In all of last week's discussions about the possible sale of the Sterling Folios from the University of London, there wasn't all that much written about the actual books themselves. So, curious, I turned to Anthony James West's First Folio census (OUP, 2003) to see what he has to say about the volumes.
As one might expect, the Sterling Folios have quite a backstory, even if we don't know too much about their early life. The four volumes are uniformly bound, by the English binder James Hayday, in dark blue goatskin (West, I, 117; II, 101), with gilt edges (the First Folio also contains marbling beneath the gilt).
West notes of the First Folio (in a comment which extends to the other three) "The volume is notable both for its early migration to America and for its repatriation." This set of the four folios was purchased by Francis Calley Gray of Boston (1790-1859) around 1836, and was perhaps the first full set of Shakespeare folios to cross the Atlantic. Gray (Harvard, 1809) was the son of prominent Boston merchant William Gray, and went to Russia with John Quincy Adams in 1809 as a private secretary (William Gray also happened to own the ship, the Horace, on which JQA & Co. sailed).
Upon his return to America Gray was admitted to the bar and became a prominent lawyer, orator, poet, and art collector. His 1815 visit with George Ticknor to Thomas Jefferson at Monticello is well known (for a bit on this, see here), and he left an impressive collection of engravings to Harvard (see the catalog), "together with a choice library of works on art, and several valuable illustrated books, among them Rosellini's Monumenti dell' Egitto and Audubon's Birds and Quadrupeds of America" (Gray had been one of several donors to Harvard's original copy of Audubon's Birds, and perhaps gave his own copy of a later edition to the Museum of Comparative Zoology).
F.C. Gray's nephew William inherited the set of Folios in 1856, and they were purchased by Miss Mary Edgecombe (sometimes Edgcumbe or Edgecumbe) Blatchford (1838-1902) of Cambridge in 1879. West writes of Miss Blatchford "She was one of the two Americans who in 1901-2 helped Sidney Lee the most in gathering information about American First Folios for his census. He acknowledged her enthusiastic work in the Census introduction (p. 17), and there is ample evidence of it in her correspondence with Lee in the Sir Sidney Lee Collection at the Birthplace Trust Records Office. She mentions in her neatly completed copy of Lee's questionnaire there that she examined her Folio with Justin Winsor" (West, II, 100). Winsor had published, in 1876, his Bibliography of the Original Quartos and Folios of Shakespeare, with Particular Reference to Copies in America.
Miss Blatchford was the eldest daughter of Edgecombe Heath Blatchford (1811-1853) and his wife Mary Ann Hubbard (1820-1864). Blatchford, an alumnus of Union College (my own alma mater), was a lawyer by profession, and the Hubbards were a prominent Boston family: Mary Ann's father Samuel was a justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Mary Blatchford, who wrote the 1898 childrens' book The Story of Little Jane and Me, was a donor to many Boston-area institutions, held a proprietorship at the Boston Athenaeum (perhaps inherited from her mother), and as previously mentioned was of significant help to Sir Sidney Lee.
From Blatchford or her estate the volumes passed, it seems, to the Massachusetts General Hospital Trust, who arranged for their sale at Sotheby's London on 4 March 1935. As West notes, this re-crossing of the Atlantic did not go unnoticed, with a comment in the TLS that "the sentimentalist will hope that these four folios ill stay." They were purchased for £3,100 by the booksellers Lionel and Philip Robinson, a price mourned in the TLS as "somewhat disappointing," given that First Folios alone had previously sold for rather higher prices (the letterpress on the title page of this First Folio is in facsimile, with the portrait inlaid; the "To the Reader" leaf is also in facsimile).
The Folios were then sold for £3,500 to Sir Louis Sterling (1879-1958), an American-born industrialist memorialized in one death-notice as a "millionaire socialist." The same piece continued "The industrialist-philanthropist amassed a fortune in the phonograph and recording business and became a naturalized Britain [sic] after arriving nearly penniless by cattleboat in 1903. Explaining why he had given away more than $2.8 million in Britain, the man born Louis Saul Sterling in a New York tenement, said: 'I made all my money in this country, so I guess Britain is entitled to it.'"
Sterling was known for his assistance to Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis, received a knighthood in 1937, and endowed the Sterling Library at the University of London in the early 1950s. The library itself was opened by Queen Elizabeth (as the University's Chancellor) in October 1956. For more on Sterling's library, see the collection overview, or this 1939 TLS piece, reprinted on the Senate House site.
See what happens when you start pulling threads? Connections abound: who would have thought this set of four folios would stand just a degree of separation or two away from John Quincy Adams, Union College, and the early days of the British recording industry?
Like all books, the Sterling Library Folios have their own stories to tell us, of the people who made them, bound them, owned them, sold them, and read them. While there are many unanswered questions about these (when were they originally brought together? Who had them bound? Who owned them prior to the 1830s?), we know much of what we do know about them thanks to the good work of Justin Winsor, Sidney Lee, and Anthony James West, assisted by Mary Edgecombe Blatchford and the countless others who helped make their censuses of the Shakespeare Folios possible. Another reminder (here are some more) that these censuses are important scholarly works, worthy of our attention and our assistance whenever possible.
NB: I couldn't find either Lee's or Winsor's Folio censuses online, which seems a shame. Though outdated now and vastly superseded by West's, their texts are still quite interesting, and it would be useful to be able to link to them. Also and as always, additions/clarifications/corrections appreciated!
[Update: Lee's census is in fact online, here. Thanks to Mitch Fraas and Sarah Werner!]
Thursday, September 12, 2013
Monday, September 09, 2013
Book Review: "Shady Characters"
If you enjoyed Keith Houston's New Yorker blog post about punctuation history, or follow his own blog at Shady Characters, I heartily recommend his new book, Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, & Other Typographical Marks (forthcoming from W.W. Norton). It's a well-researched and very engagingly-written book filled with fascinating little details about pilcrows and dashes and interrobangs and manicules and other such delightful marks. Houston explores the origins and evolution of these marks, how their uses have changed over time, and dredges up all manner of excellent stories about them.
While the origins of some of these marks are disputed or unknown, Houston thoroughly explores the various options for each, and offers well-reasoned thoughts of his own where there is doubt. And there are more than sixty pages of endnotes, probably more than enough to sate the appetite of even the most fanatic of octothorpe fans.
Recommended.
While the origins of some of these marks are disputed or unknown, Houston thoroughly explores the various options for each, and offers well-reasoned thoughts of his own where there is doubt. And there are more than sixty pages of endnotes, probably more than enough to sate the appetite of even the most fanatic of octothorpe fans.
Recommended.
Sunday, September 08, 2013
Catching up ...
I really will get back to a regular posting schedule, one of these days ... since I've last written I have managed to pack up and move to Charlottesville, and have about half the books unpacked and on their shelves again now (the remainder, which comprise the portions of my library that were still all jumbled together from the last move, are in boxes but on shelves, awaiting my sorting and shelving attentions). And I have started my job at Rare Book School, which promises to be exciting and challenging and wonderful in all kinds of ways. I've been enjoying getting to know Charlottesville in the fall, which is quite a lot different than Charlottesville in the summer, too.
Of course things haven't gone silent in the biblio-universe just because I've been fixated on shelf-locations and organizational schemas and boxes (oh, the boxes). In fact, rather the opposite! So, without further ado, and with apologies again for the long radio silence, here are my collected links and reviews from recent weeks. It is my fervent hope that I'll be able to keep up with these from here on. Wish me luck!
- The big story this week was of course the news that a plan was afoot by which the copies of the four Shakespeare Folios given to the Senate House Libraries, University of London by Sir Louis Sterling in 1956 would be sold at auction (reportedly at Bonhams this November) to fund an endowment designed to fund additional research at the libraries. This news took the book world by storm, and it was most heartening to see the strong, nearly unanimous reaction of shock and dismay.
The news broke with the release of a letter written by Professor Henry Woudhuysen, Rector of Lincoln College, to Senate House Libraries director Christopher Pressler, who had requested Woudhuysen's support for the planned sale. This is, I think, one of the strongest and most impressive responses to such a proposal I've ever read, and I was absolutely delighted to see it. If you haven't yet, you should go read the whole thing. I agree entirely with Ian Gadd's tweet in response to it: "Henry Woudhuysen’s response is comprehensive, magisterial, and unanswerable. This is why bibliography matters."
The Guardian covered the story on Tuesday, as did the Telegraph, and both articles featured strong quotes from scholars against the proposed sale. Director of UCL Library Services Dr Paul Ayris also issued a statement in opposition.
The sale would reportedly have required the permission of the Charity Commission, as it would have violated the terms of the original bequest which brought the Folios to the university in the first place.
Librarians and academics from around the world joined Woudhuysen in opposition, and The Bibliographical Society set up an online petition urging the library administrators to reconsider the sale; it garnered some 2,740 signatures before the library's decision to call off the sale was announced on Thursday evening.
Calling off the sale, University Vice Chancellor Sir Adrian Smith put out a statement announcing "The university has decided to focus its attention on examining alternative ways of investing in the collection. The money raised from any sale would have been used to invest in the future of the library by acquiring major works and archives of English literature." More from the Globe and Mail, including comments from Woudhuysen, who said "We wait to see what they do next. I’m not convinced that we’re out of the woods. There is always the possibility that they will return with another proposition and one would want to look at that quite carefully. They will have learned something from this."
Following Smith's Bibliographical Society president Christine Ferdinand posted a thorough synopsis of the reasons for opposition to the sale.
I've been digging a bit into the provenance of the Sterling Folios, and will have more on that soon. Pretty interesting copies, these!
- New from Lisa Fagin Davis, Manuscript Road Trip, a blog tour of lesser-known manuscript collections in the Lower 48. This will be fun to follow! On the same subject, Medieval Fragments recently posted on manuscripts in American collections.
- In The Nation, Scott Sherman has published a lengthy article on "The Hidden History of New York City's Central Library Plan."
- Ireland's Arts and Heritage minister has called on the Bodleian Library to return the 12th-century Annals of Inisfallen to Ireland, so that the manuscript can be displayed at Killarney House.
- Now at AAS, a personal account book of Boston museum proprietor Moses Kimball.
- The Sarum Missal, lost from the library of St. Paul's in the 19th century, was restored to the collection after it failed to meet estimates at the sale of the Mendham collection and was privately sold back to the cathedral library. Quite a good story on this in the Independent.
- Keith Houston blogs for The New Yorker about some of the punctuation marks described in his new book Shady Characters (which I've just finished reading; it's excellent).
- In my last I noted the arrest of German auction house director Herbert Schauer in relation to the de Caro thefts in Italy; the Telegraph ran an article on this development recently.
- A pre-Raphaelite mural was discovered on a wall at William Morris' Red House, now owned by the National Trust.
- Coming up in December at the Library of Congress, a full-day symposium on "Authenticity," which sounds amazing. I'll be there. Will you?
- There's an article in the new New Yorker about forger/con man Marc Landis, who has given hundreds of artworks and other forged documents to institutions around the country.
- Outgoing HRC director Thomas Staley was profiled recently in the NYTimes.
- From the LARB, William Giraldi's The Writer as Reader: Melville and his Marginalia is well worth a read.
- Three rare books were stolen from Jonkers Rare Books in June: first editions of Wodehouse's The Man Upstairs, Anthony Burgess' Time for a Tiger, and T.H. White's Dear Mr. Nixon. The shop discovered the thefts when a New York bookseller contacted them after having been offered the White book. "The thief is described as being in his fifties, of average height and chubby."
- The longlist for this year's Samuel Johnson Prize is out.
- A big-budget Bronte biopic may be in the works, according to the Telegraph & Argus.
- New: The Dutch in the Caribbean World, c.1670-c.1870, a guide to archival sources on Dutch colonies in the Caribbean as well as a summary of relevant laws and regulations.
- NPR highlighted the DPLA's efforts in a piece on "All Things Considered" recently. And the DPLA has officially moved into their new digs at the BPL.
- From John Overholt at Houghton Library, a look at some recently-digitized materials there.
- Arion Press and Andrew Hoyem are profiled in Harvard Magazine.
- Congratulations to several new members of the ABAA, announced this week.
- In August the Washington Map Society announced via its journal The Portolan, the discovery of what is claimed to be the oldest surviving engraved globe to show the New World. More from the Washington Post. As the Post article points out, there are some serious red flags being thrown about the provenance and ownership of the globe.
Reviews
- Andrea Barrett's Archangel; review by Janet Maslin in the NYTimes.
- Thomas Healy's The Great Dissent; review by Roy Gutterman in the WaPo.
- A. Scott Berg's Wilson; review by Jeff Shesol in the WaPo.
- Joel F. Harrington's The Faithful Executioner; review by Richard J. Evans in the TLS.
- Charlotte Higgins' Under Another Sky; review by Emily Gowers in the TLS.
- Jonathan Lyons' The Society for Useful Knowledge; review by Laura Snyder in the WSJ.
- Nick Basbanes' On Paper; review by Pradeep Sebastian in The Hindu.
Of course things haven't gone silent in the biblio-universe just because I've been fixated on shelf-locations and organizational schemas and boxes (oh, the boxes). In fact, rather the opposite! So, without further ado, and with apologies again for the long radio silence, here are my collected links and reviews from recent weeks. It is my fervent hope that I'll be able to keep up with these from here on. Wish me luck!
- The big story this week was of course the news that a plan was afoot by which the copies of the four Shakespeare Folios given to the Senate House Libraries, University of London by Sir Louis Sterling in 1956 would be sold at auction (reportedly at Bonhams this November) to fund an endowment designed to fund additional research at the libraries. This news took the book world by storm, and it was most heartening to see the strong, nearly unanimous reaction of shock and dismay.
The news broke with the release of a letter written by Professor Henry Woudhuysen, Rector of Lincoln College, to Senate House Libraries director Christopher Pressler, who had requested Woudhuysen's support for the planned sale. This is, I think, one of the strongest and most impressive responses to such a proposal I've ever read, and I was absolutely delighted to see it. If you haven't yet, you should go read the whole thing. I agree entirely with Ian Gadd's tweet in response to it: "Henry Woudhuysen’s response is comprehensive, magisterial, and unanswerable. This is why bibliography matters."
The Guardian covered the story on Tuesday, as did the Telegraph, and both articles featured strong quotes from scholars against the proposed sale. Director of UCL Library Services Dr Paul Ayris also issued a statement in opposition.
The sale would reportedly have required the permission of the Charity Commission, as it would have violated the terms of the original bequest which brought the Folios to the university in the first place.
Librarians and academics from around the world joined Woudhuysen in opposition, and The Bibliographical Society set up an online petition urging the library administrators to reconsider the sale; it garnered some 2,740 signatures before the library's decision to call off the sale was announced on Thursday evening.
Calling off the sale, University Vice Chancellor Sir Adrian Smith put out a statement announcing "The university has decided to focus its attention on examining alternative ways of investing in the collection. The money raised from any sale would have been used to invest in the future of the library by acquiring major works and archives of English literature." More from the Globe and Mail, including comments from Woudhuysen, who said "We wait to see what they do next. I’m not convinced that we’re out of the woods. There is always the possibility that they will return with another proposition and one would want to look at that quite carefully. They will have learned something from this."
Following Smith's Bibliographical Society president Christine Ferdinand posted a thorough synopsis of the reasons for opposition to the sale.
I've been digging a bit into the provenance of the Sterling Folios, and will have more on that soon. Pretty interesting copies, these!
- New from Lisa Fagin Davis, Manuscript Road Trip, a blog tour of lesser-known manuscript collections in the Lower 48. This will be fun to follow! On the same subject, Medieval Fragments recently posted on manuscripts in American collections.
- In The Nation, Scott Sherman has published a lengthy article on "The Hidden History of New York City's Central Library Plan."
- Ireland's Arts and Heritage minister has called on the Bodleian Library to return the 12th-century Annals of Inisfallen to Ireland, so that the manuscript can be displayed at Killarney House.
- Now at AAS, a personal account book of Boston museum proprietor Moses Kimball.
- The Sarum Missal, lost from the library of St. Paul's in the 19th century, was restored to the collection after it failed to meet estimates at the sale of the Mendham collection and was privately sold back to the cathedral library. Quite a good story on this in the Independent.
- Keith Houston blogs for The New Yorker about some of the punctuation marks described in his new book Shady Characters (which I've just finished reading; it's excellent).
- In my last I noted the arrest of German auction house director Herbert Schauer in relation to the de Caro thefts in Italy; the Telegraph ran an article on this development recently.
- A pre-Raphaelite mural was discovered on a wall at William Morris' Red House, now owned by the National Trust.
- Coming up in December at the Library of Congress, a full-day symposium on "Authenticity," which sounds amazing. I'll be there. Will you?
- There's an article in the new New Yorker about forger/con man Marc Landis, who has given hundreds of artworks and other forged documents to institutions around the country.
- Outgoing HRC director Thomas Staley was profiled recently in the NYTimes.
- From the LARB, William Giraldi's The Writer as Reader: Melville and his Marginalia is well worth a read.
- Three rare books were stolen from Jonkers Rare Books in June: first editions of Wodehouse's The Man Upstairs, Anthony Burgess' Time for a Tiger, and T.H. White's Dear Mr. Nixon. The shop discovered the thefts when a New York bookseller contacted them after having been offered the White book. "The thief is described as being in his fifties, of average height and chubby."
- The longlist for this year's Samuel Johnson Prize is out.
- A big-budget Bronte biopic may be in the works, according to the Telegraph & Argus.
- New: The Dutch in the Caribbean World, c.1670-c.1870, a guide to archival sources on Dutch colonies in the Caribbean as well as a summary of relevant laws and regulations.
- NPR highlighted the DPLA's efforts in a piece on "All Things Considered" recently. And the DPLA has officially moved into their new digs at the BPL.
- From John Overholt at Houghton Library, a look at some recently-digitized materials there.
- Arion Press and Andrew Hoyem are profiled in Harvard Magazine.
- Congratulations to several new members of the ABAA, announced this week.
- In August the Washington Map Society announced via its journal The Portolan, the discovery of what is claimed to be the oldest surviving engraved globe to show the New World. More from the Washington Post. As the Post article points out, there are some serious red flags being thrown about the provenance and ownership of the globe.
Reviews
- Andrea Barrett's Archangel; review by Janet Maslin in the NYTimes.
- Thomas Healy's The Great Dissent; review by Roy Gutterman in the WaPo.
- A. Scott Berg's Wilson; review by Jeff Shesol in the WaPo.
- Joel F. Harrington's The Faithful Executioner; review by Richard J. Evans in the TLS.
- Charlotte Higgins' Under Another Sky; review by Emily Gowers in the TLS.
- Jonathan Lyons' The Society for Useful Knowledge; review by Laura Snyder in the WSJ.
- Nick Basbanes' On Paper; review by Pradeep Sebastian in The Hindu.
Sunday, August 18, 2013
Links & Reviews
- Another shoe has dropped in the de Caro book theft case: Herbert Schauer, Executive Director of the Munich auction firm Zisska & Schauer, was arrested on 2 August in relation to the ongoing investigation. According to a press release from the auction house, "The Italian authorities had issued a European arrest warrant on the basis of self-exculpatory submissions made by a number of the accused in the Girolamini trials and had forwarded the warrant to the Bavarian authorities."
- Over at Bibliodeviant, Jonathan Kearns has a must-read piece on bookselling in today's world: "Fear and Loathing in Book-ville."
- The contenders for the 16th ILAB Breslauer Prize have been announced.
- Charles Simic posted on the NYRB blog about the loss of used bookstores and what that means for us all.
- Library Journal posted on the upcoming opening of the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon.
- Via Shannon Supple at the Clog, a look at an extremely-heavily annotated "hybrid book" from the Clark's collections.
- Author Boris Kachka talked to The Awl about his new book Hothouse, a history of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
- The summer issue of Common-place is up. Good stuff, as usual.
- Chet Van Duzer talked to Lapham's Quarterly about his new book, Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps.
- In the NYTimes, Jennifer Schuessler reports on a Notes and Queries piece by Shakespeare scholar Douglas Bruster possibly furthering the case for Shakespeare's authorship of certain parts of The Spanish Tragedy.
- An anonymous donor has pledged £100,000 to the ongoing effort to keep Jane Austen's ring from passing into the ownership of Kelly Clarkson, who purchased it at auction last year.
- Making the rounds this week was a 1969 Paris Review interview with E.B. White, which is well worth a read.
- Over on the Guardian book blog, Stuart Kelly explores the attractions of Tobias Smollett's Humphry Clinker.
- A post at Notabilia this week highlights the shelf-mark of the library of the Earls of Shaftesbury.
- The Getty Museum launched its Open Content Program this week, making available as a first tranche some 4,600 images of artwork.
- A fire destroyed the Asgar Ali Book Centre in Port of Spain, Trinidad earlier this week.
- The Financial Times reported this week on the BL's plans to digitize its 25,000 medieval manuscripts.
- In other BL-related digitization news, CRL and the BL have agreed to cooperate in the digitization of newspapers from Africa, South Asia, and Latin America into the World Newspaper Archive.
- Historian Pauline Maier died this week. See her NYTimes Obit. I knew Pauline from my time at MHS, and always found her gracious, warm, and wonderfully interesting to talk to. I've enjoyed her books greatly, and she will be much missed. More from Michael Hattem at The Junto, J.L. Bell at Boston 1775, and at The Beehive.
Reviews
- Felix Palma's The Map of Time; review by Miriam Burstein at The Little Professor.
- Boris Kachka's Hothouse; reviews by Maureen Corrigan on NPR; Elisa Schappell on NPR.
- Samantha Shannon's The Bone Season; review by Jane Ciabattari on NPR.
- Brenda Wineapple's Ecstatic Nation; review by David Shribman in the Boston Globe.
... And now, back to the packing!
- Over at Bibliodeviant, Jonathan Kearns has a must-read piece on bookselling in today's world: "Fear and Loathing in Book-ville."
- The contenders for the 16th ILAB Breslauer Prize have been announced.
- Charles Simic posted on the NYRB blog about the loss of used bookstores and what that means for us all.
- Library Journal posted on the upcoming opening of the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon.
- Via Shannon Supple at the Clog, a look at an extremely-heavily annotated "hybrid book" from the Clark's collections.
- Author Boris Kachka talked to The Awl about his new book Hothouse, a history of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
- The summer issue of Common-place is up. Good stuff, as usual.
- Chet Van Duzer talked to Lapham's Quarterly about his new book, Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps.
- In the NYTimes, Jennifer Schuessler reports on a Notes and Queries piece by Shakespeare scholar Douglas Bruster possibly furthering the case for Shakespeare's authorship of certain parts of The Spanish Tragedy.
- An anonymous donor has pledged £100,000 to the ongoing effort to keep Jane Austen's ring from passing into the ownership of Kelly Clarkson, who purchased it at auction last year.
- Making the rounds this week was a 1969 Paris Review interview with E.B. White, which is well worth a read.
- Over on the Guardian book blog, Stuart Kelly explores the attractions of Tobias Smollett's Humphry Clinker.
- A post at Notabilia this week highlights the shelf-mark of the library of the Earls of Shaftesbury.
- The Getty Museum launched its Open Content Program this week, making available as a first tranche some 4,600 images of artwork.
- A fire destroyed the Asgar Ali Book Centre in Port of Spain, Trinidad earlier this week.
- The Financial Times reported this week on the BL's plans to digitize its 25,000 medieval manuscripts.
- In other BL-related digitization news, CRL and the BL have agreed to cooperate in the digitization of newspapers from Africa, South Asia, and Latin America into the World Newspaper Archive.
- Historian Pauline Maier died this week. See her NYTimes Obit. I knew Pauline from my time at MHS, and always found her gracious, warm, and wonderfully interesting to talk to. I've enjoyed her books greatly, and she will be much missed. More from Michael Hattem at The Junto, J.L. Bell at Boston 1775, and at The Beehive.
Reviews
- Felix Palma's The Map of Time; review by Miriam Burstein at The Little Professor.
- Boris Kachka's Hothouse; reviews by Maureen Corrigan on NPR; Elisa Schappell on NPR.
- Samantha Shannon's The Bone Season; review by Jane Ciabattari on NPR.
- Brenda Wineapple's Ecstatic Nation; review by David Shribman in the Boston Globe.
... And now, back to the packing!
Big News!
Links and reviews for this week are coming soon, but before I get to that, I have some exciting personal news to share: as of 1 September, I'm headed down to Charlottesville, VA to take up a new position as Director of Communications and Outreach at Rare Book School. I am impatient to get there and embrace the opportunities and challenges that await, and thrilled to be joining Charlottesville's vibrant biblio-community. I've loved spending the summers there for the last few years, and I'm looking forward to being there year-round and helping to further the mission of RBS.
It's all happened fairly quickly: this week I finalized arrangements for an apartment, and at the moment I'm spending most of my time boxing up my books in preparation for the big move. I've filled 70 of U-Haul's "book boxes" (12"x12"x12") so far, with lots more books to go. Wish me luck!
All this means that there's a job opening at LibraryThing, and I'd certainly encourage interested readers to apply if you like. It's a very fun company to work for and to be involved with, and while I will be switching roles, I will certainly continue to be an active LibraryThing member as well as the coordinator of the Legacy Libraries project there (I think I'll probably have rather more time to devote to those things again, in fact).
So, that's the news from here. More updates from the packing/moving front as warranted.
It's all happened fairly quickly: this week I finalized arrangements for an apartment, and at the moment I'm spending most of my time boxing up my books in preparation for the big move. I've filled 70 of U-Haul's "book boxes" (12"x12"x12") so far, with lots more books to go. Wish me luck!
All this means that there's a job opening at LibraryThing, and I'd certainly encourage interested readers to apply if you like. It's a very fun company to work for and to be involved with, and while I will be switching roles, I will certainly continue to be an active LibraryThing member as well as the coordinator of the Legacy Libraries project there (I think I'll probably have rather more time to devote to those things again, in fact).
So, that's the news from here. More updates from the packing/moving front as warranted.
Sunday, August 11, 2013
Links & Reviews
Okay, one last gigantic links roundup and then with any luck at all I'll be back to a (slightly-more) regular schedule. I'm back at home now after the summer at Rare Book School, which was wonderful but very busy (hence the lack of posts). I had the great pleasure of taking Jan Storm van Leeuwen's Introduction to the History of Bookbinding course this year, and enjoyed the experience immensely (add it to your list, if it's not on there already). But that was just one of many highlights of the summer.
- Speaking of Rare Book School, Rebecca Rego Barry's "Letter from Rare Book School" is a must-read.
- One of the other students from my RBS class, James Capobianco, has begun posting images of neat bindings from the Houghton collections here.
- Gregory S. Girolami, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Illinois, is conducting a census of the first edition of Robert Boyle's Sceptical Chymist (1661), and is looking for information on extant copies. Contact details are listed on Girolamni's website (and I've written often, I am a huge proponent of book censuses, so I encourage you to help if you can).
- The excellent Community Libraries project has issued a call for papers for three two-day colloquia in 2014 and 2015, which I suspect many readers will be interested in. Please do take a look and distribute widely.
- Via Mitch Fraas, a list of the books Lincoln checked out of the Library of Congress while president.
- Over at Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie, Lew Jaffe explores the question of just what is the earliest American bookplate?
- An absolutely stupendous discovery was made this summer in the collections of Houghton Library: cataloger Karen Nipps found eight original 1767 subscription sheets signed by some 650 Bostonians pledging support of a boycott of British goods in response to the Townshend Acts. J.L. Bell comments on the find here.
- The FBI has posted images of 28 rare books and maps stolen by E. Forbes Smiley and not yet returned to their owners. Do you know where these belong?
- There was a well-worth-reading Reed Johnson piece on the Voynich Manuscript in the New Yorker back in July. Paul Romaine's response to the article shouldn't be missed, either. Johnson talked to NPR about the manuscript as well.
- Stephen Moss of The Guardian talked with Arnold (A.D.) Harvey, the man responsible for creating a fictitious meeting between Dickens and Dostoyevsky that was accepted as fact for years (exposed by Eric Naiman in the TLS in April). Fascinating article.
- The criminal conspiracy trial of Marino Massimo de Caro and his co-conspirators has been delayed until October.
- The ABAA blog noted the discovery of a Pearl Buck manuscript novel in a Texas storage locker.
- Ann Blair's 31 January talk at Columbia, "Methods of Collaboration Among Early Modern Humanists," is now available on YouTube.
- The Harry Ransom Center has acquired the McSweeney's archive.
- The John Carter Brown Library has uploaded its 5000th book to the Internet Archive (theirs is one of the best uses of the Archive I've seen).
- Pop star Kelly Clarkson was the winning bidder on the Jane Austen ring which sold last year at auction for better than £150,000, but the British government is seeking to stop the ring's removal from the country. UK buyers have until 30 September to raise the funds to match Clarkson's bid.
- Information on recent thefts of maps, posted on Ex-Libris in July: "The Chicago Division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is investigating the theft of historical topographical maps from various educational institutions. The maps are mostly from Central and Eastern Europe, including: Poland, Germany, Austria, and western Russia and their scales vary between 1:25,000 to 1:100,000. The maps are considered to be Interwar, meaning they were published between 1919 and 1939. Of particular interest are maps published by the Wojskowy Instytut Geograficzny Instytut (Poland). The investigation has also revealed the theft of 19th century Austro-Hungarian topographical maps. The thefts have occurred as far back as 2008 and as recently as the spring of 2013. The FBI would like to identify as many victims as possible, and would like to interview individuals who may have been in contact with the individual or individuals responsible for these thefts. If you have information or believe your institution may have been the victim of a similar theft, please contact Special Agent Luigi Mondini at 312 829-5526 or luigi.mondini@ic.fbi.gov."
- Two books stolen from the National Library of Sweden by former librarian Anders Burius were returned to the library in late July, after the Baltimore dealer who purchased them at a German auction in 2008 bought them back from the clients to whom he had subsequently sold them.
- The investigation into the 2007 murder of book collector Rolland Comstock remains open, investigators say, even after the recent death of Comstock's ex-wife, found liable for his death in a civil suit. Greene County, MO sheriff Jim Arnott said that charges are still forthcoming related to the case.
- The Onion recently ran an obituary for print.
- From the Cambridge Incunabula Project blog, some unidentified provenance marks discovered in English incunables.
- Mount Vernon and the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington purchased the eight volumes from George Washington's library up for sale in June.
- Richard Luscombe reported for the Guardian on the sale of the Harrisburg collection of memorabilia. Normally I'd be completely appalled at a sale like this, but in this particular case, it seems to have been acquired haphazardly and without much thought, so better for the material to find more appropriate homes.
- Over on the Royal Society's blog, Rebecca Easey writes on the "crossroads between science and art," scientific illustration.
- The winners of the 2013 National Collegiate Book Collecting contest have been announced. Congratulations to all!
- From Matthew Green at the Public Domain Review, "The Lost World of the London Coffeehouse."
- There are Q&As with new Folger Director of Digital Access Eric Johnson and Research and Outreach Librarian Melanie Dyer at The Collation. And at Wynken de Worde, Sarah Werner discusses her new role as the Folger's Digital Media Strategist, which sounds tremendously exciting and awesome.
- A Poe manuscript sold for $300,000 at a small Rhode Island auction on 30 July.
- Over at Boston 1775, J.L. Bell takes a look at Alexander Gilles' editing of his copy of Isaac Watts' Psalms and edited out the British bits.
- John K. Hale, co-editor of a new edition of Milton's De Doctrina Christiana, reflects on the experience for the OSEO blog.
- At Mapping Books, Mitch Fraas posts about his research into print/book circulation between late 18th-century India and Europe, with some great visualizations. In a separate post, Mitch maps the current locations of 15-century books, with some very surprising results.
- The Yale Law Library Rare Books Blog has a new URL: http://library.law.yale.edu/blogs/rare-books.
- Back in July, the NYTimes covered (somewhat anecdotally, by necessity) Amazon's price-shifting practices.
- I almost can't believe that it's been more than four years now since John Quincy Adams started tweeting. The MHS blog has a look back. Thanks to Nancy Heywood and all the others at MHS who have kept the project going!
- Historian Edmund S. Morgan died in early July at the age of 97. The NYTimes ran a thorough obituary. The Junto ran a weeklong roundtable discussion on Morgan's life and legacy.
- From Res Obscura, a beginner's guide to reading early modern texts.
- The British Library has announced plans to bring together all four surviving original copies of the Magna Carta in 2015, to mark the charter's 800th anniversary.
- The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada are now (save the last three years) freely available online.
- William Blake's cottage in Felpham, West Sussex, is for sale.
- Some interesting background on the linguistic unmasking of J.K. Rowling as Robert Galbraith, the author of The Cuckoo's Calling: WSJ blog, Language Log (Patrick Juola).
- In the Boston Globe this weekend, Christine Woodside writes about Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane's intentional crafting of the Little House books to enhance a libertarian political philosophy.
Reviews
- Anthony Pagden's The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters; review by Noel Malcolm in the Telegraph.
- Scott Anderson's Lawrence in Arabia; review by Alex von Tunzelmann in the NYTimes.
- Royce Prouty's Stoker's Manuscript; review by Rebecca Rego Barry at Fine Books Blog.
- Robert Wilson's Matthew Brady; reviews by Caleb Crain in the NYTimes; Dwight Garner in the NYTimes.
- Boris Kachka's Hothouse; review by Heller McAlpin in the LATimes.
- Samantha Shannon's The Bone Season; review by Helen Brown in the Telegraph.
- Travis McDade's Thieves of Book Row; review by Stephen J. Gertz at Booktryst.
- Brenda Wineapple's Ecstatic Nation; reviews by Scott Martelle in the LATimes; David Reynolds in the NYTimes.
- Caleb Crain's Necessary Errors; review by Aaron Hamburger in the NYTimes.
- Speaking of Rare Book School, Rebecca Rego Barry's "Letter from Rare Book School" is a must-read.
- One of the other students from my RBS class, James Capobianco, has begun posting images of neat bindings from the Houghton collections here.
- Gregory S. Girolami, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Illinois, is conducting a census of the first edition of Robert Boyle's Sceptical Chymist (1661), and is looking for information on extant copies. Contact details are listed on Girolamni's website (and I've written often, I am a huge proponent of book censuses, so I encourage you to help if you can).
- The excellent Community Libraries project has issued a call for papers for three two-day colloquia in 2014 and 2015, which I suspect many readers will be interested in. Please do take a look and distribute widely.
- Via Mitch Fraas, a list of the books Lincoln checked out of the Library of Congress while president.
- Over at Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie, Lew Jaffe explores the question of just what is the earliest American bookplate?
- An absolutely stupendous discovery was made this summer in the collections of Houghton Library: cataloger Karen Nipps found eight original 1767 subscription sheets signed by some 650 Bostonians pledging support of a boycott of British goods in response to the Townshend Acts. J.L. Bell comments on the find here.
- The FBI has posted images of 28 rare books and maps stolen by E. Forbes Smiley and not yet returned to their owners. Do you know where these belong?
- There was a well-worth-reading Reed Johnson piece on the Voynich Manuscript in the New Yorker back in July. Paul Romaine's response to the article shouldn't be missed, either. Johnson talked to NPR about the manuscript as well.
- Stephen Moss of The Guardian talked with Arnold (A.D.) Harvey, the man responsible for creating a fictitious meeting between Dickens and Dostoyevsky that was accepted as fact for years (exposed by Eric Naiman in the TLS in April). Fascinating article.
- The criminal conspiracy trial of Marino Massimo de Caro and his co-conspirators has been delayed until October.
- The ABAA blog noted the discovery of a Pearl Buck manuscript novel in a Texas storage locker.
- Ann Blair's 31 January talk at Columbia, "Methods of Collaboration Among Early Modern Humanists," is now available on YouTube.
- The Harry Ransom Center has acquired the McSweeney's archive.
- The John Carter Brown Library has uploaded its 5000th book to the Internet Archive (theirs is one of the best uses of the Archive I've seen).
- Pop star Kelly Clarkson was the winning bidder on the Jane Austen ring which sold last year at auction for better than £150,000, but the British government is seeking to stop the ring's removal from the country. UK buyers have until 30 September to raise the funds to match Clarkson's bid.
- Information on recent thefts of maps, posted on Ex-Libris in July: "The Chicago Division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is investigating the theft of historical topographical maps from various educational institutions. The maps are mostly from Central and Eastern Europe, including: Poland, Germany, Austria, and western Russia and their scales vary between 1:25,000 to 1:100,000. The maps are considered to be Interwar, meaning they were published between 1919 and 1939. Of particular interest are maps published by the Wojskowy Instytut Geograficzny Instytut (Poland). The investigation has also revealed the theft of 19th century Austro-Hungarian topographical maps. The thefts have occurred as far back as 2008 and as recently as the spring of 2013. The FBI would like to identify as many victims as possible, and would like to interview individuals who may have been in contact with the individual or individuals responsible for these thefts. If you have information or believe your institution may have been the victim of a similar theft, please contact Special Agent Luigi Mondini at 312 829-5526 or luigi.mondini@ic.fbi.gov."
- Two books stolen from the National Library of Sweden by former librarian Anders Burius were returned to the library in late July, after the Baltimore dealer who purchased them at a German auction in 2008 bought them back from the clients to whom he had subsequently sold them.
- The investigation into the 2007 murder of book collector Rolland Comstock remains open, investigators say, even after the recent death of Comstock's ex-wife, found liable for his death in a civil suit. Greene County, MO sheriff Jim Arnott said that charges are still forthcoming related to the case.
- The Onion recently ran an obituary for print.
- From the Cambridge Incunabula Project blog, some unidentified provenance marks discovered in English incunables.
- Mount Vernon and the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington purchased the eight volumes from George Washington's library up for sale in June.
- Richard Luscombe reported for the Guardian on the sale of the Harrisburg collection of memorabilia. Normally I'd be completely appalled at a sale like this, but in this particular case, it seems to have been acquired haphazardly and without much thought, so better for the material to find more appropriate homes.
- Over on the Royal Society's blog, Rebecca Easey writes on the "crossroads between science and art," scientific illustration.
- The winners of the 2013 National Collegiate Book Collecting contest have been announced. Congratulations to all!
- From Matthew Green at the Public Domain Review, "The Lost World of the London Coffeehouse."
- There are Q&As with new Folger Director of Digital Access Eric Johnson and Research and Outreach Librarian Melanie Dyer at The Collation. And at Wynken de Worde, Sarah Werner discusses her new role as the Folger's Digital Media Strategist, which sounds tremendously exciting and awesome.
- A Poe manuscript sold for $300,000 at a small Rhode Island auction on 30 July.
- Over at Boston 1775, J.L. Bell takes a look at Alexander Gilles' editing of his copy of Isaac Watts' Psalms and edited out the British bits.
- John K. Hale, co-editor of a new edition of Milton's De Doctrina Christiana, reflects on the experience for the OSEO blog.
- At Mapping Books, Mitch Fraas posts about his research into print/book circulation between late 18th-century India and Europe, with some great visualizations. In a separate post, Mitch maps the current locations of 15-century books, with some very surprising results.
- The Yale Law Library Rare Books Blog has a new URL: http://library.law.yale.edu/blogs/rare-books.
- Back in July, the NYTimes covered (somewhat anecdotally, by necessity) Amazon's price-shifting practices.
- I almost can't believe that it's been more than four years now since John Quincy Adams started tweeting. The MHS blog has a look back. Thanks to Nancy Heywood and all the others at MHS who have kept the project going!
- Historian Edmund S. Morgan died in early July at the age of 97. The NYTimes ran a thorough obituary. The Junto ran a weeklong roundtable discussion on Morgan's life and legacy.
- From Res Obscura, a beginner's guide to reading early modern texts.
- The British Library has announced plans to bring together all four surviving original copies of the Magna Carta in 2015, to mark the charter's 800th anniversary.
- The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada are now (save the last three years) freely available online.
- William Blake's cottage in Felpham, West Sussex, is for sale.
- Some interesting background on the linguistic unmasking of J.K. Rowling as Robert Galbraith, the author of The Cuckoo's Calling: WSJ blog, Language Log (Patrick Juola).
- In the Boston Globe this weekend, Christine Woodside writes about Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane's intentional crafting of the Little House books to enhance a libertarian political philosophy.
Reviews
- Anthony Pagden's The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters; review by Noel Malcolm in the Telegraph.
- Scott Anderson's Lawrence in Arabia; review by Alex von Tunzelmann in the NYTimes.
- Royce Prouty's Stoker's Manuscript; review by Rebecca Rego Barry at Fine Books Blog.
- Robert Wilson's Matthew Brady; reviews by Caleb Crain in the NYTimes; Dwight Garner in the NYTimes.
- Boris Kachka's Hothouse; review by Heller McAlpin in the LATimes.
- Samantha Shannon's The Bone Season; review by Helen Brown in the Telegraph.
- Travis McDade's Thieves of Book Row; review by Stephen J. Gertz at Booktryst.
- Brenda Wineapple's Ecstatic Nation; reviews by Scott Martelle in the LATimes; David Reynolds in the NYTimes.
- Caleb Crain's Necessary Errors; review by Aaron Hamburger in the NYTimes.
Sunday, June 30, 2013
Links & Reviews
Apologies for the radio silence and the once-again epic roundup post of links and reviews. I've been down the delightful Rare Book School rabbit-hole for the last couple weeks, far too busy to manage to keep up with things here. But I've been saving up links and here they all are, before Google Reader goes away:
- Petrina Jackson from UVA Special Collections posted on their blog about the Rare Book School season there, which is great fun. (And yes, you can even see the back of my head in the final picture).
- Something not to be missed: Leah Price's essay "Books on Books," at the great site Public Books.
- New from Meredith Neuman at Clark University, Sermon Notebooks Online.
- Library and Archives Canada purchased the Sherbrooke Collection of War of 1812 documents at auction in London for $573,000.
- A new study suggests that the Voynich Manuscript may actually contain meaningful text, but skeptics remain unconvinced.
- Jerry Morris has posted about the process of cataloging (and recataloging) the library of James Boswell (on LibraryThing).
- Jennifer Lowe pointed out this week some new information on the de Caro thefts in Italy: recent police raids on bookshops in Florence, Rome, Milan, and Turin resulted in the recovery of more stolen books.
- A proof copy of the first bifolium from the Kelmscott Chaucer was up for grabs last week at PBA Galleries, but went unsold.
- Hathi Trust and the DPLA have announced a partnership, which will make some 3.5 million public-domain books available through the DPLA site.
- A Sternean mystery (the date of the original publication of the first volumes of Tristram Shandy) has been solved at last.
- The BL acquired several lots at the sale of the Mendham Collection.
- Yale's recent acquisition of the Anthony Taussig collection of legal books and manuscripts is highlighted in the NYTimes.
- New work on William Henry Ireland? Yes, please! Heather Wolfe and Arnold Hunt report on Shakespeare's personal library as curated by Ireland in his forgeries.
- In the LATimes Jacket Copy blog, Hector Tobar reports on Matthew Haley's recent comments about the state of the book trade in the digital age.
- Founders Online launched earlier this month, and there was a report on this in the Washington Post. J.L. Bell has a quick note on this here, including fears for the long-term health of the NHPRC.
- A copy of the first newspaper printing of the Declaration of Independence sold this week at Robert Siegel Auction Galleries for $632,500, the largest sum ever paid for a historic newspaper. More on this here. The buyer was David Rubenstein.
- German authorities have recovered more than 15,000 books stolen from libraries (including the Bad Arolsen library) by a former official in the Hessian Ministry of Science. Some 2,000 books remain to be returned to their owners.
- On the Princeton Graphic Arts blog, Julie Mellby gives some love to the twenty-one artists who designed engravings for Baskerville's 1773 edition of Orlando Furioso.
- Nate Pedersen interviewed Joseph Felcone about his Printing in New Jersey 1754-1800: A Descriptive Bibliography.
- The National Archives will open a new David M. Rubenstein Gallery and Visitor Orientation Plaza this fall.
- Starting on 15 July, Guernsey's will be holding a seven-day sale of the Harrisburg Collection, some 8,000 items purchased by a former mayor with an eye toward creating a number of museums around the city.
- Ralph Gardner recently visited the Grolier Club and wrote about his trip in the WSJ.
- Four volumes of a copy of Don Quixote once owned by Thomas Jefferson failed to sell this week at a Virginia auction.
- All the libraries and museums in the United States, mapped. [h/t Tom Scheinfeldt]
- From the BBC Magazine, a report on early fashionista Mattheus Schwarz.
- Several books were reported stolen from Wentworth & Leggett Rare Books in North Carolina. See the full list and full contact information here.
- Peter Steinberg writes on the MHS' Beehive blog about some great detective work he's been doing to identify and reconnect pamphlets removed from Harbottle Dorr's newspaper volumes.
- Over at Booktryst, Stephen Gertz highlights a nice association copy of Common Sense which sold for $545,000 at a Sotheby's auction earlier this month. More on the sale over at Jacket Copy. At the same sale, seven books from George Washington's library fetched $1.2 million.
- The John Carter Brown Library is making its own publications freely available online.
- There's a really excellent guest post at The Collation about an annotated copy of The Roaring Girl.
- Also at The Collation, Erin Blake offers up part two of her series on proof prints.
- I was very pleased to see J.L. Bell's excellent response piece Paul Revere and the Sociologists.
- Another installment in the Anchora series on leaf books, this one focusing on a particularly annotated leaf from the Coverdale Bible.
- From the Appendix blog, a look at a 1680 sex manual that even made Pepys blush.
- Turkish media reports indicate several smugglers have been detained in Ankara with manuscripts stolen from Syrian repositories and illegally removed from the country to be sold on the black market.
- James Schmidt comments on Anthony Pagden's The Enlightnment and Why It Still Matters.
- Book collector Tom Johnson is profiled in the Springfield, MO News-Leader. Johnson's library, accumulated over three generations, is now the heart of the nonprofit Johnson Library and Museum, affiliated with Missouri State University.
- From the Houghton Library blog, Leslie Morris reports on the return of a volume from the library of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, gone missing from the Widener stacks at some point.
- Book Patrol notes the Morgan Library's publication of a new facsimile edition of the Van Damme Hours.
- At Medieval Fragments, David Ganz remembers master palaeographer Malcolm Parkes.
Reviews
- Nat Philbrick's Bunker Hill and Richard Beeman's Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor; review by Joyce Chaplin in the NYTimes.
- Neil Gaiman's Ocean at the End of the Lane; review by Benjamin Percy in the NYTimes.
- Colum McCann's TransAtlantic; review by Erica Wagner in the NYTimes.
- Paul Collins' Duel with the Devil; review by Mark Schone in the LATimes.
- Joseph Ellis' Revolutionary Summer; reviews by Andrew Cayton in the NYTimes and Kirk Davis Swinehart in the WSJ.
- Travis McDade's Thieves of Book Row; review by Carolyn Kellogg in the LATimes.
- J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fall of Arthur; review by Andrew O'Hehir in the NYTimes.
- Allen Guelzo's Gettysburg; reviews by David Blight in the NYTimes and Ernest Furgurson in the WaPo.
- Petrina Jackson from UVA Special Collections posted on their blog about the Rare Book School season there, which is great fun. (And yes, you can even see the back of my head in the final picture).
- Something not to be missed: Leah Price's essay "Books on Books," at the great site Public Books.
- New from Meredith Neuman at Clark University, Sermon Notebooks Online.
- Library and Archives Canada purchased the Sherbrooke Collection of War of 1812 documents at auction in London for $573,000.
- A new study suggests that the Voynich Manuscript may actually contain meaningful text, but skeptics remain unconvinced.
- Jerry Morris has posted about the process of cataloging (and recataloging) the library of James Boswell (on LibraryThing).
- Jennifer Lowe pointed out this week some new information on the de Caro thefts in Italy: recent police raids on bookshops in Florence, Rome, Milan, and Turin resulted in the recovery of more stolen books.
- A proof copy of the first bifolium from the Kelmscott Chaucer was up for grabs last week at PBA Galleries, but went unsold.
- Hathi Trust and the DPLA have announced a partnership, which will make some 3.5 million public-domain books available through the DPLA site.
- A Sternean mystery (the date of the original publication of the first volumes of Tristram Shandy) has been solved at last.
- The BL acquired several lots at the sale of the Mendham Collection.
- Yale's recent acquisition of the Anthony Taussig collection of legal books and manuscripts is highlighted in the NYTimes.
- New work on William Henry Ireland? Yes, please! Heather Wolfe and Arnold Hunt report on Shakespeare's personal library as curated by Ireland in his forgeries.
- In the LATimes Jacket Copy blog, Hector Tobar reports on Matthew Haley's recent comments about the state of the book trade in the digital age.
- Founders Online launched earlier this month, and there was a report on this in the Washington Post. J.L. Bell has a quick note on this here, including fears for the long-term health of the NHPRC.
- A copy of the first newspaper printing of the Declaration of Independence sold this week at Robert Siegel Auction Galleries for $632,500, the largest sum ever paid for a historic newspaper. More on this here. The buyer was David Rubenstein.
- German authorities have recovered more than 15,000 books stolen from libraries (including the Bad Arolsen library) by a former official in the Hessian Ministry of Science. Some 2,000 books remain to be returned to their owners.
- On the Princeton Graphic Arts blog, Julie Mellby gives some love to the twenty-one artists who designed engravings for Baskerville's 1773 edition of Orlando Furioso.
- Nate Pedersen interviewed Joseph Felcone about his Printing in New Jersey 1754-1800: A Descriptive Bibliography.
- The National Archives will open a new David M. Rubenstein Gallery and Visitor Orientation Plaza this fall.
- Starting on 15 July, Guernsey's will be holding a seven-day sale of the Harrisburg Collection, some 8,000 items purchased by a former mayor with an eye toward creating a number of museums around the city.
- Ralph Gardner recently visited the Grolier Club and wrote about his trip in the WSJ.
- Four volumes of a copy of Don Quixote once owned by Thomas Jefferson failed to sell this week at a Virginia auction.
- All the libraries and museums in the United States, mapped. [h/t Tom Scheinfeldt]
- From the BBC Magazine, a report on early fashionista Mattheus Schwarz.
- Several books were reported stolen from Wentworth & Leggett Rare Books in North Carolina. See the full list and full contact information here.
- Peter Steinberg writes on the MHS' Beehive blog about some great detective work he's been doing to identify and reconnect pamphlets removed from Harbottle Dorr's newspaper volumes.
- Over at Booktryst, Stephen Gertz highlights a nice association copy of Common Sense which sold for $545,000 at a Sotheby's auction earlier this month. More on the sale over at Jacket Copy. At the same sale, seven books from George Washington's library fetched $1.2 million.
- The John Carter Brown Library is making its own publications freely available online.
- There's a really excellent guest post at The Collation about an annotated copy of The Roaring Girl.
- Also at The Collation, Erin Blake offers up part two of her series on proof prints.
- I was very pleased to see J.L. Bell's excellent response piece Paul Revere and the Sociologists.
- Another installment in the Anchora series on leaf books, this one focusing on a particularly annotated leaf from the Coverdale Bible.
- From the Appendix blog, a look at a 1680 sex manual that even made Pepys blush.
- Turkish media reports indicate several smugglers have been detained in Ankara with manuscripts stolen from Syrian repositories and illegally removed from the country to be sold on the black market.
- James Schmidt comments on Anthony Pagden's The Enlightnment and Why It Still Matters.
- Book collector Tom Johnson is profiled in the Springfield, MO News-Leader. Johnson's library, accumulated over three generations, is now the heart of the nonprofit Johnson Library and Museum, affiliated with Missouri State University.
- From the Houghton Library blog, Leslie Morris reports on the return of a volume from the library of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, gone missing from the Widener stacks at some point.
- Book Patrol notes the Morgan Library's publication of a new facsimile edition of the Van Damme Hours.
- At Medieval Fragments, David Ganz remembers master palaeographer Malcolm Parkes.
Reviews
- Nat Philbrick's Bunker Hill and Richard Beeman's Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor; review by Joyce Chaplin in the NYTimes.
- Neil Gaiman's Ocean at the End of the Lane; review by Benjamin Percy in the NYTimes.
- Colum McCann's TransAtlantic; review by Erica Wagner in the NYTimes.
- Paul Collins' Duel with the Devil; review by Mark Schone in the LATimes.
- Joseph Ellis' Revolutionary Summer; reviews by Andrew Cayton in the NYTimes and Kirk Davis Swinehart in the WSJ.
- Travis McDade's Thieves of Book Row; review by Carolyn Kellogg in the LATimes.
- J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fall of Arthur; review by Andrew O'Hehir in the NYTimes.
- Allen Guelzo's Gettysburg; reviews by David Blight in the NYTimes and Ernest Furgurson in the WaPo.
Sunday, June 02, 2013
Links & Reviews
Apologies for the rather lengthy post this week: I've been on the road just a bit (New York last weekend for some family time, then to Boston for a couple days, then to New York for Book Expo America (on which there is a good writeup in the NYTimes), and now in Charlottesville to kick off the Rare Book School season) so I've fallen quite behind and had accumulated lots of things to pass along. So here they all are!
- The Law Society of England and Wales is moving ahead with the sale of selected items from the Mendham Collection, which will occur (barring any last-minute action) on 5 June at Sotheby's (see the catalog). This has sparked quite a discussion about the legal, moral, and ethical implications of the Society's decision, including calls for a boycott of the sale. Watch this space for more on this as events progress this week.
- A volunteer at the Buffalo History Museum, Daniel J. Witek, 50, has been charged with the theft of letters and postcards from the Aaron Conger Goodyear collection. Witek, using the alias "Walter Payne," tried to sell the documents to Lion Heart Autographs of New York City, but Lion Heart president David Lowenherz contacted the museum. As a volunteer, BHM officials say, Witek used the name "Daniel Mountbatten-Witek." So far mail fraud is the only charge filed against Witek, but more to come on this one, I'm sure.
- The head of Library and Archives Canada resigned in mid-May over improper use of government funds, and the Canadian Association of Research Libraries has called on the prime minister to consult with the library and archives community about filling the vacancy.
- The Baltimore Sun reported this week on the gradual return of the documents stolen from various archives by Barry Landau and his accomplice. So far only about twenty percent of the recovered materials have been returned.
- Quite an interesting resolution to a longstanding standoff over one of the original copies of the Bill of Rights: the New York Public Library and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania have agreed to share custody of the document for the next hundred years, at which time the settlement will be reexamined. The copy may be that which originally was sent to Pennsylvania (this is unclear); it has been at NYPL since 1896.
- Over on the Cardiff University rare books blog, a guide to manicules found in their collections.
- From Sarah Werner at The Collation: an excellent look at oddities in digital surrogates (and other topics).
- There's a good report on the PEN charity auction in the Telegraph; this saw a first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone annotated by J.K. Rowling sell for a record £150,000.
- Molly Schwartzburg posted a very interesting account of 18th-19th century cicada emergences as documented in 1824 by "J.S."
- The NYRB looks back on fifty years of book advertisements in its pages. At BEA this week I picked up a copy of the facsimile edition of the first NYRB issue they'd printed up for the anniversary, which makes for a very neat browse.
- Stephen Brumwell has been awarded the 2013 George Washington Book Prize for his forthcoming book George Washington: First Warrior.
- Two men have been sentenced in Denmark for the theft of more than 1,000 World War II documents from the Danish National Archives between 2009 and this year. The pair received jail terms of 24 and 21 months. Some documents were reportedly sold before they could be recovered.
- The great printer/designer Kim Merker died on 28 April; an obituary ran in the New York Times this week.
- From the new Mapping Books blog (link added on the sidebar), Mitch Fraas explores from a wide-angle view some of the things he's found in examining the "unique at Penn" ESTC books, and takes a look at the geographical distribution of the first edition of Whitman's Leaves of Grass.
- Vince Golden writes on the AAS blog about the recent acquisition of a volume of the National Magazine, purchased in honor of Marcus McCorison.
- The June AE Monthly is up; it includes an interview with Joel Silver, the new director of the Lilly Library.
- At the Public Domain Review, Christine Jones explores the early English translations of Charles Perrault's fairy tales.
- Heather Cole offered up a post on the anthropodermic binding at Houghton Library.
- John Van Horne, director of the Library Company of Philadelphia, has announced that he will retire in May 2014.
- From Erin Blake, the first in a series of posts about proof prints, covering trial proofs and progress proofs.
- Speaking at the Hay Festival of Literature, Matthew Haley of Bonhams told his audience that the loss of secondhand bookshops is a dangerous trend, but that "book towns" stand a real chance of successfully navigating the current rough waters.
- Jerry Morris at My Sentimental Library has posted some images and thoughts on the possibility that a book in his library may have belonged to John Hancock. We've emailed extensively about this and frankly I'm just not sure, but it makes for quite a good mystery!
- Also retiring is the chief librarian of the D.C. library system, Ginnie Cooper, profiled recently in the Washington Post.
- In a 1895 letter, Rudyard Kipling writes to an unknown correspondent that he may have "helped himself promiscuously" in drawing from other sources when he penned The Jungle Book.
- On the Houghton Library blog, a wonderful example of how collaborative scholarship is making some great things happen these days.
- The Junto folks have launched a podcast.
- From Nathan Raab at Forbes, a (very) brief survey of the history of the written word.
- The oldest known complete Torah scroll has been identified in the library of the University of Bologna; the twelfth-century manuscript had previously been miscataloged as dating from the seventeenth century.
- From the University of Glasgow rare books blog, a look at the use of false title pages in a 1670 octavo edition of Spinoza. And in other Spinoza-news, some good old-fashioned bibliographical detective work has resulted in the identification of Spinoza's printer.
- The Spring 2013 Common-place is out, and as usual is well worth a thorough read.
- Newly updated from the Society of Early Americanists: recent publications of interest to the field.
- I had a chance to read through the summer issue of the Journal of the Early Republic, and recommend it highly. Most of the articles draw on the A New Nation Votes project (AAS and Tufts), which is also a great way to wile away some time, I should note.
- At JCB Books Speak, Kenneth Ward reports on a very exciting new acquisition of a variant edition of Vetancurt's Arte de la lengua Mexicana (1673). There are some lingering mysteries around these two editions, so go check out the post and see if you can help!
- From Goran Proot at The Collation, a look at all ten Folger copies of the 1640 edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Duplicates? I think not!
- Over on The Appendix blog, a guest post from Ox and Pigeon editor Jason Curran.
- The Antiques Trade Digest reported recently on a few cases of the U.K. National Archives taking action to keep public records from being sold at auction.
- Felicity Henderson has a post on the Royal Society's blog about the group's early collections of curiosities.
- The John Rylands Library's Centre for Heritage Imaging and Collection Care will be digitizing the extensive archival collection of the papers of John Henry Cardinal Newman. They've started a blog to chronicle the project.
- On the OUP blog, Robert McNamee writes on the "marginalization" of Alexander Pope, both as a Catholic and for his physical deformity, and Pat Rogers offers up an essay on Pope's wordplay and writing technique.
- There's a short writeup in the Washington Post by Ron Charles on recent goings-on there, including an exhibit hall renovation and a particularly important copy of Shakespeare's works currently on display.
- From Princeton: the manuscript and annotated galleys of The Great Gatsby have been digitized.
Reviews
- Victor S. Navasky's The Art of Controversy; review by Deborah Solomon in the NYTimes.
- Peter Carlson's Junius and Albert's Adventures in the Confederacy; review by Tony Horwitz in the WaPo.
- Allen Guelzo's Gettysburg; review by Thomas Donnelly in the WSJ.
- J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fall of Arthur; review by Elizabeth Hand in the LATimes.
- David Scott's Leviathan; review by Brendan Simms in the Telegraph.
- E.O. Wilson's Letters to a Young Scientist; review by Bill Streever in the NYTimes.
- Philip Gura's Truth's Ragged Edge; review by Michael Gorra in the WSJ.
- Charlie Lovett's The Bookman's Tale; review by Rebecca Rego Barry at Fine Books Blog.
- Khaled Hosseini's And the Mountains Echoed; review by Wendy Smith in the LATimes.
- Joel Harrington's The Faithful Executioner; review by Daniel Stashower in the WaPo.
- The Law Society of England and Wales is moving ahead with the sale of selected items from the Mendham Collection, which will occur (barring any last-minute action) on 5 June at Sotheby's (see the catalog). This has sparked quite a discussion about the legal, moral, and ethical implications of the Society's decision, including calls for a boycott of the sale. Watch this space for more on this as events progress this week.
- A volunteer at the Buffalo History Museum, Daniel J. Witek, 50, has been charged with the theft of letters and postcards from the Aaron Conger Goodyear collection. Witek, using the alias "Walter Payne," tried to sell the documents to Lion Heart Autographs of New York City, but Lion Heart president David Lowenherz contacted the museum. As a volunteer, BHM officials say, Witek used the name "Daniel Mountbatten-Witek." So far mail fraud is the only charge filed against Witek, but more to come on this one, I'm sure.
- The head of Library and Archives Canada resigned in mid-May over improper use of government funds, and the Canadian Association of Research Libraries has called on the prime minister to consult with the library and archives community about filling the vacancy.
- The Baltimore Sun reported this week on the gradual return of the documents stolen from various archives by Barry Landau and his accomplice. So far only about twenty percent of the recovered materials have been returned.
- Quite an interesting resolution to a longstanding standoff over one of the original copies of the Bill of Rights: the New York Public Library and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania have agreed to share custody of the document for the next hundred years, at which time the settlement will be reexamined. The copy may be that which originally was sent to Pennsylvania (this is unclear); it has been at NYPL since 1896.
- Over on the Cardiff University rare books blog, a guide to manicules found in their collections.
- From Sarah Werner at The Collation: an excellent look at oddities in digital surrogates (and other topics).
- There's a good report on the PEN charity auction in the Telegraph; this saw a first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone annotated by J.K. Rowling sell for a record £150,000.
- Molly Schwartzburg posted a very interesting account of 18th-19th century cicada emergences as documented in 1824 by "J.S."
- The NYRB looks back on fifty years of book advertisements in its pages. At BEA this week I picked up a copy of the facsimile edition of the first NYRB issue they'd printed up for the anniversary, which makes for a very neat browse.
- Stephen Brumwell has been awarded the 2013 George Washington Book Prize for his forthcoming book George Washington: First Warrior.
- Two men have been sentenced in Denmark for the theft of more than 1,000 World War II documents from the Danish National Archives between 2009 and this year. The pair received jail terms of 24 and 21 months. Some documents were reportedly sold before they could be recovered.
- The great printer/designer Kim Merker died on 28 April; an obituary ran in the New York Times this week.
- From the new Mapping Books blog (link added on the sidebar), Mitch Fraas explores from a wide-angle view some of the things he's found in examining the "unique at Penn" ESTC books, and takes a look at the geographical distribution of the first edition of Whitman's Leaves of Grass.
- Vince Golden writes on the AAS blog about the recent acquisition of a volume of the National Magazine, purchased in honor of Marcus McCorison.
- The June AE Monthly is up; it includes an interview with Joel Silver, the new director of the Lilly Library.
- At the Public Domain Review, Christine Jones explores the early English translations of Charles Perrault's fairy tales.
- Heather Cole offered up a post on the anthropodermic binding at Houghton Library.
- John Van Horne, director of the Library Company of Philadelphia, has announced that he will retire in May 2014.
- From Erin Blake, the first in a series of posts about proof prints, covering trial proofs and progress proofs.
- Speaking at the Hay Festival of Literature, Matthew Haley of Bonhams told his audience that the loss of secondhand bookshops is a dangerous trend, but that "book towns" stand a real chance of successfully navigating the current rough waters.
- Jerry Morris at My Sentimental Library has posted some images and thoughts on the possibility that a book in his library may have belonged to John Hancock. We've emailed extensively about this and frankly I'm just not sure, but it makes for quite a good mystery!
- Also retiring is the chief librarian of the D.C. library system, Ginnie Cooper, profiled recently in the Washington Post.
- In a 1895 letter, Rudyard Kipling writes to an unknown correspondent that he may have "helped himself promiscuously" in drawing from other sources when he penned The Jungle Book.
- On the Houghton Library blog, a wonderful example of how collaborative scholarship is making some great things happen these days.
- The Junto folks have launched a podcast.
- From Nathan Raab at Forbes, a (very) brief survey of the history of the written word.
- The oldest known complete Torah scroll has been identified in the library of the University of Bologna; the twelfth-century manuscript had previously been miscataloged as dating from the seventeenth century.
- From the University of Glasgow rare books blog, a look at the use of false title pages in a 1670 octavo edition of Spinoza. And in other Spinoza-news, some good old-fashioned bibliographical detective work has resulted in the identification of Spinoza's printer.
- The Spring 2013 Common-place is out, and as usual is well worth a thorough read.
- Newly updated from the Society of Early Americanists: recent publications of interest to the field.
- I had a chance to read through the summer issue of the Journal of the Early Republic, and recommend it highly. Most of the articles draw on the A New Nation Votes project (AAS and Tufts), which is also a great way to wile away some time, I should note.
- At JCB Books Speak, Kenneth Ward reports on a very exciting new acquisition of a variant edition of Vetancurt's Arte de la lengua Mexicana (1673). There are some lingering mysteries around these two editions, so go check out the post and see if you can help!
- From Goran Proot at The Collation, a look at all ten Folger copies of the 1640 edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Duplicates? I think not!
- Over on The Appendix blog, a guest post from Ox and Pigeon editor Jason Curran.
- The Antiques Trade Digest reported recently on a few cases of the U.K. National Archives taking action to keep public records from being sold at auction.
- Felicity Henderson has a post on the Royal Society's blog about the group's early collections of curiosities.
- The John Rylands Library's Centre for Heritage Imaging and Collection Care will be digitizing the extensive archival collection of the papers of John Henry Cardinal Newman. They've started a blog to chronicle the project.
- On the OUP blog, Robert McNamee writes on the "marginalization" of Alexander Pope, both as a Catholic and for his physical deformity, and Pat Rogers offers up an essay on Pope's wordplay and writing technique.
- There's a short writeup in the Washington Post by Ron Charles on recent goings-on there, including an exhibit hall renovation and a particularly important copy of Shakespeare's works currently on display.
- From Princeton: the manuscript and annotated galleys of The Great Gatsby have been digitized.
Reviews
- Victor S. Navasky's The Art of Controversy; review by Deborah Solomon in the NYTimes.
- Peter Carlson's Junius and Albert's Adventures in the Confederacy; review by Tony Horwitz in the WaPo.
- Allen Guelzo's Gettysburg; review by Thomas Donnelly in the WSJ.
- J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fall of Arthur; review by Elizabeth Hand in the LATimes.
- David Scott's Leviathan; review by Brendan Simms in the Telegraph.
- E.O. Wilson's Letters to a Young Scientist; review by Bill Streever in the NYTimes.
- Philip Gura's Truth's Ragged Edge; review by Michael Gorra in the WSJ.
- Charlie Lovett's The Bookman's Tale; review by Rebecca Rego Barry at Fine Books Blog.
- Khaled Hosseini's And the Mountains Echoed; review by Wendy Smith in the LATimes.
- Joel Harrington's The Faithful Executioner; review by Daniel Stashower in the WaPo.
Book Review: "The Bookman's Tale"
A book about antiquarian books and forgery, actually written by someone who knows about such things and can write about them coherently? Needless to say, I wasn't about to miss this one. Charlie Lovett's The Bookman's Tale: A Novel of Obsession (Viking, 2013) is just such a book, and it's also an engaging and enjoyable read.
Peter Bylerly is an American rare book dealer living in the English countryside, still recovering from the tragic death of his wife, Amanda. When, in leafing through a copy of Edmond Malone's Inquiry into the authenticity of certain miscellaneous papers... he stumbles upon a 19th-century watercolor of a woman bearing an uncanny resemblance to Amanda, Peter feels compelled to learn more about the artist and his subject, and that leads him into quite a tangled web of forgery, deceit, and long-running family feuds (let us not speak of what he does with the watercolor; suffice it to say that it follows the long-running pattern in books of this type, with the protagonist taking an action which will make most biblio-folk cringe a bit).
Lovett intersperses Peter's narrative with flashbacks, both to ten years prior when Peter first got interested in rare books (and Amanda) during his college years, and to earlier scenes where the important rare book at the centerpiece of the plot passed from hand to hand through generations of readers (by means both fair and foul). It's filled with good details about Shakespeare scholarship, forgery, and the world of bookselling, and there's even a scene involving a Hinman Collator. (If there are other novels in which a collator is featured, I don't know of them but would very much like to, so please do let me know if you can think of any).
Now, there are a few particularly amazing coincidences throughout the book, a detail is off here and there, I could have done without some or all of the trysting in the rare book room (really?!), and I figured out the final twist fairly early on. But on the whole, I actually quite liked this book, and recommend it highly.
Peter Bylerly is an American rare book dealer living in the English countryside, still recovering from the tragic death of his wife, Amanda. When, in leafing through a copy of Edmond Malone's Inquiry into the authenticity of certain miscellaneous papers... he stumbles upon a 19th-century watercolor of a woman bearing an uncanny resemblance to Amanda, Peter feels compelled to learn more about the artist and his subject, and that leads him into quite a tangled web of forgery, deceit, and long-running family feuds (let us not speak of what he does with the watercolor; suffice it to say that it follows the long-running pattern in books of this type, with the protagonist taking an action which will make most biblio-folk cringe a bit).
Lovett intersperses Peter's narrative with flashbacks, both to ten years prior when Peter first got interested in rare books (and Amanda) during his college years, and to earlier scenes where the important rare book at the centerpiece of the plot passed from hand to hand through generations of readers (by means both fair and foul). It's filled with good details about Shakespeare scholarship, forgery, and the world of bookselling, and there's even a scene involving a Hinman Collator. (If there are other novels in which a collator is featured, I don't know of them but would very much like to, so please do let me know if you can think of any).
Now, there are a few particularly amazing coincidences throughout the book, a detail is off here and there, I could have done without some or all of the trysting in the rare book room (really?!), and I figured out the final twist fairly early on. But on the whole, I actually quite liked this book, and recommend it highly.
Sunday, May 19, 2013
Links & Reviews
- From Small Notes, the blog of UVA's special collections library, David Whitesell reports a reunion between long-separated fragments of a Jefferson manuscript (a ~1769 draft of rules changes for the House of Burgesses).
- The AAS has acquired an unrecorded 1812 New York edition of Aristotle's Masterpiece.
- From Heather Wolfe at The Collation, a fascinating look at handwriting instruction during the early modern period.
- Over at the Ticknor Society's blog, an overview of the books George Ticknor was borrowing from the Boston Athenaeum.
- From the BBC, a look inside the UK's last remaining carbon paper factory. [via Brycchan Carey]
- An important collection of Philip Mazzei manuscripts has been given to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.
- Quite a good exploration of early Bible leaves used as paper wrappers on the Cambridge Incunabula Project blog.
- The OED appeal I mentioned last week still stands, and got some attention this week from Rachel Maddow, among others.
- A 1939 journal by W.H. Auden, thought lost, has been found and will be sold at Christie's in June.
- From Medieval Fragments, a tour of one of the last intact chained libraries, at the Church of St. Walburga in Zutphen.
- At Salon, Andrew Leonard reports on a dark side of Wikipedia (its potential to draw vindictive sock-puppetry, &c.).
- Gordon Rugg on why the Voynich Manuscript matters.
- At Notabilia, a look at the distinctive shelf-mark of Charles Spencer, 3rd Earl of Sunderland.
- Sarah Faragher posted this week about a fantastic find at an antique shop: a copy of the 1773 edition of Johnson's Dictionary at what sounds like an extremely good price indeed.
- Always interesting: a step-by-step look at conservation on a 17th-century book from the Senate House collections. [via @john_overholt]
- In the TLS, Mark Davies explores a possible real-life inspiration for Lewis Carroll's Mad Hatter.
Reviews
- John Taliaferro's All the Great Prizes; review by Thomas Mallon in the NYTimes.
- Dan Brown's Inferno; review by Jake Kerridge in the Telegraph.
- Marcia Coyle's The Roberts Court; review by Jeffrey Rosen in the WaPo.
- The AAS has acquired an unrecorded 1812 New York edition of Aristotle's Masterpiece.
- From Heather Wolfe at The Collation, a fascinating look at handwriting instruction during the early modern period.
- Over at the Ticknor Society's blog, an overview of the books George Ticknor was borrowing from the Boston Athenaeum.
- From the BBC, a look inside the UK's last remaining carbon paper factory. [via Brycchan Carey]
- An important collection of Philip Mazzei manuscripts has been given to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.
- Quite a good exploration of early Bible leaves used as paper wrappers on the Cambridge Incunabula Project blog.
- The OED appeal I mentioned last week still stands, and got some attention this week from Rachel Maddow, among others.
- A 1939 journal by W.H. Auden, thought lost, has been found and will be sold at Christie's in June.
- From Medieval Fragments, a tour of one of the last intact chained libraries, at the Church of St. Walburga in Zutphen.
- At Salon, Andrew Leonard reports on a dark side of Wikipedia (its potential to draw vindictive sock-puppetry, &c.).
- Gordon Rugg on why the Voynich Manuscript matters.
- At Notabilia, a look at the distinctive shelf-mark of Charles Spencer, 3rd Earl of Sunderland.
- Sarah Faragher posted this week about a fantastic find at an antique shop: a copy of the 1773 edition of Johnson's Dictionary at what sounds like an extremely good price indeed.
- Always interesting: a step-by-step look at conservation on a 17th-century book from the Senate House collections. [via @john_overholt]
- In the TLS, Mark Davies explores a possible real-life inspiration for Lewis Carroll's Mad Hatter.
Reviews
- John Taliaferro's All the Great Prizes; review by Thomas Mallon in the NYTimes.
- Dan Brown's Inferno; review by Jake Kerridge in the Telegraph.
- Marcia Coyle's The Roberts Court; review by Jeffrey Rosen in the WaPo.
Sunday, May 12, 2013
Links & Reviews
- NPR reported this week on the Field Museum's ongoing financial difficulties, which may result in further deaccessioning of rare books and museum collections.
- Officials at the Vatican report that a 2006 restoration of a Pinturicchio fresco in the Room of the Mysteries revealed what they believe could well be the first European images of American Indians. The fresco was originally painted between 1492 and 1494, and the pope at the time (Alexander VI, Rodrigo Borgia) was quite interested in Columbus' findings.
- At the Eton College Library blog, a post on some M.R. James artifacts in the Eton collections. And speaking of James, BBC4 is currently streaming some of his stories adapted for radio (just a few days left to listen).
- New on the scene: Just Teach One, an effort to make available some "neglected or forgotten texts" for scholars of early American studies to use in the classroom (hosted by AAS and Common-place). Joe Adelman offers some thoughts from a historical and book-historical perspective over at The Junto.
- At the Incunabula Project blog, two participants in David Pearson's recent Masterclass at Cambridge on "Discovering Provenance in Book History" share their experiences.
- The Smithsonian's Design Decoded blog explores the phonetic alphabet of Benjamin Franklin. [h/t @john_overholt]
- The joys (and amusements) of pen facsimiles at The Collation.
- New: DPLA StackLife, a way to visualize DPLA collections (useful as an example of a new "front end" for the DPLA collections and how they can be "mashed up" with other resources).
Reviews
- Rick Gekoski's Lost, Stolen or Shredded; review by Pradeep Sebastian in The Hindu.
- Edward Rutherfurd's Paris; review by Rodney Welch in the WaPo.
- Nathaniel Philbrick's Bunker Hill; review by Scott Martelle in the LATimes.
- Jill Lepore's The Story of America; review by Amanda Foreman in the TLS.
- Two recent volumes on Samuel Johnson; review by Kate Chisholm in the TLS.
- Officials at the Vatican report that a 2006 restoration of a Pinturicchio fresco in the Room of the Mysteries revealed what they believe could well be the first European images of American Indians. The fresco was originally painted between 1492 and 1494, and the pope at the time (Alexander VI, Rodrigo Borgia) was quite interested in Columbus' findings.
- At the Eton College Library blog, a post on some M.R. James artifacts in the Eton collections. And speaking of James, BBC4 is currently streaming some of his stories adapted for radio (just a few days left to listen).
- New on the scene: Just Teach One, an effort to make available some "neglected or forgotten texts" for scholars of early American studies to use in the classroom (hosted by AAS and Common-place). Joe Adelman offers some thoughts from a historical and book-historical perspective over at The Junto.
- At the Incunabula Project blog, two participants in David Pearson's recent Masterclass at Cambridge on "Discovering Provenance in Book History" share their experiences.
- The Smithsonian's Design Decoded blog explores the phonetic alphabet of Benjamin Franklin. [h/t @john_overholt]
- The joys (and amusements) of pen facsimiles at The Collation.
- New: DPLA StackLife, a way to visualize DPLA collections (useful as an example of a new "front end" for the DPLA collections and how they can be "mashed up" with other resources).
Reviews
- Rick Gekoski's Lost, Stolen or Shredded; review by Pradeep Sebastian in The Hindu.
- Edward Rutherfurd's Paris; review by Rodney Welch in the WaPo.
- Nathaniel Philbrick's Bunker Hill; review by Scott Martelle in the LATimes.
- Jill Lepore's The Story of America; review by Amanda Foreman in the TLS.
- Two recent volumes on Samuel Johnson; review by Kate Chisholm in the TLS.
Saturday, May 11, 2013
Auction Report: April & May
Recent and upcoming auction doings:
- 10 April was a pretty amazing day for Christie's New York. The sale of the first part of the Collection of Arthur & Charlotte Vershbow on 10 April can only be described as spectacular. The sale realized a grand total of $15,842,145, with Goya's Tauromaquia leading the way at $1,915,750. Another Goya lot, Los Caprichos, sold for $843,750. And in their single-item sale on the same day, Christie's sold Dr. Francis Crick's "secret of life" letter to his son for an eye-popping $6,059,750.
- Bloomsbury sold Books on Horology, Science, and Medicine on 11 April; results here.
- At Swann on 11 April, Fine Books Including Incunabula and Writing Manuals, in 148 lots. The Noble Fragment Gutenberg leaf sold for $55,200, and the first edition of Audubon's Quadrupeds made $288,000. The (only?) presentation copy of Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield fetched $16,800, and early printing did especially well.
- Swann sold Printed & Manuscript Americana on 16 April. A collection of Civil War diaries and letters by two friends in a California regiment sold for $31,200, while an archive of material by natural historian William Cooper and his son James Graham Cooper made $40,800 (over estimates of just $1,500-2,500). An extreme Theodore Roosevelt rarity, a memorial volume to his wife and mother, sold for $38,400.
- Bloomsbury held a Bibliophile Sale on 18 April, in 655 lots. Results here.
- Christie's London sold Travel, Science, and Natural History items on 24 London, realizing £1,658,075. The manuscript speech by Wilbur Wright sold for £61,875, while the egg of an extinct elephant bird fetched £66,675.
- PBA Galleries sold Travel & Exploration, Cartography & Americana from the Library of Glen McLaughlin (with additions) on 25 April. Their website was having issues when I wrote this, so I don't have results information at present.
- Christie's Paris' sale of Importants Lives Anciens, Livres d'artistes et Manuscrits on 29 April brought in 2,407,762 Euros, with Hugo, Balzac and Proust manuscript lots taking top honors.
- At Sotheby's Paris on 29-30 April, the first part of the Bibliothèque des ducs de Luynes, Château de Dampierre was sold, for a total of 2,354,715 Euros. The grand folio volume with Blondel watercolors produced to mark the wedding of the dauphin in 1745 sold for 301,500 Euros, but it was a manuscript map noting action involving Lafayette during the American Revolution which took the top price, fetching 373,500 Euros (over estimates of just 60,000-80,000 Euros).
- Bloomsbury sold The Library of a Continental Gentleman: Natural History Books on 9 May, in 288 lots. Results here. A copy of Ventenat's Description des Plantes Nouvelles et peu Connues (1800-1802) sold for £13,000.
- Swann sold Art, Press & Illustrated Books, including inventory from the stock of Irving Oaklander on 9 May. See the summer Fine Books & Collection for an overview of this sale.
- Sotheby's London sells Travel, Atlases, Maps & Natural History on 14 May, in 219 lots. An early 18th-century illustrated manuscript of Piri Reis' Kitab-i Bahriye once in the Phillipps collection could fetch £100,000-150,000.
- At Bloomsbury on 16 May, a Bibliophile Sale, in 406 lots.
- Sotheby's London holds a sale of First Editions, Second Thoughts on 21 May. This sale includes 50 contemporary first editions, annotated by their authors, to benefit the charity English PEN. Browse the available lots here.
- On 29 May at Sotheby's Paris, Livres et Manuscrits, in 149 lots. An archive of Rousseau letters is estimated at 250,000-350,000 Euros.
- PBA Galleries sells South Sea: The Library of Richard Topel, Part II on 30 May, in 349 lots.
- Also on 30 May, Bloomsbury holds a 30th Anniversary Sale of Books, Manuscripts and Works on Paper, in 424 lots.
- 10 April was a pretty amazing day for Christie's New York. The sale of the first part of the Collection of Arthur & Charlotte Vershbow on 10 April can only be described as spectacular. The sale realized a grand total of $15,842,145, with Goya's Tauromaquia leading the way at $1,915,750. Another Goya lot, Los Caprichos, sold for $843,750. And in their single-item sale on the same day, Christie's sold Dr. Francis Crick's "secret of life" letter to his son for an eye-popping $6,059,750.
- Bloomsbury sold Books on Horology, Science, and Medicine on 11 April; results here.
- At Swann on 11 April, Fine Books Including Incunabula and Writing Manuals, in 148 lots. The Noble Fragment Gutenberg leaf sold for $55,200, and the first edition of Audubon's Quadrupeds made $288,000. The (only?) presentation copy of Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield fetched $16,800, and early printing did especially well.
- Swann sold Printed & Manuscript Americana on 16 April. A collection of Civil War diaries and letters by two friends in a California regiment sold for $31,200, while an archive of material by natural historian William Cooper and his son James Graham Cooper made $40,800 (over estimates of just $1,500-2,500). An extreme Theodore Roosevelt rarity, a memorial volume to his wife and mother, sold for $38,400.
- Bloomsbury held a Bibliophile Sale on 18 April, in 655 lots. Results here.
- Christie's London sold Travel, Science, and Natural History items on 24 London, realizing £1,658,075. The manuscript speech by Wilbur Wright sold for £61,875, while the egg of an extinct elephant bird fetched £66,675.
- PBA Galleries sold Travel & Exploration, Cartography & Americana from the Library of Glen McLaughlin (with additions) on 25 April. Their website was having issues when I wrote this, so I don't have results information at present.
- Christie's Paris' sale of Importants Lives Anciens, Livres d'artistes et Manuscrits on 29 April brought in 2,407,762 Euros, with Hugo, Balzac and Proust manuscript lots taking top honors.
- At Sotheby's Paris on 29-30 April, the first part of the Bibliothèque des ducs de Luynes, Château de Dampierre was sold, for a total of 2,354,715 Euros. The grand folio volume with Blondel watercolors produced to mark the wedding of the dauphin in 1745 sold for 301,500 Euros, but it was a manuscript map noting action involving Lafayette during the American Revolution which took the top price, fetching 373,500 Euros (over estimates of just 60,000-80,000 Euros).
- Bloomsbury sold The Library of a Continental Gentleman: Natural History Books on 9 May, in 288 lots. Results here. A copy of Ventenat's Description des Plantes Nouvelles et peu Connues (1800-1802) sold for £13,000.
- Swann sold Art, Press & Illustrated Books, including inventory from the stock of Irving Oaklander on 9 May. See the summer Fine Books & Collection for an overview of this sale.
- Sotheby's London sells Travel, Atlases, Maps & Natural History on 14 May, in 219 lots. An early 18th-century illustrated manuscript of Piri Reis' Kitab-i Bahriye once in the Phillipps collection could fetch £100,000-150,000.
- At Bloomsbury on 16 May, a Bibliophile Sale, in 406 lots.
- Sotheby's London holds a sale of First Editions, Second Thoughts on 21 May. This sale includes 50 contemporary first editions, annotated by their authors, to benefit the charity English PEN. Browse the available lots here.
- On 29 May at Sotheby's Paris, Livres et Manuscrits, in 149 lots. An archive of Rousseau letters is estimated at 250,000-350,000 Euros.
- PBA Galleries sells South Sea: The Library of Richard Topel, Part II on 30 May, in 349 lots.
- Also on 30 May, Bloomsbury holds a 30th Anniversary Sale of Books, Manuscripts and Works on Paper, in 424 lots.
Sunday, May 05, 2013
Links & Reviews
- Your must-read piece this week is John Overholt's "Five Theses on the Future of Special Collections," which will appear in a forthcoming issue of RBM but is available now via Harvard's OA DASH repository. It is an excellent, timely, and provocative essay which I hope will receive the large audience it very much deserves.
- The editors of the OED have issued a public appeal for help in identifying a book cited in the dictionary but which doesn't seem to be held in any libraries and is only found mentioned in a few places (so far). Quite a fun rabbit-hole to lose yourself down, as I've discovered. Let's help them find this book!
- At The Collation, Erin Blake explores "Two disciplines separated by a common language" - that is, "print culture" as either pertaining to printed pictures or printed words.
- Jennifer Howard profiles Bethany Nowviskie of UVA's Scholars Lab for The Chronicle.
- The Bodleian Library has acquired a manuscript of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem "Binsey Poplars" for £50,000.
- In today's New York Times, a look at how the sequester budget cuts are affecting the Library of Congress.
- The National Library of Wales announced this week that they will no longer be claiming copyright over digitized copies of items from its collections.
- From the medievalfragments blog, a summary of a recent (and very awesome) find: 132 medieval notes and fragments found in the binding of a 1577 book.
- Sarah Werner expands on her recent Collation post on digitized copies of the First Folio at Wynken de Worde, asking just what it is that we should want as users of such digital surrogates (and not just of the First Folio, but of such things generally).
- New from the Massachusetts Historical Society, a digital presentation of the wonderfully interesting Harbottle Dorr annotated newspapers. See the blog post announcing the launch.
- David Rubenstein has lent a copy of the Stone Declaration of Independence to the State Department and will fund reproductions of the broadside to be displayed in every U.S. embassy.
- Over at EMOB, Anna Battigelli summarizes a recent Beinecke Library conference on digital archiving, Beyond the Text: Library Archives in the 21st Century.
- From Cultural Compass, the blog of the Harry Ransom Center, a post about the process used to create a digital version of the Center's Blaeu "great wall map."
- At Boston 1775 this week, J.L. Bell talked to Nat Philbrick about Philbrick's new book on the Battle of Bunker Hill: Part I, Part II.
- The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists announced the launch of their new journal this week: J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.
- Over at Brown's curio blog, a look at a first edition Great Gatsby inscribed to T.S. Eliot by Fitzgerald (who spelled Eliot's name wrong) with Eliot's pencilled marginal notes throughout.
- I'm not sure if this is new or not, but it's new to me so I wanted to mention it: The Morgan Library & Museum has posted a piece on the provenance of their copy of the Gutenberg Bible.
Reviews
- Randall Woods' Shadow Warrior; review by Evan Thomas in the NYTimes.
- Steve Vogel's Through the Perilous Fight; review by Joyce Appleby in the WaPo.
- The editors of the OED have issued a public appeal for help in identifying a book cited in the dictionary but which doesn't seem to be held in any libraries and is only found mentioned in a few places (so far). Quite a fun rabbit-hole to lose yourself down, as I've discovered. Let's help them find this book!
- At The Collation, Erin Blake explores "Two disciplines separated by a common language" - that is, "print culture" as either pertaining to printed pictures or printed words.
- Jennifer Howard profiles Bethany Nowviskie of UVA's Scholars Lab for The Chronicle.
- The Bodleian Library has acquired a manuscript of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem "Binsey Poplars" for £50,000.
- In today's New York Times, a look at how the sequester budget cuts are affecting the Library of Congress.
- The National Library of Wales announced this week that they will no longer be claiming copyright over digitized copies of items from its collections.
- From the medievalfragments blog, a summary of a recent (and very awesome) find: 132 medieval notes and fragments found in the binding of a 1577 book.
- Sarah Werner expands on her recent Collation post on digitized copies of the First Folio at Wynken de Worde, asking just what it is that we should want as users of such digital surrogates (and not just of the First Folio, but of such things generally).
- New from the Massachusetts Historical Society, a digital presentation of the wonderfully interesting Harbottle Dorr annotated newspapers. See the blog post announcing the launch.
- David Rubenstein has lent a copy of the Stone Declaration of Independence to the State Department and will fund reproductions of the broadside to be displayed in every U.S. embassy.
- Over at EMOB, Anna Battigelli summarizes a recent Beinecke Library conference on digital archiving, Beyond the Text: Library Archives in the 21st Century.
- From Cultural Compass, the blog of the Harry Ransom Center, a post about the process used to create a digital version of the Center's Blaeu "great wall map."
- At Boston 1775 this week, J.L. Bell talked to Nat Philbrick about Philbrick's new book on the Battle of Bunker Hill: Part I, Part II.
- The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists announced the launch of their new journal this week: J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.
- Over at Brown's curio blog, a look at a first edition Great Gatsby inscribed to T.S. Eliot by Fitzgerald (who spelled Eliot's name wrong) with Eliot's pencilled marginal notes throughout.
- I'm not sure if this is new or not, but it's new to me so I wanted to mention it: The Morgan Library & Museum has posted a piece on the provenance of their copy of the Gutenberg Bible.
Reviews
- Randall Woods' Shadow Warrior; review by Evan Thomas in the NYTimes.
- Steve Vogel's Through the Perilous Fight; review by Joyce Appleby in the WaPo.
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