Links & Reviews

- The Echoes from the Vault blog is beginning a series on Victorian cloth bindings.

- Ever wondered about the differences between "uncut," "unopened," and "untrimmed"? Erin Blake's got you covered at The Collation.

- The fall Book History Seminar at Yale, "Inevitabilities of the Book," is coming up on 9–10 September. Looks like a great lineup.

- Mary Sarah Bilder talked to Mark Cheatham for the SHEAR blog about her book Madison's Hand.

- Jane Raisch writes for the JHIBlog on "The Hellenism of Early Print."

- A manuscript account by Granville Sharp of an important 1781 slave ship massacre has been identified in the British Library.

- The New Haven Register reports on the impending reopening of the Beinecke Library.

- The William Blake Gallery will open in October in San Francisco.

- The Bookhunter on Safari posts about publisher W.J. Adams, "the almost wholly forgotten man behind the story of Bradshaw's Railway Guides."

- Phillip Lopate writes for the American Scholar about the process and pain of selling his papers to Yale.

- From John Schulman, "An Antiquarian's Guide to the Election."

- Charlotte Howsam's dissertation on medieval book fastenings is now available via medievalists.net.

- Lauren Young writes about the "library wars of the ancient world" for Atlas Obscura.

- In the New Yorker's "Daily Shouts," feature, Janet Manley highlights "Rare Books for sale, excellent condition."

- Penguin Classics is publishing a collection of ancient Egyptian writings in English for the first time.

- Keith Houston has a short feature for the BBC, "The mysterious ancient origins of the book."

Reviews

- John Dixon's The Enlightenment of Cadwallader Colden; review by Christopher Minty at The Junto.

- Forrest Leo's The Gentleman; review by Michael Dirda in the WaPo.

- Emma Smith's Shakespeare's First Folio; review by Jonathan Rose in the WSJ.

Links & Reviews

- George Eberhart writes for American Libraries about a panel at last week's IFLA congress on library theft and security.

- Brooke Palmieri has been appointed editor and Michael Russem designer of APHA's journal, Printing History. Look forward to seeing the fruits of their labors!

- A research team has confirmed that the Codex Selden, housed at the Bodleian Library, is a palimpsest, containing earlier characters beneath the 16th-century text. The before-and-after images here are pretty stunning. More.

- Wayne Wiegand has been named distinguished visiting scholar at the Library of Congress' John W. Kluge Center, to support his work on a book covering the history of American public school libraries.

- Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (Manuscripts) is now available. Congratulations to all those involved!

- Fiona McDonald writes for the BBC about several long-hidden libraries.

- John Fea talks to Jonathan Yeager about Yeager's new book Jonathan Edwards and Transatlantic Print Culture.

- Forthcoming from the Book Club of California, The Noblest Roman: A History of the Centaur Types of Bruce Rogers.

- Jason Rovito has been appointed Director of Fine Books and Manuscripts at Leslie Hindman Auctioneers.

- Hannah Stahl has the latest in a series of posts about imaginary creatures in maps for the Library of Congress' Worlds Revealed blog.

- Rutgers University has received an NEH grant to digitize some 100,000 pages of New Jersey newspapers published between 1836 and 1922 and not currently available in digital form.

- Barnes & Noble CEO Ronald Boire was sacked this week, after just a year on the job.

- Atlas Obscura highlights the NYPL's new storage facility beneath Bryant Park.

- John Lancaster posts for the Houghton Library blog about an important recent acquisition (a 1485 Aquinas) and his work to find the other volume from the set.

- In the LARB, Melissa Dinsman interviews Richard Grusin about digital humanities.

- Coming soon at Penn, an exhibition and publication, Reactions: Medieval/Modern, which "explores the many and varied ways that people have reacted to, and acted upon, manuscripts from the Middle Ages up to today."

- Emily Dourish gets the "Bright Young Librarians" treatment on the Fine Books blog.

- Richard Davies posts for the AbeBooks blog offering a cautionary tale about potentially valuable copies of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

- Virginia university librarians have sent a letter to the chair of the House Judiciary Committee urging caution about any potential changes to Sections 107 and 108 of the Copyright Act.

- Cameron Hunt McNabb writes for Slate on the origins of the ellipsis.

- Alexandra Walker posts for the Bodleian Library's blog about conservation work undertaken on a recent collection of Mabel Fitzgerald materials.

- Spanish facsimile publishing firm Siloe will produce 898 "exact replicas" of the Voynich manuscript, which will sell for more than £6,000 apiece. Note that Yale University Press will also be publishing a facsimile edition this year, accompanied by essays by Raymond Clemens and Deborah Harkness.

Reviews

- John Fea's The Bible Cause; review by D.G. Hart in the WSJ.

- Irina Reyn's The Imperial Wife; review by Shannon Reed in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Links & Reviews

- Rebecca Rego Barry writes for the Guardian about a bird book which once belonged to the "Birdman of Alcatraz" which will go on the auction block at Christie's in September (as part of their "Out of the Ordinary" sale, which always contains some fantastic things).

- María Palacio posts for the Jesuit Libraries Provenance Project about working with an 1836 manuscript library catalog of a Jesuit seminar in Missouri.

- A new report on digitizing orphan works is now available via Harvard's DASH portal.

- At meh.com, a history of intentionally blank pages, featuring Sarah Werner, Joe Howley, and others.

- The very long legal battle over Franz Kafka's manuscripts has ended, with Israel's supreme court ruling that Max Brod's heirs must turn over the manuscripts to the National Library of Israel.

- Last week I linked to a report that a box of rare comics had been stolen from the Tampa Bay Comic Con. The Tampa Bay Times updated this week that the dealer, Rick Whitelock, received a phone call on Monday from an anonymous man saying he had accidentally packed up the box with his materials from the show and would return them, but refusing to give his name or contact information. All's well that end's well, though: on Wednesday, the box arrived.

- Tom Kiser of Vivarium Books is profiled as part of the FB&C "Bright Young Booksellers" series.

- Peter Harrington staff have chosen their favorite items from the firm's Summer Catalogue.

- Paul Dingman posts at The Collation about how the transcriptions submitted as part of the Early Modern Manuscripts Online project will be aggregated and verified.

- The Harry Ransom Center is seeking a Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Curator of Early Printed Books and Manuscripts.

- Elaine Long posts on the Shakespeare's World blog about finding references to paper used in early modern cooking.

- Nearly 400 books donated to an English village after an American plane crashed there during WWII have been removed from the village library and destroyed.

Reviews

- Carols M. N. Eire's Reformations; reviewed by Michael Massing in the NYTimes.

- Winifred Gallagher's How the Post Office Shaped America; review by Emily Cataneo in the CSM.

- Richard Zacks' Chasing the Last Laugh; review by Debra Bruno in the WaPo.

Links & Reviews

- The August Rare Book Monthly is up: it includes a piece by Bruce McKinney asking several booksellers to answer the question "Looking back five and ahead five years, where have you come from, where are you now, and where will you be?" Michael Stillman also writes up the theft of William Wordsworth's prayer book from a Grasmere church.

- Anthony Tedeschi posts about Melbourne Rare Book Week at the Fine Books Blog.

- For his "Booking It" series this week, Keith Houston makes a woodcut.

- Jane Eagan of the Oxford Conservation Consortium writes about a 17th-century ream wrapper used in a binding.

- A box of rare comics has been reported missing from Tampa Bay Comic Con.

- Pradeep Sebastian profiles Simran Thadani for The Hindu.

- Caroline Duroselle-Melish explores an eighteenth-century copybook with a Don Quixote engraving (printed on heavy stock) used as the cover.

- Kevin Young has been named Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

- Don Skemer surveys a few of the 200+ commonplace books in Princeton's collections.

- Andrew McGill reports on the state of the Library of Congress-Twitter archive.

- Ted Underwood asks how many texts one has to examine for it to be considered "distant reading."

- Roland Arkell reports for the Antiques Trade Gazette that some of the Aristophil books and manuscripts may soon be back on the market.

- At Techdirt, Mike Masnick reports that there seem to be moves afoot at the Copyright Office to make changes to Section 108 of the Copyright Act, which exempts libraries and archives from certain provisions.

- Michael Dirda picks eleven "hidden gem" books for the summer.

Reviews

- John Strausbaugh's City of Sedition; review by Sam Roberts in the NYTimes.

- Claire Harman's Charlotte Brontë; review by Trev Broughton in the TLS.

- Jennifer Schuessler reviews the Folger's new exhibition, "Will and Jane," in the NYTimes.