I went down to Longfellow Books on Friday afternoon just to say hi to the staff and buy some books. The store was buzzing and I was amazed at how much progress had been made in just a couple days to get things back up and running. The booksellers were exhausted, but said all the support and energy from the community was keeping them going. The Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance has launched a three-pronged effort to help with recovery, and if you want to buy a few books from Longfellow you can order through their website or by phone.
- A new blog you should be following: Function Follows Form, by David J. Gary, who's been doing great work on Rufus King's library and other book history-related things. Some of the early posts take a close look at some aspects of King's library space, the travels of the library over the years, &c.
- The Private Libraries in Renaissance England database hosted by the Folger Library is newly updated and enlarged with material from the forthcoming eighth volume in the printed series.
- Over at The Cataloguer's Desk, looking back on forty-five years of Peter Harrington catalogues.
- A great new acquisition at Princeton highlighted in their Rare Books blog: a 1785 East India Company tea catalogue.
- Winterthur has acquired the John and Carolyn Grossman collection of printed ephemera, comprising some 250,000 items. The collection had been on deposit at Winterthur since 2008.
- David Levy has some interesting new information on a chess manuscript once believed to be in the hand of Oliver Goldsmith.
- Also from Princeton's Notabilia blog, the printed book label of the Wisbech Literary Society, and the very lovely 1694 printed book label of Margaret Harrington.
- On the JCB Books blog, a great new acquisition of a 1609 Mexican imprint with a gorgeous binding, one of the earliest woodcut illustrations produced in North America, and a neat overall story.
- A typewritten Gandhi letter sold for £115,000 at an auction in Shropshire this week.
- An interesting discovery this week pointed out by Book Patrol: Northern Kentucky University is selling off a collection of rare books appraised at $24,000 on the auction site GovDeals.
- In the NYTimes' Disunion blog, Louis Masur explores the reception of Les Miserables during the American Civil War.
- The AAUP has filed an amicus brief in the GSU e-reserves case, siding with the publishers.
- Oxford and Cambridge have launched a joint fundraising campaign to purchase a portion of the Hebrew manuscript trove from the Cairo Genizah. The 1,700 manuscript fragments in the "Lewis-Gibson" collection are currently held by Westminster College, and may be sold off and dispersed if the Oxbridge effort proves unsuccessful.
- Over at The Junto, Sara Georgini interviews Thomas Lannon, an NYPL curator who's worked on the Emmet Collection.
Reviews
- Todd Andrlik's Reporting the Revolutionary War; review by Michael Hattem at The Junto.
- John Burt's Lincoln's Tragic Pragmatism; reviews by Steven B. Smith in the NYTimes and Michael Dirda in the Washington Post.
- Paula Byrne's The Real Jane Austen; review by Maxwell Carter in the NYTimes.
- Daniel Stashower's The Hour of Peril; review by Del Quentin Wilber in the Washington Post.
- Jim Crace's The Harvest; review by David Ulin in the LATimes.
