEA has set up a page of testimonials by way of memorial to Professor Lemay, and the University of Delaware also has posted a memorial page.

Czar's Book Returned to Russia

An 1889 book from the library of Czar Alexander III has been returned to Russia after it appeared on a U.S. auction site, according to Russian media reports. The book - a catalog of the art collections in the Imperial Hermitage - went missing from the Gatchinsky Palace Museum during WWII. A ceremony was held today at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, where the Ambassador presented the book to Russian officials.

Ousted BPL Head Albany-Bound

Former Boston Public Library director Bernie Margolis has been appointed New York's state librarian, the Boston Globe reports today. Margolis was confirmed yesterday by the State Board of Regents.

Some New Historical Libraries

I've added some new Legacy Libraries to the list over the past couple of weeks, as we move forward with plans to really kick off a major new effort:

- Henry Lee (1691-1747), a Virginia planter. Henry was the brother of Virginia governor Thomas Lee (of Stratford) and the grandfather of Revolutionary War general "Light-Horse Harry" Lee. His wife, Mary Bland, was the daughter of Richard Bland and Elizabeth Randolph (a great-aunt of Thomas Jefferson). His small library is known from an inventory included with his will.

- Lady Jean Skipwith, (1748-1826), the most prolific female book collector in colonial Virginia (and quite possibly in all of America). The self-educated daughter of Hugh Miller and Jane Bolling Miller, Lady Jean married Sir Peyton Skipwith at age forty, but outlived him by more than two decades. Her comparatively large collection includes many novels, including important works of gothic literature. She also collected heavily in the areas of travel and history. Her collection is held partly by descendants, with significant portions at the Skipwith plantation, Prestwould, and at the College of William and Mary.

- Hans Peter Gyllembourg Koch (1844-1918), a Danish emigrant to America and collector of books pertaining to the American West and exploration. Koch was a founder of Bozeman, MT's first public library, and was active in the formation of Montana Historical Society and Montana State University.

Book Review: "Dry Storeroom No. 1"

I would not have expected any book titled Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum (Knopf, 2008) to send me into contortions of laughter. Maybe that's why I enjoyed it so well. In this volume, retired paleontologist (aka Tribolite Man) Richard Fortey takes us on an across-the-centuries, behind-the-galleries tour of London's Natural History Museum in a way that only a true insider could do. Fortey's affection and respect for the institution where he spent his career are in evidence from the first page to the last, but those feelings are, thankfully, augmented by a healthy scientific skepticism of the "official history" and a twinkly-eyed admiration for a good bit of gossip.

The reader first accompanies Fortey on a ramble through the museum's back channels, where we visit the various scientific departments and learn something of not only their functions but also of those who have performed the functions over the decades, true characters most. Fortey is almost never at a loss for an amusing aside about one famed scientist or another, from the fellow who catalogued bits of used string (by size, of course) and kept them in file boxes around his office to the curator who nearly bowled over the Director and King George VI while running to a water fountain in order to quench a burning pan of sausages he'd been clandestinely cooking over his bunsen burner. A riff on scientists who seemed to bear uncanny resemblances to their chosen subjects of study had me in stitches, as did several of Fortey's paragraph-ending one-liners and picture captions.

Fortey displays a remarkable ease with his subjects, writing as lucidly about his trilobites as about birds, minerals, skeletons, museum administration, and literature (he compares the Museum itself to Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, for example, and draws ably on other great literary figures from Poe to Dryden to T. S. Eliot).

For all its humor, Fortey's book is also a paean to the value of scientific research and museum scholarship, which he sees slipping away in these days of branding, financial strife and obsession with bells and whistles rather than the hard slog of careful research. He's quite right to sound that alarm, of course, and I hope his clarion call is heard loud and clear by those with the power to do something about it.

Every institution of a certain age has its share of past (and usually current) characters; and each one deserves a book like this to share them with the rest of us.

Book Review: "The Pale Blue Eye"

Louis Bayard's The Pale Blue Eye (HarperCollins, 2006) is a detective story much like Poe's own, but instead of being authored by Poe, this one features him as a major character. Cadets are being murdered at West Point, and their fellow-cadet Poe joins forces with a washed-up (but quite skilled) old constable (that would be one Gus Landor) brought in by Point commanders to solve the case before more cadets meet an early and quite grisly end.

Bayard's grasp of language, expertly displayed in Mr. Timothy and in his more recent The Black Tower, is put to excellent use here as well; he captures mid-19th century lingo quite nicely. The characters, while a bit boilerplate at times, are mostly well-drawn and believable. Bayard tries perhaps a bit too hard with his portrayal of Poe, which I found a bit too 'deep' at times.

The plot carries the characters along very well, with enough twists and turns to keep the reader guessing until the last pages. One of my criteria for declaring a mystery story good is if I haven't figured out the ending before I get there, and I wasn't even close with this one. Another of those criteria is that I don't roll my eyes at the final, unexpected plot twist, and I didn't have cause to do that this time either (the last twist of the knife is just too sad for any such response).

A good read. Poe would be proud.