John Palfrey's BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google (Basic Books, 2015) offers a timely and heartfelt examination of the library world as it is, as well as a series of steps he suggests will ensure that libraries will remain vital parts of the American community well into the future.
I wish one more word appeared in the subtitle: "Public." Because by and large the libraries Palfrey discusses in this book are the community-based public libraries that populate large cities and small towns throughout America, like the one I walked to many days after school (where I learned about the magical mysteries of interlibrary loan, where I first used the Internet, and where I came to appreciate the absolutely essential role that a good librarian can play in shaping lifelong habits and interests). These, it must be noted at the outset, are for the most part the libraries Palfrey refers to. At least, I hope they are, since at least some of his recommendations would be severely out of place if applied to most libraries at schools, colleges, and universities, not to mention independent research libraries, archives, and historical societies.
Such shorthanding can be partially understood if we take Palfrey at his word that this book is targeted not at librarians, but at "those who do not work in libraries and who should be taking a greater interest in the fate of these essential knowledge institutions on which we rely more than we seem to realize" (p. 17). I do wish, though, that he had explicitly made the point somewhere in the book, since I fear that Palfrey's message could be easily misapplied by well-meaning but unwise administrators or oversight boards, with potentially dramatic and drastic consequences for the types of libraries to which Palfrey's (over)generalizations simply aren't germane. The needs of the scholarly community at a major research university are vastly different from the needs of the patrons of the Jamaica Plan branch of the Boston Public Library; what is good medicine for the one might well poison the other, or vice versa. If Palfrey sees his prescriptions as universal (which I'm not suggesting he does, but wish that he'd made clear), then there are places where he's just flat-out gotten it wrong. So let's give him the benefit of the doubt, and from here on I will focus to the extent possible on his recommendations in the context of their application to public libraries—recognizing that there are vast differences between those as well.
Palfrey is correct to say that public libraries today will not be able to survive by coasting along on a wave of nostalgia, offering rooms full of Nora Roberts paperbacks, back issues of Popular Science, copies of the 1040 tax form, and a few computer terminals (my examples, not his). All those things can be had elsewhere, probably in more comfortable surroundings. He is also correct that increased regional cooperation, libraries as a "network of stewards" (p. 33), is going to be very important, as is an increased focus on providing digital access to books and other resources. It is true that librarians cannot simply throw up their hands and ignore the trends in publishing and book distribution, nor should they stand by silently (or even quietly) and allow a few powerful companies to come in and control the way people read, or the way libraries handle their own data.
He is also entirely right to call for increased funding, both from governments at every level and from private foundations, to support the important work that public libraries do, from providing a bridge across the "digital divide," offering spaces for civic engagement, educational services, community activities (but also for quiet contemplation), as well as (and still most importantly in my view) being access points for information. Obviously, too, innovative and imaginative programming for children and adults is a must.
Much of what Palfrey calls for is commonsensical and perfectly reasonable. As the founding director of the Digital Public Library of America, it makes sense that he mentions that organization's laudable mission every chance he gets (it's not the only thing he repeats several times throughout the book). He makes it difficult to argue with the idea that more R&D in libraries would be a good thing for the future of the library (it would!) and that librarians should be thinking creatively and frequently about how the ultimate mission of their institution can be pushed forward.
But there are some areas where I take strong issue with Palfrey. He writes, "Libraries must continue to make the shift toward the digital and away from print. The shift should not be overnight, but it should be made steadily and with great care. Libraries can and should de-accession physical materials much more aggressively than they do today, especially to save space and money when these materials are redundant with other local collections or digital forms of access to them. The public will have to accept slower delivery times for print-related materials to come back from efficient shared storage facilities" (p. 219). This blithe dismissal of concerns, "the public will have to accept," comes just a few pages after Palfrey notes that "the browsing experience is one of the most magical childhood memories for many people" (p. 207). This experience he doesn't dismiss so casually, though he suggests that "experimentation in digital browsing could eliminate the problem of reduced serendipity with the removal of physical stacks" (p. 215). That doesn't fly with me. I find virtual browsing to be an exceedingly poor replacement for shelf-browsing. You can't pick up that book on the next shelf that might be relevant in order to check the table of contents or the index ... and if you do think a nearby book might be needed, you'll have to order it up, then wait a day or more for it to be retrieved from wherever it's been stowed. Don't get me wrong, in certain cases offsite storage makes sense, but replacing open stacks with virtual browsing is by no means an acceptable substitution, nor should it be one that is turned to without a deep understanding of how it will change the library experience.
Palfrey's cliché-laden references to the book as physical object rubbed me the wrong way too, though that happens with every author who insists on referring to library stacks on nearly every reference as "dimly lit," or "musty." If your library's stacks smell musty, there is something seriously wrong; this is not to be celebrated!
This all seems like a lot of criticism (and it is) but I am genuinely glad that Palfrey wrote this book, and I firmly agree with much of what he says: cooperation, innovation, the adoption of new technologies: these are all important parts of ensuring that libraries have a vibrant future, as are finding new sources for investment in library technologies and infrastructure. We may differ on the details as well as on the extent to which his recommendations apply, but this is certainly a book which deserves a broad audience and one which will, I hope, lead to significant discussions both within the library community and between librarians and those who support (in several different senses of the word) the work they do.
Wednesday, May 20, 2015
Sunday, May 17, 2015
Links & Reviews
- The Jewish Theological Seminary is selling a Gutenberg Bible fragment from its collections: the complete Book of Esther (in eight leaves) will go on the block at Christie's on 19 June, with an estimate of $500,000-700,000. The JTS will also sell thirteen other early printed texts, in preparation for the temporary closure of the library.
- There is a report in The Guardian today about a major conference scheduled for 26 June at the British Library: The Written Heritage of Mankind in Peril: Theft, Retrieval, Sale, and Restitution of rare books, maps, and manuscripts.
- Sebastian Stockman, writing in the Boston Globe, recaps the Radcliffe Institute's recent "University as Collector" conference. Even better, videos from the conference are now available here.
- Andrea Mays talked to NPR this week about her new book The Millionaire and the Bard, about Folger's Foliomania.
- Over at Echoes from the Vault, a great story about the identification of incunabula leaves used as endpapers.
- More than 100 past Rare Book School lectures (going back to a Graham Pollard talk in 1973) are now available on the RBS website.
- From the Harvard Gazette, "Robert Darnton closes the book." See also the full text of Darnton's remarks at a farewell celebration.
- Nina Schneider writes on the Clark Library's blog about the opportunity staff there are taking to reorganize their fine press collection, as they prepare for a building retrofit.
- From the Essex Centre for Bibliographical History, "Twitter, the book historian's friend."
- The Kaiser Library in Kathmandu was badly damaged in the recent earthquakes.
- From the HRC newsletter, a peek inside the processing of the Gabriel Garcia Márquez archive.
- In an effort to break open the case, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum has offered a $100,000 reward for the return of a bronze eagle finial stolen along with major works of art during the 1990 heist (this is in addition to the $5 million reward offered for all of the stolen art).
- A copy of the 1611 "Great She Bible" has been identified in St Mary's Parish Church in Gisburn, Lancashire.
- Historian Joseph Ellis is featured in the NYTimes' "By the Book" column.
- Historian Peter Gay died this week at the age of 91. Read the NYTimes obituary.
Reviews
- The new BBC adaptation of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell; review by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst in the Telegraph.
- Three recent books on the Battle of Waterloo; review by Gerard DeGroot in the WaPo.
- John Hemming's Naturalists in Paradise; review by Mark J. Plotkin in the WaPo.
- Andrea Mays' The Millionaire and the Bard; review by Howard Schneider in the WSJ.
- There is a report in The Guardian today about a major conference scheduled for 26 June at the British Library: The Written Heritage of Mankind in Peril: Theft, Retrieval, Sale, and Restitution of rare books, maps, and manuscripts.
- Sebastian Stockman, writing in the Boston Globe, recaps the Radcliffe Institute's recent "University as Collector" conference. Even better, videos from the conference are now available here.
- Andrea Mays talked to NPR this week about her new book The Millionaire and the Bard, about Folger's Foliomania.
- Over at Echoes from the Vault, a great story about the identification of incunabula leaves used as endpapers.
- More than 100 past Rare Book School lectures (going back to a Graham Pollard talk in 1973) are now available on the RBS website.
- From the Harvard Gazette, "Robert Darnton closes the book." See also the full text of Darnton's remarks at a farewell celebration.
- Nina Schneider writes on the Clark Library's blog about the opportunity staff there are taking to reorganize their fine press collection, as they prepare for a building retrofit.
- From the Essex Centre for Bibliographical History, "Twitter, the book historian's friend."
- The Kaiser Library in Kathmandu was badly damaged in the recent earthquakes.
- From the HRC newsletter, a peek inside the processing of the Gabriel Garcia Márquez archive.
- In an effort to break open the case, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum has offered a $100,000 reward for the return of a bronze eagle finial stolen along with major works of art during the 1990 heist (this is in addition to the $5 million reward offered for all of the stolen art).
- A copy of the 1611 "Great She Bible" has been identified in St Mary's Parish Church in Gisburn, Lancashire.
- Historian Joseph Ellis is featured in the NYTimes' "By the Book" column.
- Historian Peter Gay died this week at the age of 91. Read the NYTimes obituary.
Reviews
- The new BBC adaptation of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell; review by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst in the Telegraph.
- Three recent books on the Battle of Waterloo; review by Gerard DeGroot in the WaPo.
- John Hemming's Naturalists in Paradise; review by Mark J. Plotkin in the WaPo.
- Andrea Mays' The Millionaire and the Bard; review by Howard Schneider in the WSJ.
Sunday, May 10, 2015
Links & Reviews
- Rebecca Rego Barry has a bit more about the apparent theft of materials from the NYPL. Mitch Fraas has posted some court filings from the case and linked to the NYPL Bulletin issue from 1930 announcing the library's acquisition of the Franklin Work Book.
- The Gospels of Queen Theutberga of Lorraine, a ninth-century manuscript described as "pristine," will be sold at Christie's London on 15 July, estimated at £1.5 million. It was sold from the Beck Collection at Sotheby's in 1997 for around £1 million and has been in a private collection since then.
- The University of Pennsylvania has acquired a copy of what is believed to be the last full-length book printed by Benjamin Franklin, Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg's Petit Code de la raison humaine (printed at Passy in 1782).
- History of Humanities, a new journal, will be published by the University of Chicago Press beginning next spring.
- The British Library has launched a new guide to its collection of American newspapers.
- Carol Berkin talked to John Fea about her new book The Bill of Rights.
- The collection of Japanese internment camp artifacts recently pulled from auction have been acquired by the Japanese American National Museum in LA.
- The Obama Presidential Library will be located in Chicago.
- A new online database of the library of Robert Hooke has launched.
- Writing in the Washington Post, Hillary Kelly argues for a return to the serialization of novels.
- Scholars at the Mark Twain Papers project have identified a number of news stories written by Twain during his early journalistic career.
- Five volumes of manuscripts from the Paston Family correspondence have been digitized and are now available online.
- In The Guardian, David Shariatmadari offers "a history of cartography in 12 amazing maps."
- A signed first edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude stolen from a display case at a Bogota book fair was recovered after a week.
- In an editorial, the New York Times has called for needed funding increases for the city's public libraries.
- Cambridge University has acquired two books from the library of historian Edward Gibbon, and Liam Sims has written a thorough account of these new acquisitions as well as the rest of Gibbons' library.
- The Library Company of Philadelphia has joined the Provenance Online Project.
- Tracey Kry writes about some of the legal manuscripts in the AAS collections.
- Excerpts from John Palfrey's new book BiblioTech have been posted on Medium as "The Future of the Stacks." On LibraryCity, David Rothman has a long post on Palfrey's book at the DPLA.
- OPenn has launched, with the entire Schoenberg Collection and other digitized Penn manuscripts available for viewing/downloading/&c.
- A new book claims that Jane Austen's character Mr. Darcy was based on the real-life John Parker, the first Earl of Morley.
- Wired notes the launch of a new online viewer for the US Geological Survey's topographic maps.
- A collection of books, broadsides, and pamphlets associated with Ireland, from the collection of collector Tony Sweeney, will be sold at auction in Dublin on 12 May. See the catalog. Sweeney had tried to collect "the best possible copy of every book or pamphlet that could be shown to have a connection to Ireland before 1700."
- Illinois State University has acquired a collection of material related to animal trainer and circus owner Clyde Beatty. The collection was compiled by Dave and Mary Jane Price over some six decades.
Reviews
- The 2015 CODEX Book Fair and Symposium; review by Gregory Eow.
- Rosa Salzburg's Ephemeral City: Cheap Print and Urban Culture in Renaissance Venice; review by Alexander S. Wilkinson at Reviews in History.
- David McCullough's The Wright Brothers; reviews by Daniel Okrent and Janet Maslin in the NYTimes, Reeve Lindbergh in the WaPo.
- Charlotte Gordon's Romantic Outlaws; review by Cristina Nehring in the NYTimes.
- Joseph Ellis' The Quartet; review by R.B. Bernstein in the NYTimes.
- Cokie Roberts' Capital Dames; review by Elaine Showalter in the WaPo.
- Thomas Kunkel's Man in Profile; review by Michael Dirda in the WaPo.
- Phyllis Lee Levin's The Remarkable Education of John Quincy Adams; review by Glenn Altschuler in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
- Hugh Aldersey-Williams' The Adventures of Sir Thomas Browne in the 21st Century; review by Noel Malcolm in The Telegraph.
- Sabaa Tahir's An Ember in the Ashes; review by Marie Rutkoski in the NYTimes.
- Abigail Swingen's Competing Visions of Empire; review by Jessica Parr at The Junto.
- Bruce Holsinger's The Invention of Fire; reviews by Amy Gwiazdowski at The Book Report and Patrick Anderson in the WaPo.
- Matthew Pearl's The Last Bookaneer; review by Rebecca Rego Barry at Fine Books Blog.
- The Gospels of Queen Theutberga of Lorraine, a ninth-century manuscript described as "pristine," will be sold at Christie's London on 15 July, estimated at £1.5 million. It was sold from the Beck Collection at Sotheby's in 1997 for around £1 million and has been in a private collection since then.
- The University of Pennsylvania has acquired a copy of what is believed to be the last full-length book printed by Benjamin Franklin, Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg's Petit Code de la raison humaine (printed at Passy in 1782).
- History of Humanities, a new journal, will be published by the University of Chicago Press beginning next spring.
- The British Library has launched a new guide to its collection of American newspapers.
- Carol Berkin talked to John Fea about her new book The Bill of Rights.
- The collection of Japanese internment camp artifacts recently pulled from auction have been acquired by the Japanese American National Museum in LA.
- The Obama Presidential Library will be located in Chicago.
- A new online database of the library of Robert Hooke has launched.
- Writing in the Washington Post, Hillary Kelly argues for a return to the serialization of novels.
- Scholars at the Mark Twain Papers project have identified a number of news stories written by Twain during his early journalistic career.
- Five volumes of manuscripts from the Paston Family correspondence have been digitized and are now available online.
- In The Guardian, David Shariatmadari offers "a history of cartography in 12 amazing maps."
- A signed first edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude stolen from a display case at a Bogota book fair was recovered after a week.
- In an editorial, the New York Times has called for needed funding increases for the city's public libraries.
- Cambridge University has acquired two books from the library of historian Edward Gibbon, and Liam Sims has written a thorough account of these new acquisitions as well as the rest of Gibbons' library.
- The Library Company of Philadelphia has joined the Provenance Online Project.
- Tracey Kry writes about some of the legal manuscripts in the AAS collections.
- Excerpts from John Palfrey's new book BiblioTech have been posted on Medium as "The Future of the Stacks." On LibraryCity, David Rothman has a long post on Palfrey's book at the DPLA.
- OPenn has launched, with the entire Schoenberg Collection and other digitized Penn manuscripts available for viewing/downloading/&c.
- A new book claims that Jane Austen's character Mr. Darcy was based on the real-life John Parker, the first Earl of Morley.
- Wired notes the launch of a new online viewer for the US Geological Survey's topographic maps.
- A collection of books, broadsides, and pamphlets associated with Ireland, from the collection of collector Tony Sweeney, will be sold at auction in Dublin on 12 May. See the catalog. Sweeney had tried to collect "the best possible copy of every book or pamphlet that could be shown to have a connection to Ireland before 1700."
- Illinois State University has acquired a collection of material related to animal trainer and circus owner Clyde Beatty. The collection was compiled by Dave and Mary Jane Price over some six decades.
Reviews
- The 2015 CODEX Book Fair and Symposium; review by Gregory Eow.
- Rosa Salzburg's Ephemeral City: Cheap Print and Urban Culture in Renaissance Venice; review by Alexander S. Wilkinson at Reviews in History.
- David McCullough's The Wright Brothers; reviews by Daniel Okrent and Janet Maslin in the NYTimes, Reeve Lindbergh in the WaPo.
- Charlotte Gordon's Romantic Outlaws; review by Cristina Nehring in the NYTimes.
- Joseph Ellis' The Quartet; review by R.B. Bernstein in the NYTimes.
- Cokie Roberts' Capital Dames; review by Elaine Showalter in the WaPo.
- Thomas Kunkel's Man in Profile; review by Michael Dirda in the WaPo.
- Phyllis Lee Levin's The Remarkable Education of John Quincy Adams; review by Glenn Altschuler in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
- Hugh Aldersey-Williams' The Adventures of Sir Thomas Browne in the 21st Century; review by Noel Malcolm in The Telegraph.
- Sabaa Tahir's An Ember in the Ashes; review by Marie Rutkoski in the NYTimes.
- Abigail Swingen's Competing Visions of Empire; review by Jessica Parr at The Junto.
- Bruce Holsinger's The Invention of Fire; reviews by Amy Gwiazdowski at The Book Report and Patrick Anderson in the WaPo.
- Matthew Pearl's The Last Bookaneer; review by Rebecca Rego Barry at Fine Books Blog.
Sunday, April 26, 2015
Links & Reviews
- Going to have to dig into this one and try to find some more information: there are reports in the New York Daily News and the Wall Street Journal that federal authorities are looking into the theft of seven rare books and a Benjamin Franklin manuscript from the New York Public Library. According to the report, Margaret Tanchuk took the books to Doyle auction house for appraisal last May and Doyle contacted the library after noting library markings; she maintains that she is the legal owner after finding the materials when cleaning out her late father's jewelry store. The Franklin manuscript, known as "Work Book No. 2" and containing the accounts of the Franklin & Hall partnership from 1759 through 1766, is believed to have been stolen sometime between 1988 and 1991. According to a newspaper clipping [found via Google Books] the manuscript turned up in 1924 in an attic in Mount Holly, N.J. There is a photocopy [noted as "from the original at the New York Public Library"] in the David Hall Papers at the American Philosophical Society. [Update: adding a link to this article from 7 April, which comes at this case from the opposite side.]
- Duke University has acquired the truly amazing collection of books and other materials related to women's history (broadly defined) assembled by Lisa Unger Baskin over more than four decades.
- Erik Kwakkel has a fascinating post up about rare medieval name tags, kept in the archives of a Leiden orphanage.
- A collection of Herman Hesse manuscripts will be sold at auction in May by Ketterer Kunst Hamburg.
- Laura Aydelotte writes about a William Henry Ireland "Shakespeare" signature in a quarto Hamlet.
- Nora Krug reports on the ongoing publishing juggernaut that the annotated autobiography of Laura Ingalls Wilder has become.
- A book stolen from a private library in Rome last year has been located at a Buenos Aires bookstore after it was listed for sale online, according to Italian media reports. The reports do not indicate whether other books from the same theft were also found.
- Indiana may build a $25 million state archives building in downtown Indianapolis.
- The NYTimes covers a recent report by public library officials in New York City warning of a "staggering infrastructure crisis" in the branch library facilities.
- The ABAA blog reports that three items were discovered missing after the New York Antiquarian Book Fair. If you have any information, please contact ABAA Security Chair Garrett Scott.
- The Harvard Gazette reports on several events leading up to the centennial of Harvard's Widener Library, coming up this June.
- The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum has acquired a large collection of the papers of Arthur C. Clarke.
- Missed this last week: the NYTimes obituary of T. H. Tsien, who died on 9 April at the age of 105, is very much worth a read.
- In TNR, William Giraldi writes on "Why we need physical books."
Reviews
- Bruce Holsinger's The Invention of Fire; review by Rebecca Rego Barry at the Fine Books Blog.
- Michael Pye's The Edge of the World; review by Michael Dirda in the Washington Post.
- Charlotte Gordon's Romantic Outlaws; review by Anna Russell in the WSJ (there's also a Q&A with the author).
- Alberto Manguel's Curiosity; review by Iain Reid in the Globe and Mail.
- John Palfrey's Biblio Tech; review by Carlos Lozada in the Washington Post.
- Duke University has acquired the truly amazing collection of books and other materials related to women's history (broadly defined) assembled by Lisa Unger Baskin over more than four decades.
- Erik Kwakkel has a fascinating post up about rare medieval name tags, kept in the archives of a Leiden orphanage.
- A collection of Herman Hesse manuscripts will be sold at auction in May by Ketterer Kunst Hamburg.
- Laura Aydelotte writes about a William Henry Ireland "Shakespeare" signature in a quarto Hamlet.
- Nora Krug reports on the ongoing publishing juggernaut that the annotated autobiography of Laura Ingalls Wilder has become.
- A book stolen from a private library in Rome last year has been located at a Buenos Aires bookstore after it was listed for sale online, according to Italian media reports. The reports do not indicate whether other books from the same theft were also found.
- Indiana may build a $25 million state archives building in downtown Indianapolis.
- The NYTimes covers a recent report by public library officials in New York City warning of a "staggering infrastructure crisis" in the branch library facilities.
- The ABAA blog reports that three items were discovered missing after the New York Antiquarian Book Fair. If you have any information, please contact ABAA Security Chair Garrett Scott.
- The Harvard Gazette reports on several events leading up to the centennial of Harvard's Widener Library, coming up this June.
- The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum has acquired a large collection of the papers of Arthur C. Clarke.
- Missed this last week: the NYTimes obituary of T. H. Tsien, who died on 9 April at the age of 105, is very much worth a read.
- In TNR, William Giraldi writes on "Why we need physical books."
Reviews
- Bruce Holsinger's The Invention of Fire; review by Rebecca Rego Barry at the Fine Books Blog.
- Michael Pye's The Edge of the World; review by Michael Dirda in the Washington Post.
- Charlotte Gordon's Romantic Outlaws; review by Anna Russell in the WSJ (there's also a Q&A with the author).
- Alberto Manguel's Curiosity; review by Iain Reid in the Globe and Mail.
- John Palfrey's Biblio Tech; review by Carlos Lozada in the Washington Post.
Sunday, April 19, 2015
Links & Reviews
Apologies for not getting a post up last week; as usual the New York Book Fair weekend proved too busy to get much written. It was lovely to see many friends at the book fair(s), and if you have a chance to get to the Grolier Club for the absolutely excellent Aldus show before it comes down on 25 April, do go and see it.
- Rebecca Rego Barry has a rundown of the book fairs at the Fine Books Blog, while Greg Gibson at Bookman's Log writes about the "dueling" shadow shows (I went to both, and must say the venue for the Getman show was a real winner; it made browsing the booths much more pleasant).
- At The Collation, Sarah Werner takes a look at the use of printed cancel slips as a method of correcting printing mistakes.
- Entrepreneur John Rogers, who bought up the photo archives of several major American, Australian, and New Zealand newspapers (in exchange for money and digital copies of the photos) reportedly faces up to a dozen lawsuits and his business has been raided by the FBI, Brian Lamber reports for MinnPost.
- More on that unpublished Jupiter Hammon poem from the N-YHS blog.
- An exhibition at the Library of Congress on early American printing opens on 4 June and will run until 2 January 2016. The show features two copies of the 1640 Bay Psalm Book, among other treasures.
- There's an update from the CBC about the aftermath of the disastrous fire at Moscow's INION in January. Library staff and volunteers are still packing and removing damaged books from the site.
- Jennifer Schuessler reports for the NYTimes on the possible shutdown of the Dictionary of American Regional English due to funding shortfalls. More from the Boston Globe.
- Work by UVA profs Chad Wellmon and Brad Pasanek to create a "digital network of print materials created during the Enlightenment" is highlighted in UVA Today.
- The Royal Archives is digitizing some 350,000 pages from the private papers of George III.
- Also from Jennifer Schuessler, a report on Terry Alford's new biography of John Wilkes Booth, Fortune's Fool (OUP), and Alford's work with amateur Booth researchers.
- The manuscript of Don McLean's "American Pie" sold for $1.2 million at Christie's on 7 April.
- Erik Kwakkel has a new piece on how people sent short messages to each other in earlier centuries: "Texting in Medieval Times."
- The Outer Banks Sentinel reports on some new research which suggests that the Roanoke colonists may well have relocated to Hatteras Island (as has been long thought).
- Some 450 artifacts made by Japanese-Americans in WWII internment camps (and later given to a historian writing about the art created in the camps) were withdrawn from a New Jersey auction this week following online protests and threats of legal action.
- Ralph Blumenthal reports on the Stanford Literary Lab's Mapping Emotions in Victorian London project.
- Book collector and Melbourne barrister John Emmerson has bequeathed his library to the State Library of Victoria. The collection, numbering more than 5,000 volumes, includes a number of important English imprints from the Civil War period, books from Charles I's personal library, &c. The bequest also funds fellowships for visiting scholars to work with the collection. [h/t Anthony Tedeschi]
- Literary Hub has launched.
- In the THE, Christopher Bigsby writes on the changing nature(s) of libraries.
- From the WSJ, a report by Steven Rosenbush, "In This Digital Age, Book Collecting is Still Going Strong."
- At Inside Adams, Julie Miller writes on Jefferson's manuscript chart on the appearances of fruits and vegetables in the markets of Washington, D.C. (compiled while Jefferson was president).
- On the JHI blog, Maryan Patton writes on "The Early History of Arabic Printing in Europe."
- A key Alan Turing notebook was sold at Bonhams New York on 13 April for $1,025,000.
- The current Houghton Library exhibition, Starry Messengers: Signs and Science from the Skies, closes on 2 May. As a sneek peek, they've posted a short video conversation between curator John Overholt, Sara Schechner (Curator of Harvard's Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments) and Owen Gingerich.
- There's an excerpt from Alex Johnson's new book Improbable Libraries online at the Guardian.
- Johnson's Dictionary is highlighted on the John J. Burns Library's Blog.
- More than a hundred professors at the University of Oregon have called on the university administration to reinstate archivist James Fox, who was placed on administrative leave following the release of confidential university data to a professor.
- Abbie Weinberg writes at The Collation about the sorts of bibliographical thread-pulling expeditions that provide hours of entertainment for those of us who enjoy such things (and utter, hair-pulling-worthy frustration for others, I'm sure!).
- Over at The New Antiquarian, John Waite profiles a rare edition of The New England Primer, one printed during the 1780s which contains a portrait of Washington possibly engraved by Paul Revere.
- Sarah Henary profiles the legacy of Anthony Trollope at The Millions.
- Writing for the Guardian, Calum Marsh asks "Can you really make a living by selling used books on Amazon for a penny?"
Reviews
- Mary Pilon's The Monopolists; review by Sarah Wise in the Telegraph.
- Deborah Cadbury's Princes at War; review by Philip Ziegler in the Telegraph.
- Jon Ronson's So You've Been Publicly Shamed; review by Choire Sicha in the NYTimes.
- Cassandra Good's Founding Friendships; review by Tom Cutterham at The Junto.
- Robert Bevan reviews the new Weston Library in Architects Journal.
- Rebecca Rego Barry has a rundown of the book fairs at the Fine Books Blog, while Greg Gibson at Bookman's Log writes about the "dueling" shadow shows (I went to both, and must say the venue for the Getman show was a real winner; it made browsing the booths much more pleasant).
- At The Collation, Sarah Werner takes a look at the use of printed cancel slips as a method of correcting printing mistakes.
- Entrepreneur John Rogers, who bought up the photo archives of several major American, Australian, and New Zealand newspapers (in exchange for money and digital copies of the photos) reportedly faces up to a dozen lawsuits and his business has been raided by the FBI, Brian Lamber reports for MinnPost.
- More on that unpublished Jupiter Hammon poem from the N-YHS blog.
- An exhibition at the Library of Congress on early American printing opens on 4 June and will run until 2 January 2016. The show features two copies of the 1640 Bay Psalm Book, among other treasures.
- There's an update from the CBC about the aftermath of the disastrous fire at Moscow's INION in January. Library staff and volunteers are still packing and removing damaged books from the site.
- Jennifer Schuessler reports for the NYTimes on the possible shutdown of the Dictionary of American Regional English due to funding shortfalls. More from the Boston Globe.
- Work by UVA profs Chad Wellmon and Brad Pasanek to create a "digital network of print materials created during the Enlightenment" is highlighted in UVA Today.
- The Royal Archives is digitizing some 350,000 pages from the private papers of George III.
- Also from Jennifer Schuessler, a report on Terry Alford's new biography of John Wilkes Booth, Fortune's Fool (OUP), and Alford's work with amateur Booth researchers.
- The manuscript of Don McLean's "American Pie" sold for $1.2 million at Christie's on 7 April.
- Erik Kwakkel has a new piece on how people sent short messages to each other in earlier centuries: "Texting in Medieval Times."
- The Outer Banks Sentinel reports on some new research which suggests that the Roanoke colonists may well have relocated to Hatteras Island (as has been long thought).
- Some 450 artifacts made by Japanese-Americans in WWII internment camps (and later given to a historian writing about the art created in the camps) were withdrawn from a New Jersey auction this week following online protests and threats of legal action.
- Ralph Blumenthal reports on the Stanford Literary Lab's Mapping Emotions in Victorian London project.
- Book collector and Melbourne barrister John Emmerson has bequeathed his library to the State Library of Victoria. The collection, numbering more than 5,000 volumes, includes a number of important English imprints from the Civil War period, books from Charles I's personal library, &c. The bequest also funds fellowships for visiting scholars to work with the collection. [h/t Anthony Tedeschi]
- Literary Hub has launched.
- In the THE, Christopher Bigsby writes on the changing nature(s) of libraries.
- From the WSJ, a report by Steven Rosenbush, "In This Digital Age, Book Collecting is Still Going Strong."
- At Inside Adams, Julie Miller writes on Jefferson's manuscript chart on the appearances of fruits and vegetables in the markets of Washington, D.C. (compiled while Jefferson was president).
- On the JHI blog, Maryan Patton writes on "The Early History of Arabic Printing in Europe."
- A key Alan Turing notebook was sold at Bonhams New York on 13 April for $1,025,000.
- The current Houghton Library exhibition, Starry Messengers: Signs and Science from the Skies, closes on 2 May. As a sneek peek, they've posted a short video conversation between curator John Overholt, Sara Schechner (Curator of Harvard's Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments) and Owen Gingerich.
- There's an excerpt from Alex Johnson's new book Improbable Libraries online at the Guardian.
- Johnson's Dictionary is highlighted on the John J. Burns Library's Blog.
- More than a hundred professors at the University of Oregon have called on the university administration to reinstate archivist James Fox, who was placed on administrative leave following the release of confidential university data to a professor.
- Abbie Weinberg writes at The Collation about the sorts of bibliographical thread-pulling expeditions that provide hours of entertainment for those of us who enjoy such things (and utter, hair-pulling-worthy frustration for others, I'm sure!).
- Over at The New Antiquarian, John Waite profiles a rare edition of The New England Primer, one printed during the 1780s which contains a portrait of Washington possibly engraved by Paul Revere.
- Sarah Henary profiles the legacy of Anthony Trollope at The Millions.
- Writing for the Guardian, Calum Marsh asks "Can you really make a living by selling used books on Amazon for a penny?"
Reviews
- Mary Pilon's The Monopolists; review by Sarah Wise in the Telegraph.
- Deborah Cadbury's Princes at War; review by Philip Ziegler in the Telegraph.
- Jon Ronson's So You've Been Publicly Shamed; review by Choire Sicha in the NYTimes.
- Cassandra Good's Founding Friendships; review by Tom Cutterham at The Junto.
- Robert Bevan reviews the new Weston Library in Architects Journal.
Sunday, April 05, 2015
Links & Reviews
- Italian authorities said this week that some books seized from the library of former Italian senator Marcello Dell'Utri (now in prison for ties to organized crime) had been "removed from" from public and ecclesiastical libraries across Italy. The NYTimes piece on this is currently headlined "Politician's Books Came from Libraries Across Italy, Police Say." (Presumably some of the books might have been legitimately deaccessioned). Appended at the bottom is the following correction:
- The GAO has issued a 130-page report on the Library of Congress' IT strategies, and the title itself is pretty telling: "Strong Leadership Needed to Address Serious Information Technology Management Weaknesses." The Washington Post ran a long piece on the report by Peggy McGlone, in which top management at the library comes in for very strong criticism. An NYTimes editorial yesterday concludes that "Congress ... has been far too lax over the years in reviewing [Librarian of Congress James] Billington's leadership because of his status as a capital fixture. Lawmakers must hold him to his latest promises and much more if the institution is not to slip further behind in a world where smartly managed information should be the basic stuff of a library."
- Princeton has acquired the personal library of philosopher Jacques Derrida; many of the 13,800 volumes reportedly contain significant marginalia and insertions.
- Anthony Grafton's March talk at the New York Society Library, "Books & Barrels: Readers and Reading in Colonial America," is now available on YouTube.
- Yale's Beinecke Library has purchased the Meserve-Kunhardt Collection of Lincoln material, including thousands of photographs, some 600 volumes from Lincoln's Springfield library, and much more.
- The Maine Antique Digest posted an editorial this week on the (currently-postponed) planned sale of highlights from the Edward Payson Vining collection by Gordon College. The college has reportedly requested an opinion from the state attorney general's office on the legality of any sale.
- A collection of manuscripts from the Syriac Orthodox Mar Matti Monastery in northern Iraq was saved from ISIS militants and is currently being housed in an apartment in Dohuk, according to an AP report.
- The NYPL broke ground this week on the expansion of underground storage space beneath Bryant Park.
- More than 15,000 new maps have been added to the David Rumsey Map Collection, bringing the total number of digitized maps on the site to 58,078.
- The ABAA blog reports that a cache of documents and other items relating to work on the Statue of Liberty were in Baltimore in late December. See their post for full information on the stolen materials.
- The Library of Congress has acquired some 540 Civil War stereographs from the Robert G. Stanford Collection.
- J.L. Bell notes the important discovery of a new poem by enslaved poet Jupiter Hammon. I agree with him that the full text will be very important in determining how the poem is read.
- Scholars working with the Black Book of Carmarthen have identified via ultraviolet light two erased portrait sketches, marginalia, and a "hitherto unknown Welsh poem."
- An odd volume of a 1543 Cicero set, with the badge of Elizabeth I on the boards, will be sold at Swann this week, estimated at $8,000-12,000.
- There's a Q&A with Hilary Mantel in the WaPo about upcoming stage and screen adaptations of Wolf Hall (the Masterpiece series begins airing tonight on PBS).
- Over at Manutius in Manchester, an account of a short-term fellowship at Harvard to examine books printed on parchment.
- Two archivists at the University of Oregon have been removed from their positions after turning over confidential university records to a professor.
- There's a piece in the Dallas Morning News about the construction of a 77-car underground garage at the estate of Harlan Crow, near Dallas. Crow told the paper that the garage will accommodate visitors to his library who would otherwise need to park on the street.
- Collector Reid Moon's exhibition of rare Bibles is now open in Provo, Utah.
Reviews
- Jon Ronson's So You've Been Publicly Shamed; reviews by Janet Maslin in the NYTimes and Astra Taylor in the LATimes.
- Matthew Denison's Behind the Mask and Robert Sackville-West's The Disinherited; review by Amber K. Regis in the TLS.
- Massimo Bucciantini's Galileo's Telescope; review by Mark Archer in the WSJ.
- Abigail Swingen's Competing Visions of Empire; review by Donald MacRaild in the THE.
- The GAO has issued a 130-page report on the Library of Congress' IT strategies, and the title itself is pretty telling: "Strong Leadership Needed to Address Serious Information Technology Management Weaknesses." The Washington Post ran a long piece on the report by Peggy McGlone, in which top management at the library comes in for very strong criticism. An NYTimes editorial yesterday concludes that "Congress ... has been far too lax over the years in reviewing [Librarian of Congress James] Billington's leadership because of his status as a capital fixture. Lawmakers must hold him to his latest promises and much more if the institution is not to slip further behind in a world where smartly managed information should be the basic stuff of a library."
- Princeton has acquired the personal library of philosopher Jacques Derrida; many of the 13,800 volumes reportedly contain significant marginalia and insertions.
- Anthony Grafton's March talk at the New York Society Library, "Books & Barrels: Readers and Reading in Colonial America," is now available on YouTube.
- Yale's Beinecke Library has purchased the Meserve-Kunhardt Collection of Lincoln material, including thousands of photographs, some 600 volumes from Lincoln's Springfield library, and much more.
- The Maine Antique Digest posted an editorial this week on the (currently-postponed) planned sale of highlights from the Edward Payson Vining collection by Gordon College. The college has reportedly requested an opinion from the state attorney general's office on the legality of any sale.
- A collection of manuscripts from the Syriac Orthodox Mar Matti Monastery in northern Iraq was saved from ISIS militants and is currently being housed in an apartment in Dohuk, according to an AP report.
- The NYPL broke ground this week on the expansion of underground storage space beneath Bryant Park.
- More than 15,000 new maps have been added to the David Rumsey Map Collection, bringing the total number of digitized maps on the site to 58,078.
- The ABAA blog reports that a cache of documents and other items relating to work on the Statue of Liberty were in Baltimore in late December. See their post for full information on the stolen materials.
- The Library of Congress has acquired some 540 Civil War stereographs from the Robert G. Stanford Collection.
- J.L. Bell notes the important discovery of a new poem by enslaved poet Jupiter Hammon. I agree with him that the full text will be very important in determining how the poem is read.
- Scholars working with the Black Book of Carmarthen have identified via ultraviolet light two erased portrait sketches, marginalia, and a "hitherto unknown Welsh poem."
- An odd volume of a 1543 Cicero set, with the badge of Elizabeth I on the boards, will be sold at Swann this week, estimated at $8,000-12,000.
- There's a Q&A with Hilary Mantel in the WaPo about upcoming stage and screen adaptations of Wolf Hall (the Masterpiece series begins airing tonight on PBS).
- Over at Manutius in Manchester, an account of a short-term fellowship at Harvard to examine books printed on parchment.
- Two archivists at the University of Oregon have been removed from their positions after turning over confidential university records to a professor.
- There's a piece in the Dallas Morning News about the construction of a 77-car underground garage at the estate of Harlan Crow, near Dallas. Crow told the paper that the garage will accommodate visitors to his library who would otherwise need to park on the street.
- Collector Reid Moon's exhibition of rare Bibles is now open in Provo, Utah.
Reviews
- Jon Ronson's So You've Been Publicly Shamed; reviews by Janet Maslin in the NYTimes and Astra Taylor in the LATimes.
- Matthew Denison's Behind the Mask and Robert Sackville-West's The Disinherited; review by Amber K. Regis in the TLS.
- Massimo Bucciantini's Galileo's Telescope; review by Mark Archer in the WSJ.
- Abigail Swingen's Competing Visions of Empire; review by Donald MacRaild in the THE.
Sunday, March 29, 2015
Links & Reviews
- Rich Rennicks previews the New York Antiquarian Book Fair for the ABAA blog.
- Charles Dickens' desk from Gad's Hill Place has been purchased by the Charles Dickens Museum in London with a grant of more than £780,000 from the National Heritage Memorial Fund.
- Writing for the JHI Blog, Devani Singh reviews and comments on a current exhibition at the Cambridge University Libraries, Private Lives of Print.
- The University of Rochester Libraries have joined HathiTrust.
- New Folger Curator of Early Modern Books and Prints is introduced via a Q&A over at The Collation.
- Greece has criticized the British Museum for refusing UNESCO mediation over the Elgin Marbles.
- A copy of Robert Boyle's Sceptical Chymist sold at Bonham's this week for £362,500 (over estimates of £50,000-75,000.
- A new interactive literary map of Edinburgh will launch this week.
- The Library History Round Table has launched a blog.
- Eric Kwakkel posted about dirty medieval books this week.
- The University of Chicago Library News highlights a recent project to conserve a 16th-century Byzantine binding (part of the Edgar J. Goodspeed Manuscript Collection, currently being digitized).
- Peter Steinberg has posted about a recent research trip to the Lilly Library, where he's working on Sylvia Plath materials.
- Meredith Mann posts on the NYPL's holdings of material related to Madame du Châtelet.
- In the WSJ, Alexander McCall Smith writes on "The Secret of the Jane Austen Industry."
Reviews
- Robert Middlekauff's Washington's Revolution; review by Richard Brookhiser in the NYTimes.
- Lothar Müller's White Magic and G. Thomas Tanselle's Portraits and Reviews; review by Michael Dirda in the WaPo.
- Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's The Story of Alice; review by A.S. Byatt in the Spectator.
- Matthew Carr's Sherman's Ghosts; review by James McPherson in the NYTimes.
- Alex Johnson's Improbable Libraries; review by J.C. Gabel in the LATimes.
- Laura J. Snyder's Eye of the Beholder; review by Jonathan Lopez in the WSJ.
- Charles Dickens' desk from Gad's Hill Place has been purchased by the Charles Dickens Museum in London with a grant of more than £780,000 from the National Heritage Memorial Fund.
- Writing for the JHI Blog, Devani Singh reviews and comments on a current exhibition at the Cambridge University Libraries, Private Lives of Print.
- The University of Rochester Libraries have joined HathiTrust.
- New Folger Curator of Early Modern Books and Prints is introduced via a Q&A over at The Collation.
- Greece has criticized the British Museum for refusing UNESCO mediation over the Elgin Marbles.
- A copy of Robert Boyle's Sceptical Chymist sold at Bonham's this week for £362,500 (over estimates of £50,000-75,000.
- A new interactive literary map of Edinburgh will launch this week.
- The Library History Round Table has launched a blog.
- Eric Kwakkel posted about dirty medieval books this week.
- The University of Chicago Library News highlights a recent project to conserve a 16th-century Byzantine binding (part of the Edgar J. Goodspeed Manuscript Collection, currently being digitized).
- Peter Steinberg has posted about a recent research trip to the Lilly Library, where he's working on Sylvia Plath materials.
- Meredith Mann posts on the NYPL's holdings of material related to Madame du Châtelet.
- In the WSJ, Alexander McCall Smith writes on "The Secret of the Jane Austen Industry."
Reviews
- Robert Middlekauff's Washington's Revolution; review by Richard Brookhiser in the NYTimes.
- Lothar Müller's White Magic and G. Thomas Tanselle's Portraits and Reviews; review by Michael Dirda in the WaPo.
- Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's The Story of Alice; review by A.S. Byatt in the Spectator.
- Matthew Carr's Sherman's Ghosts; review by James McPherson in the NYTimes.
- Alex Johnson's Improbable Libraries; review by J.C. Gabel in the LATimes.
- Laura J. Snyder's Eye of the Beholder; review by Jonathan Lopez in the WSJ.
Sunday, March 22, 2015
Links & Reviews
- A great new resource from the AAS: they've released a searchable database of their Mathew Carey Papers.
- Remains found beneath a convent in Madrid are believed to be those of Cervantes (though they proved not to be the bones found in a coffin marked with tacks spelling out "M C").
- The Bibliographical Society has launched an annual "Virtual Issue," designed as "a retrospective gathering of key articles in a particular field" drawn from The Library and introduced by a guest editor. The first issue, on incunabula, has been edited by John Goldfinch.
- The University of Rochester has been awarded a $100,672 pilot grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to fund a digital humanities institute for mid-career librarians.
- The Beinecke Library has acquired several WWI-period Red Cross newsletters containing previously unrecorded Edith Wharton writings.
- The Cuban National Archives (ARNAC) has begun digitizing maps, photographs, and other materials from the collections.
- A collection of letters between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and constable G.A. Anson over the George Edalji case went to the auction block last week, but failed to sell. The collection revealed that Anson fabricated evidence to discredit Conan Doyle and his theories about the case.
- A 1590s tapestry map of Worcestershire will soon be displayed at the Bodleian Library as part of the opening exhibition at the newly-renovated building (which will also include the Magna Carta, a First Folio, and the Codex Mendoza).
- At The Collation, Sarah Hovde highlights an 1871 raised-type edition of King Lear at the Folger.
- Adam Hooks has a new post at Anchora, "Reading Devices."
- A collection of photographs purchased at auction in 2006 have now been reportedly confirmed as belonging to, and mostly taken by, John Ruskin.
Reviews
- Mary Pilon's The Monopolists; review by James McManus in the NYTimes.
- Ruth Scurr's John Aubrey: My Own Life; reviews by Daisy Hay in the Telegraph and Frances Wilson in the New Statesman.
Sunday, March 15, 2015
Links & Reviews
- The Guardian reported this week that the Vatican has received a demand for €100,000 in ransom for the return of two Michelangelo letters recognized as missing from the archives of St. Peter's Basilica in 1997. The fact that the letters were missing had not been publicly disclosed prior to Italian media reports of the ransom demand. A CBC report adds that the Vatican has refused the ransom demand.
- The Glasgow School of Art has released details of items recovered from the fire which destroyed the iconic Mackintosh Library last year. GSA director Tom Inns also said this week that the school plans to rebuild the library according to Mackintosh's designs (but with allowances for technological updates).
- Adam Gopnik writes for The New Yorker on the Warburg Library.
- A new, and excellent as usual, issue of Common-place is out, with a roundtable on Kathleen Donegan's Seasons of Misery, Meredith Neuman on sermon notes, and Lisa Wilson on early American stepfamilies.
- The Times of India reports on the planned sale of John Randall's collection of books and newspapers printed in India.
- The New York Observer highlights the NYPL's What's on the Menu? digitization and crowdsourced transcription project.
- A project to accurately date early Irish manuscripts has received funding of €1.8 million from the European Research Council.
- Dan Dwyer talked to Scott Clemons about the Aldus exhibit now on display at the Grolier Club.
- Rare Book Week is coming up soon: FB&C has all the details about all kinds of bookish events in New York in early April.
- The AAS has acquired a box of nine goose quill pens from around 1850, with the original labeled box.
- Greg Gibson reports on the Washington Antiquarian Book Fair for the ABAA blog.
- I missed this last month, but better late than never: Maine Antiques Digest profiled collector and curator Susan Jaffe Tane.
- Umberto Eco's latest novel, a bestseller in Italy, will be published this fall in the United States by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt as Numero Zero.
- Jerry Morris writes on My Sentimental Library about Samuel Johnson's undergraduate library.
Reviews
- Barry Strauss' The Death of Caesar; review by James Romm in the NYTimes.
- Reif Larsen's I Am Radar; review by Christopher Byrd in the NYTimes.
- Andrew Roberts' Napoleon; review by Charles Reinhardt in the CSM.
- Stephen Kurkjian's Master Thieves; review by Art Taylor in the WaPo.
- Erik Larson's Dead Wake; review by Daniel Stashower in the WaPo.
- Sally G. McMillen's Lucy Stone; review by Janet Napolitano in the LATimes.
- Molly Guptill Manning's When Books Went to War; review by George Bornstein in the TLS.
- Charles Stack's Liberty's First Crisis; review by James Sullivan in the Boston Globe.
- The Glasgow School of Art has released details of items recovered from the fire which destroyed the iconic Mackintosh Library last year. GSA director Tom Inns also said this week that the school plans to rebuild the library according to Mackintosh's designs (but with allowances for technological updates).
- Adam Gopnik writes for The New Yorker on the Warburg Library.
- A new, and excellent as usual, issue of Common-place is out, with a roundtable on Kathleen Donegan's Seasons of Misery, Meredith Neuman on sermon notes, and Lisa Wilson on early American stepfamilies.
- The Times of India reports on the planned sale of John Randall's collection of books and newspapers printed in India.
- The New York Observer highlights the NYPL's What's on the Menu? digitization and crowdsourced transcription project.
- A project to accurately date early Irish manuscripts has received funding of €1.8 million from the European Research Council.
- Dan Dwyer talked to Scott Clemons about the Aldus exhibit now on display at the Grolier Club.
- Rare Book Week is coming up soon: FB&C has all the details about all kinds of bookish events in New York in early April.
- The AAS has acquired a box of nine goose quill pens from around 1850, with the original labeled box.
- Greg Gibson reports on the Washington Antiquarian Book Fair for the ABAA blog.
- I missed this last month, but better late than never: Maine Antiques Digest profiled collector and curator Susan Jaffe Tane.
- Umberto Eco's latest novel, a bestseller in Italy, will be published this fall in the United States by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt as Numero Zero.
- Jerry Morris writes on My Sentimental Library about Samuel Johnson's undergraduate library.
Reviews
- Barry Strauss' The Death of Caesar; review by James Romm in the NYTimes.
- Reif Larsen's I Am Radar; review by Christopher Byrd in the NYTimes.
- Andrew Roberts' Napoleon; review by Charles Reinhardt in the CSM.
- Stephen Kurkjian's Master Thieves; review by Art Taylor in the WaPo.
- Erik Larson's Dead Wake; review by Daniel Stashower in the WaPo.
- Sally G. McMillen's Lucy Stone; review by Janet Napolitano in the LATimes.
- Molly Guptill Manning's When Books Went to War; review by George Bornstein in the TLS.
- Charles Stack's Liberty's First Crisis; review by James Sullivan in the Boston Globe.
Sunday, March 08, 2015
Links & Reviews
- Gérard Lhéritier of Aristophil was taken into custody this week and placed under formal investigation for fraud, on suspicion that he'd been running a very extensive pyramid scheme. He's been released on bail.
- The Digital Humanities Awards for 2014 have been announced.
- A new edition of Trollope's The Duke's Children will reinstate some 65,000 words cut from the original publication.
- Another of the stolen books returned to Italy recently by US authorities had been purchased by Johns Hopkins University, the Baltimore Sun reports.
- Yale Law Library is hosting an exhibit to mark the 250th anniversary of Blackstone's Commentaries.
- Katherine Grandjean talked to the Boston Globe this week about her recent book American Passage: The Communications Frontier in Early New England.
- Dave Gary and Aaron Pratt were instrumental in bringing a collection of ~2,700 VHS tapes to Yale's Sterling Library; the Yale Daily News covers the acquisition.
- The AAS has posted an updated list of recent books and articles by AAS fellows, members, or readers.
- Writing for The Atlantic, Adam Chandler argues that by using a private email system as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton jeopardized the preservation of an accurate historical record.
- Simran Thadani writes for Unique at Penn about a fascinating copy of Edward Cocker's Arts Glory (1669).
- Library Journal reports on the NEH-Mellon Humanities Open Book project, which will fund open-access e-editions of out-of-print scholarly texts.
- From the Provenance Online Project, a copy of The Iliad (probably) owned by both Henry VIII and Edward VI.
- Michele Filgate reports on the ABA's Winter Institute for Buzzfeed: "The Rise of the Independent Bookseller in the Time of Amazon."
- The Junto is hosting another March Madness bracket this year: this time they're pitting primary sources against each other.
- For FB&C, Meganna Fabrega profiled the efforts of Sylvia Holton Peterson and William Peterson to reconstruct the library of William Morris.
- Christianity Today reported on the scheduled sale of books from the Edward Payson Vining Collection by Gordon College.
- Designer Robert Green has posted a digital prospectus of his reconstruction of the Doves Type [pdf].
Reviews
- The Grolier Club exhibition "Aldus Manutius: A Legacy More Lasting Than Bronze"; review by Steven Heller in The Atlantic.
- Erik Larson's Dead Wake; reviews by Hampton Sides and Janet Maslin in the NYTimes.
- Adrienne Mayor's The Amazons; review by Simon Goldhill in the TLS.
- The Digital Humanities Awards for 2014 have been announced.
- A new edition of Trollope's The Duke's Children will reinstate some 65,000 words cut from the original publication.
- Another of the stolen books returned to Italy recently by US authorities had been purchased by Johns Hopkins University, the Baltimore Sun reports.
- Yale Law Library is hosting an exhibit to mark the 250th anniversary of Blackstone's Commentaries.
- Katherine Grandjean talked to the Boston Globe this week about her recent book American Passage: The Communications Frontier in Early New England.
- Dave Gary and Aaron Pratt were instrumental in bringing a collection of ~2,700 VHS tapes to Yale's Sterling Library; the Yale Daily News covers the acquisition.
- The AAS has posted an updated list of recent books and articles by AAS fellows, members, or readers.
- Writing for The Atlantic, Adam Chandler argues that by using a private email system as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton jeopardized the preservation of an accurate historical record.
- Simran Thadani writes for Unique at Penn about a fascinating copy of Edward Cocker's Arts Glory (1669).
- Library Journal reports on the NEH-Mellon Humanities Open Book project, which will fund open-access e-editions of out-of-print scholarly texts.
- From the Provenance Online Project, a copy of The Iliad (probably) owned by both Henry VIII and Edward VI.
- Michele Filgate reports on the ABA's Winter Institute for Buzzfeed: "The Rise of the Independent Bookseller in the Time of Amazon."
- The Junto is hosting another March Madness bracket this year: this time they're pitting primary sources against each other.
- For FB&C, Meganna Fabrega profiled the efforts of Sylvia Holton Peterson and William Peterson to reconstruct the library of William Morris.
- Christianity Today reported on the scheduled sale of books from the Edward Payson Vining Collection by Gordon College.
- Designer Robert Green has posted a digital prospectus of his reconstruction of the Doves Type [pdf].
Reviews
- The Grolier Club exhibition "Aldus Manutius: A Legacy More Lasting Than Bronze"; review by Steven Heller in The Atlantic.
- Erik Larson's Dead Wake; reviews by Hampton Sides and Janet Maslin in the NYTimes.
- Adrienne Mayor's The Amazons; review by Simon Goldhill in the TLS.
Wednesday, March 04, 2015
Book Review: "Sometimes an Art"
Much of the discussion I've seen so far about Bernard Bailyn's new collection, Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (Knopf, 2015) has centered around Gordon Wood's Weekly Standard review of the book, "History in Context." I read that, and much of the ensuing discussion, and I wanted all the more to read Bailyn's essays themselves.
Of the nine pieces collected here, eight began as lectures, a point I think worth emphasizing, as is the fact that they range in delivery date from 1954 to 2007. Bailyn notes in the preface that the connecting threads between the essays are these: "the problems and nature of history as a craft, at times an art, and aspects of the history of the colonial peripheries of the early British empire" (ix). Certainly a key sub-thread, if you will, is the importance of historical context, which comes up repeatedly, and in several of the essays Bailyn focuses on the use of new historical methodologies (some of which at this point seem anything but), which he embraces but with the caveat that "we must all still be storytellers, narrators—though of events lodged deep in their natural contexts" (52).
Bailyn recognizes what some see as a difficulty: "to explain contextually is, implicitly at least, to excuse" (38). "The problems in this kind of [contextual] history, in my view the deepest history, are difficulty and subtle, and they create great demands on historians: to suspend their present commitments sufficiently to enter different worlds, to broaden their sympathies for people not only distant but alien from themselves, to respond sensitively to apparent anomalies that lead into unsuspected complexities, to distinguish consequences from intentions, and yet to do all that while retaining both the capacity for moral judgments that do not warp the narrative and the conviction that change, growth, decline—evanescence—is what history is all about" (51).
Context is key, and Bailyn, several of whose own books have been—justly—criticized for failing to fully explore the contexts of their narrative arguments, writes strongly in its favor here. He also argues, in the opening essay (originally delivered at a conference to mark the launch of the DuBois Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database) for the importance of history and memory as complementary forces, which I quite like: "The one may usefully constrain and yet vivify the other. The passionate, timeless memory of the slave trade that tears at our conscience and shocks our sense of decency may be shaped, focused, and informed by the critical history we write, while the history we so carefully compose may be kept alive, made vivid and constantly relevant and urgent, by the living memory we have of it. We cannot afford to lose or diminish either if we are to understand who we are and how we got to be the way we are" (17).
In the fourth essay, the 1985 Lewin Lecture Bailyn highlights several historians whose work he found particularly creative, who had what he calls the "capacity to conceive of a hitherto unglimpsed world, or of a world only vaguely or imperfectly seen before" (89). While any of us would come up with a different list, it is difficult to take issue with Bailyn's formulation that writers of creative history must have "the capacity to project, like a novelist, a nonexistent, an impalpable world in all its living comprehension, and yet to do this within the constraints of verifiable facts" (94).
While a couple of these essays weren't of all that much personal interest, the sixth, delivered as the Baron Lecture at AAS, proved fascinating. Bailyn used the opportunity to revisit his book The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson, re-evaluating the work more than thirty years on. Here he even calls himself out, wishing that he had embraced and understood a broader context more clearly so that he might have better understood Hutchinson's actions.
By and large, these pieces do make for very interesting reading, and they have little at all to do with the topics covered in Wood's review, which mostly focuses on criticisms of Bailyn's other works. The object lessons Bailyn offers in the importance of understanding context, the desirability of good storytelling, and the complementarity of history and memory, &c., are hardly anything anyone would take issue with. That said, I do wish that a bit more had been done by way of introducing these essays in their own proper contexts, and in engaging with subsequent scholarship and argument in the areas covered: there is some of this at the end of the notes for certain essays, but more would not have gone amiss, and it would be fascinating to know what Bailyn thinks of the changes in scholarship that have occurred since these essays were originally delivered.
Well worth a read for anyone interested in the historian's craft, even granting that some of these seem rather dated now and may not seem quite as relevant as others.
Of the nine pieces collected here, eight began as lectures, a point I think worth emphasizing, as is the fact that they range in delivery date from 1954 to 2007. Bailyn notes in the preface that the connecting threads between the essays are these: "the problems and nature of history as a craft, at times an art, and aspects of the history of the colonial peripheries of the early British empire" (ix). Certainly a key sub-thread, if you will, is the importance of historical context, which comes up repeatedly, and in several of the essays Bailyn focuses on the use of new historical methodologies (some of which at this point seem anything but), which he embraces but with the caveat that "we must all still be storytellers, narrators—though of events lodged deep in their natural contexts" (52).
Bailyn recognizes what some see as a difficulty: "to explain contextually is, implicitly at least, to excuse" (38). "The problems in this kind of [contextual] history, in my view the deepest history, are difficulty and subtle, and they create great demands on historians: to suspend their present commitments sufficiently to enter different worlds, to broaden their sympathies for people not only distant but alien from themselves, to respond sensitively to apparent anomalies that lead into unsuspected complexities, to distinguish consequences from intentions, and yet to do all that while retaining both the capacity for moral judgments that do not warp the narrative and the conviction that change, growth, decline—evanescence—is what history is all about" (51).
Context is key, and Bailyn, several of whose own books have been—justly—criticized for failing to fully explore the contexts of their narrative arguments, writes strongly in its favor here. He also argues, in the opening essay (originally delivered at a conference to mark the launch of the DuBois Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database) for the importance of history and memory as complementary forces, which I quite like: "The one may usefully constrain and yet vivify the other. The passionate, timeless memory of the slave trade that tears at our conscience and shocks our sense of decency may be shaped, focused, and informed by the critical history we write, while the history we so carefully compose may be kept alive, made vivid and constantly relevant and urgent, by the living memory we have of it. We cannot afford to lose or diminish either if we are to understand who we are and how we got to be the way we are" (17).
In the fourth essay, the 1985 Lewin Lecture Bailyn highlights several historians whose work he found particularly creative, who had what he calls the "capacity to conceive of a hitherto unglimpsed world, or of a world only vaguely or imperfectly seen before" (89). While any of us would come up with a different list, it is difficult to take issue with Bailyn's formulation that writers of creative history must have "the capacity to project, like a novelist, a nonexistent, an impalpable world in all its living comprehension, and yet to do this within the constraints of verifiable facts" (94).
While a couple of these essays weren't of all that much personal interest, the sixth, delivered as the Baron Lecture at AAS, proved fascinating. Bailyn used the opportunity to revisit his book The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson, re-evaluating the work more than thirty years on. Here he even calls himself out, wishing that he had embraced and understood a broader context more clearly so that he might have better understood Hutchinson's actions.
By and large, these pieces do make for very interesting reading, and they have little at all to do with the topics covered in Wood's review, which mostly focuses on criticisms of Bailyn's other works. The object lessons Bailyn offers in the importance of understanding context, the desirability of good storytelling, and the complementarity of history and memory, &c., are hardly anything anyone would take issue with. That said, I do wish that a bit more had been done by way of introducing these essays in their own proper contexts, and in engaging with subsequent scholarship and argument in the areas covered: there is some of this at the end of the notes for certain essays, but more would not have gone amiss, and it would be fascinating to know what Bailyn thinks of the changes in scholarship that have occurred since these essays were originally delivered.
Well worth a read for anyone interested in the historian's craft, even granting that some of these seem rather dated now and may not seem quite as relevant as others.
Sunday, March 01, 2015
Links & Reviews
- Gordon College's planned sale of some 500 books with an estimated value of $2-3 million from the Edward Payson Vining collection at Doyle New York this fall (postponed from April) rated an article in the Boston Business Journal this week, as well as coverage in the Boston Globe. The college has not provided a final list of the books to be sold.
- Islamic State militants continued their assault on Iraq's cultural heritage, destroying archaeological relics and sites in and around Mosul.
- The Folger announced this week which institution in each state and Puerto Rico will host the First Folio going on the road in 2016 as part of their The Wonder of Will: 400 Years of Shakespeare initiative. I'm delighted that one will be coming to UVA, too!
- Maine governor Paul LePage has proposed to end state revenue sharing with municipalities, offering to "make up the difference" by allowing towns to levy property taxes against non-profit institutions, including hospitals, private colleges, museums, archives, historical societies, and historic sites with property assessed at more than $500,000. Maine Antiques Digest has editorialized against the proposal, and the Association of Maine Archives and Museums issued a strong statement opposing LePage's plan.
- Rich Rennicks has posted some background on the Doves Press to complement the recent discovery of some of the lost type.
- Tom Mashberg has a piece in the NYTimes about twenty-five years of theories about the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum thefts.
- ILAB has called for entrants for the 17th ILAB Breslaur Prize, to be awarded in 2018.
- Two books stolen from the Historical National Library of Agriculture in Italy (by somebody in the de Caro ring?) will be returned; they had been purchased by a buyer in San Francisco. There's a lengthy report in the San Francisco Chronicle about the books, but it's so full of eye-roll-worthy statements that it's probably not worth your time.
- A large collection of books by and related to Robert Graves has been donated to Illinois State University's Milner Library.
- Michael Rosenwald reports for the WaPo about a new finding: "digital natives" prefer reading in print.
- Bibliophile Frances Currer's copy of Bewicks British Birds has turned up and is now being offered for sale by Quaritch.
- Rare Book Monthly has posted its articles for March.
- The Telegraph ran an obituary this week for literary forger and confessed manuscripts thief Lee Israel, who died in December.
- Stephen Berry talked to Jessica Parr about his new book A Path in the Mighty Waters for The Junto.
- Anthony Tedeschi notes a neat event coming up in Sydney at the State Library of New South Wales in April: a "pop-up book fair" organized by ILAB, and a display of all four of the library's four Shakespeare Folios.
- Ruth Scurr previews her new biography of John Aubrey in The Guardian.
- A second copy of The Book o' the Brig, containing the "new" Sherlock Holmes story noted last week, has come to light: and this one appears to be signed by Arthur Conan Doyle on the cover!
- The finalists for the Diagram Oddest Book Title prize for 2015 have been revealed.
Reviews
- The new Aldus exhibit at the Grolier Club; review by Jennifer Schuessler in the NYTimes.
- James Fairhead's The Captain and "The Cannibal"; review by Gary Krist in the WaPo.
- Reif Larsen's I Am Radar; review by Carolyn Kellogg in the LATimes.
- Ruth Scurr's John Aubrey; review by Stuart Kelly in the TLS.
- Death Sentences, edited by Otto Penzler; review by Ted Fox in the Otago Daily Times.
- Islamic State militants continued their assault on Iraq's cultural heritage, destroying archaeological relics and sites in and around Mosul.
- The Folger announced this week which institution in each state and Puerto Rico will host the First Folio going on the road in 2016 as part of their The Wonder of Will: 400 Years of Shakespeare initiative. I'm delighted that one will be coming to UVA, too!
- Maine governor Paul LePage has proposed to end state revenue sharing with municipalities, offering to "make up the difference" by allowing towns to levy property taxes against non-profit institutions, including hospitals, private colleges, museums, archives, historical societies, and historic sites with property assessed at more than $500,000. Maine Antiques Digest has editorialized against the proposal, and the Association of Maine Archives and Museums issued a strong statement opposing LePage's plan.
- Rich Rennicks has posted some background on the Doves Press to complement the recent discovery of some of the lost type.
- Tom Mashberg has a piece in the NYTimes about twenty-five years of theories about the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum thefts.
- ILAB has called for entrants for the 17th ILAB Breslaur Prize, to be awarded in 2018.
- Two books stolen from the Historical National Library of Agriculture in Italy (by somebody in the de Caro ring?) will be returned; they had been purchased by a buyer in San Francisco. There's a lengthy report in the San Francisco Chronicle about the books, but it's so full of eye-roll-worthy statements that it's probably not worth your time.
- A large collection of books by and related to Robert Graves has been donated to Illinois State University's Milner Library.
- Michael Rosenwald reports for the WaPo about a new finding: "digital natives" prefer reading in print.
- Bibliophile Frances Currer's copy of Bewicks British Birds has turned up and is now being offered for sale by Quaritch.
- Rare Book Monthly has posted its articles for March.
- The Telegraph ran an obituary this week for literary forger and confessed manuscripts thief Lee Israel, who died in December.
- Stephen Berry talked to Jessica Parr about his new book A Path in the Mighty Waters for The Junto.
- Anthony Tedeschi notes a neat event coming up in Sydney at the State Library of New South Wales in April: a "pop-up book fair" organized by ILAB, and a display of all four of the library's four Shakespeare Folios.
- Ruth Scurr previews her new biography of John Aubrey in The Guardian.
- A second copy of The Book o' the Brig, containing the "new" Sherlock Holmes story noted last week, has come to light: and this one appears to be signed by Arthur Conan Doyle on the cover!
- The finalists for the Diagram Oddest Book Title prize for 2015 have been revealed.
Reviews
- The new Aldus exhibit at the Grolier Club; review by Jennifer Schuessler in the NYTimes.
- James Fairhead's The Captain and "The Cannibal"; review by Gary Krist in the WaPo.
- Reif Larsen's I Am Radar; review by Carolyn Kellogg in the LATimes.
- Ruth Scurr's John Aubrey; review by Stuart Kelly in the TLS.
- Death Sentences, edited by Otto Penzler; review by Ted Fox in the Otago Daily Times.
Sunday, February 22, 2015
Links & Reviews
- It was made official this week: the Scheide Library will stay at Princeton, and with an appraised value of $300 million, it is the largest gift in the university's history. NPR's Audie Cornish talked to Scheide Librarian Paul Needham.
- An employee at Russia's Hermitage Museum has been arrested for the theft of books and illustrations from the museum's collections. AFP reported that Russian police had found stolen items at the man's home, in the possession of a friend, and at a St. Petersburg antique shop.
- Anthony Grafton writes for the NYRB on marginalia's moment, noting particularly the current exhibit at the New York Society Library.
- The New-York Historical Society will mount the third in a series of Audubon exhibitions this spring.
- A Bible once owned by Francis Daniel Pastorius has been acquired by the University of Pennsylvania.
- José Manuel Fernández Castineiras has received a ten-year prison sentence for the theft of the Codex Calixtinus and more than €2.4 million from the Santiago de Compostela Cathedral.
- Manchester Central Library has "withdrawn" more than 240,000 volumes, mostly non-fiction, from its circulating shelves. The books are believed to have been sold to local firm Rival Books.
- Neely Tucker has an excellent piece in the Washington Post about the "new" Harper Lee novel scheduled to be published in July.
- In case you missed the fun this week, the media picked up this week on a pretty funny little story: in a scene in the new Jennifer Lopez movie "The Boy Next Door," a character receives a copy of the "first edition" of The Iliad. This reportedly caused searches for "first editions" of The Iliad to skyrocket on AbeBooks. The story about this in The Telegraph sent me to the covers page at LibraryThing, where I pretty quickly found a strong candidate for the correct edition (in a variant color binding), and then ended up as an update on the news story. Silly fun. A few copies were listed on AbeBooks when I figured out what it was; I bought the cheapest on a whim, but wasn't surprised to find when it arrived that it was yet another variant binding!
- John Schulman has collected a roundup of bookseller responses to the recent ABAA fair in Oakland.
- British media reported this week that a previously-unknown Sherlock Holmes story has been found, part of a collection of short stories written to help fund the construction of a new bridge in the small Scottish town of Selkirk in 1904. Vulture posted the full text of the story. Mattias Bostrom at I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere makes a very good case that the story is very unlikely to have been written by Conan Doyle himself.
- Over at Alembic Rare Books, a very nice inscribed presentation copy of John Herschel's Results of Astronomical Observations (1847).
- In a post for the NYTimes Artsbeat blog, Roslyn Sulcas highlights the British Library's Endangered Archives Program, which has now mounted more than 4 million images.
- The Watkinson Library at Trinity College is raising funds to conserve and rebind the Shakespeare Second Folio they acquired in 2012.
- Conor Friedersdorf reports for The Atlantic on the absolutely ridiculous crackdown on Little Free Libraries.
- The four finalists for this year's George Washington Book Prize have been announced.
- Houghton Library highlights a very neat new acquisition: a 1474 book printed at the Benedictine monastery of SS. Ulrich and Afra in Augsburg.
- Simon Beattie's found a 1792 novel in German by Friedrich Eberhard Rambach (Die eiserne Maske. Eine schottische Geshichte [The Iron Mask. A Scottish Story], much-inspired by the Ossian tradition.
- A new website on the Martin Marprelate Press has launched.
- Alix Christie talked to The Library Cafe about her book Gutenberg's Appentice.
Reviews
- Bernard Bailyn's Sometimes an Art; review by Gordon Wood in the Weekly Standard. This one has sparked some heated discussions and rebuttals, including a critique by William R. Black at The Junto and another (in tweet form) by Jonathan W. Wilson. John Fea offers a semi-defense of Wood, to which L.D. Burnett responded.
- Reif Larsen's I Am Radar; review by Janet Maslin in the NYTimes.
- David O. Stewart's Madison's Gift; review by Carol Berkin in the WaPo.
- Mary Pilon's The Monopolists; review by Carlos Lozada in the WaPo.
- Two new editions of Jane Austen's juvenile writings; review by Paula Byrne in the TLS.
- An employee at Russia's Hermitage Museum has been arrested for the theft of books and illustrations from the museum's collections. AFP reported that Russian police had found stolen items at the man's home, in the possession of a friend, and at a St. Petersburg antique shop.
- Anthony Grafton writes for the NYRB on marginalia's moment, noting particularly the current exhibit at the New York Society Library.
- The New-York Historical Society will mount the third in a series of Audubon exhibitions this spring.
- A Bible once owned by Francis Daniel Pastorius has been acquired by the University of Pennsylvania.
- José Manuel Fernández Castineiras has received a ten-year prison sentence for the theft of the Codex Calixtinus and more than €2.4 million from the Santiago de Compostela Cathedral.
- Manchester Central Library has "withdrawn" more than 240,000 volumes, mostly non-fiction, from its circulating shelves. The books are believed to have been sold to local firm Rival Books.
- Neely Tucker has an excellent piece in the Washington Post about the "new" Harper Lee novel scheduled to be published in July.
- In case you missed the fun this week, the media picked up this week on a pretty funny little story: in a scene in the new Jennifer Lopez movie "The Boy Next Door," a character receives a copy of the "first edition" of The Iliad. This reportedly caused searches for "first editions" of The Iliad to skyrocket on AbeBooks. The story about this in The Telegraph sent me to the covers page at LibraryThing, where I pretty quickly found a strong candidate for the correct edition (in a variant color binding), and then ended up as an update on the news story. Silly fun. A few copies were listed on AbeBooks when I figured out what it was; I bought the cheapest on a whim, but wasn't surprised to find when it arrived that it was yet another variant binding!
- John Schulman has collected a roundup of bookseller responses to the recent ABAA fair in Oakland.
- British media reported this week that a previously-unknown Sherlock Holmes story has been found, part of a collection of short stories written to help fund the construction of a new bridge in the small Scottish town of Selkirk in 1904. Vulture posted the full text of the story. Mattias Bostrom at I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere makes a very good case that the story is very unlikely to have been written by Conan Doyle himself.
- Over at Alembic Rare Books, a very nice inscribed presentation copy of John Herschel's Results of Astronomical Observations (1847).
- In a post for the NYTimes Artsbeat blog, Roslyn Sulcas highlights the British Library's Endangered Archives Program, which has now mounted more than 4 million images.
- The Watkinson Library at Trinity College is raising funds to conserve and rebind the Shakespeare Second Folio they acquired in 2012.
- Conor Friedersdorf reports for The Atlantic on the absolutely ridiculous crackdown on Little Free Libraries.
- The four finalists for this year's George Washington Book Prize have been announced.
- Houghton Library highlights a very neat new acquisition: a 1474 book printed at the Benedictine monastery of SS. Ulrich and Afra in Augsburg.
- Simon Beattie's found a 1792 novel in German by Friedrich Eberhard Rambach (Die eiserne Maske. Eine schottische Geshichte [The Iron Mask. A Scottish Story], much-inspired by the Ossian tradition.
- A new website on the Martin Marprelate Press has launched.
- Alix Christie talked to The Library Cafe about her book Gutenberg's Appentice.
Reviews
- Bernard Bailyn's Sometimes an Art; review by Gordon Wood in the Weekly Standard. This one has sparked some heated discussions and rebuttals, including a critique by William R. Black at The Junto and another (in tweet form) by Jonathan W. Wilson. John Fea offers a semi-defense of Wood, to which L.D. Burnett responded.
- Reif Larsen's I Am Radar; review by Janet Maslin in the NYTimes.
- David O. Stewart's Madison's Gift; review by Carol Berkin in the WaPo.
- Mary Pilon's The Monopolists; review by Carlos Lozada in the WaPo.
- Two new editions of Jane Austen's juvenile writings; review by Paula Byrne in the TLS.
Sunday, February 15, 2015
Links & Reviews
Lots to cover once again. Here goes:
- The Bavarian government has returned more than 500 books stolen from the Girolamini and other Italian libraries. The books were seized from the Munich auction house Zisska & Schauer in 2012.
- The recovery of some of the Doves Type, noted in December, is the subject of several more complete accounts now, including a long piece in the Creative Review by Rachael Steven and a report from Justin Quirk in The Sunday Times.
- Nick Basbanes writes for the Fine Books Blog about recent attacks against books and libraries in Iraq.
- UPenn has received a $7 million gift to create a digital humanities lab.
- Jennifer Howard has launched a new project, "Books in the Wild," to document visually how we interact with books.
- Fairly surprising place for it, but there's a piece on historical bibliography (and Bible typos) in the Washington Post's Style blog.
- The Harvard magazine reports on "Cold Storage," a new documentary about the Harvard Depository.
- The Philadelphia Inquirer has a new report on the ongoing feud between the Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia and the estate of Maurice Sendak.
- The Library of Congress has acquired the papers of composer Marvin Hamlisch.
- Materials related to the codebreaking efforts at Bletchley Park, including several unique Banbury sheets, have been found in the rafters of buildings at the site during renovations.
- From the BPL Collections of Distinction blog, a look at some excellent volvelles in Apian's Cosmographica.
- The Warburg Institute and the University of London have reached a "binding agreement" through mediation about the future management of the Institute.
- In the LA Review of Books, Matthew Kirschenbaum asks "What is an @uthor?"
- Bernard Bailyn talked to The Junto about his new book, Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History.
- The NYTimes ran a story on the aftermath of the big Brooklyn warehouse fire was destroyed thousands of pages of archival records.
- The Boston Globe highlights the BPL's recent digitization initiatives.
- Michael Hoinski reports for the NYTimes on Gaylord Schanilec's new work, Lac des Pleurs.
- The manuscript of Don McLean's "American Pie" is set to be sold at Christie's in April, with an estimate of up to $1.5 million. McLean claims that the manuscript will "divulge all that there is to divulge" about the meaning of the song's lyrics.
- Over at The Collation, a neat find on the endpapers of a quarto Henry VI.
- From Stefan Fatsis at Slate, what should a dictionary look like in the 21st century?
- Alison Flood reports for the Guardian on the sale of a first edition of Aristotle's Masterpiece at last weekend's California International Antiquarian Book Fair.
- Beinecke Library curator Timothy Young has posted ten reasons why the physical book still matters.
- An Elmira, NY man has been charged with the theft of a plaque from Mark Twain's grave.
- The folks at Bookfinder have released their list of the most-sought out-of-print books of 2014.
- Pradeep Sebastian profiles London book-runners Martin Stone and Driff in his "Endpaper" column.
- The BBC Magazine ran a feature on maps, drawn from the recently-published Times History of the World in Maps.
- A copy of the Magna Carta from 1300 has been found in a scrapbook in Sandwich, England. This copy is just the seventh of this version known to exist.
- Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature have announced the planned launch of Literary Hub on 8 April. Just what this new site will do is pretty opaque, but it seems worth watching. More from the WSJ.
- The Cambridge University Library has mounted an exhibition to mark the 500th anniversary of the death of Aldus Manutius. More of these are coming, including what promises to be a fantastic one at the Grolier Club in New York.
- From Eric Kwakkel, a look at "medieval books on the go."
- Scholium Group has posted earnings warnings and spun off two companies (South Kensington Books and Ultimate Library). Is it just me, or is it really weird to read press releases like this about books?
- Manuscript Road Trip visits Rhode Island this week.
- A collection of 19th-century dust jackets, most from the 1870s-1890s, is up for grabs from South Carolina book dealer Books Tell You Why. Rebecca Rego Barry highlights the collection at Fine Books Blog.
Reviews
- "Decoding the Renaissance," the current Folger exhibition; review by William Grimes in the NYTimes.
- Peter Gay's Why the Romantics Matter; review by Peter Swaab in the Telegraph.
- Andrew Levy's Huck Finn's America; review by Parul Seghal in the NYTimes.
- Martha Hodes' Mourning Lincoln and Richard Wightman Fox's Lincoln's Body; review by Jill Lepore in the NYTimes.
- Richard Marsh's The Beetle; review by Michael Dirda in the WaPo.
- Robert Middlekauff's Washington's Revolution; review by Daniel Shribman in the Boston Globe.
- Michael Rosen's Alphabetical; review by Carlos Lozada in the WaPo.
- Richard Brookhiser's Founders' Son; review by Drew Gilpin Faust in the NYTimes.
- Ruth Guildings' Owning the Past; review by Nigel Spivey in the TLS.
- Mary Pilon's The Monopolists; review by Jen Doll in TNR.
- Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinger's Robert Love's Warnings; review by Kristin O'Brassill-Kulfan at Reviews in History.
- The Bavarian government has returned more than 500 books stolen from the Girolamini and other Italian libraries. The books were seized from the Munich auction house Zisska & Schauer in 2012.
- The recovery of some of the Doves Type, noted in December, is the subject of several more complete accounts now, including a long piece in the Creative Review by Rachael Steven and a report from Justin Quirk in The Sunday Times.
- Nick Basbanes writes for the Fine Books Blog about recent attacks against books and libraries in Iraq.
- UPenn has received a $7 million gift to create a digital humanities lab.
- Jennifer Howard has launched a new project, "Books in the Wild," to document visually how we interact with books.
- Fairly surprising place for it, but there's a piece on historical bibliography (and Bible typos) in the Washington Post's Style blog.
- The Harvard magazine reports on "Cold Storage," a new documentary about the Harvard Depository.
- The Philadelphia Inquirer has a new report on the ongoing feud between the Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia and the estate of Maurice Sendak.
- The Library of Congress has acquired the papers of composer Marvin Hamlisch.
- Materials related to the codebreaking efforts at Bletchley Park, including several unique Banbury sheets, have been found in the rafters of buildings at the site during renovations.
- From the BPL Collections of Distinction blog, a look at some excellent volvelles in Apian's Cosmographica.
- The Warburg Institute and the University of London have reached a "binding agreement" through mediation about the future management of the Institute.
- In the LA Review of Books, Matthew Kirschenbaum asks "What is an @uthor?"
- Bernard Bailyn talked to The Junto about his new book, Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History.
- The NYTimes ran a story on the aftermath of the big Brooklyn warehouse fire was destroyed thousands of pages of archival records.
- The Boston Globe highlights the BPL's recent digitization initiatives.
- Michael Hoinski reports for the NYTimes on Gaylord Schanilec's new work, Lac des Pleurs.
- The manuscript of Don McLean's "American Pie" is set to be sold at Christie's in April, with an estimate of up to $1.5 million. McLean claims that the manuscript will "divulge all that there is to divulge" about the meaning of the song's lyrics.
- Over at The Collation, a neat find on the endpapers of a quarto Henry VI.
- From Stefan Fatsis at Slate, what should a dictionary look like in the 21st century?
- Alison Flood reports for the Guardian on the sale of a first edition of Aristotle's Masterpiece at last weekend's California International Antiquarian Book Fair.
- Beinecke Library curator Timothy Young has posted ten reasons why the physical book still matters.
- An Elmira, NY man has been charged with the theft of a plaque from Mark Twain's grave.
- The folks at Bookfinder have released their list of the most-sought out-of-print books of 2014.
- Pradeep Sebastian profiles London book-runners Martin Stone and Driff in his "Endpaper" column.
- The BBC Magazine ran a feature on maps, drawn from the recently-published Times History of the World in Maps.
- A copy of the Magna Carta from 1300 has been found in a scrapbook in Sandwich, England. This copy is just the seventh of this version known to exist.
- Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature have announced the planned launch of Literary Hub on 8 April. Just what this new site will do is pretty opaque, but it seems worth watching. More from the WSJ.
- The Cambridge University Library has mounted an exhibition to mark the 500th anniversary of the death of Aldus Manutius. More of these are coming, including what promises to be a fantastic one at the Grolier Club in New York.
- From Eric Kwakkel, a look at "medieval books on the go."
- Scholium Group has posted earnings warnings and spun off two companies (South Kensington Books and Ultimate Library). Is it just me, or is it really weird to read press releases like this about books?
- Manuscript Road Trip visits Rhode Island this week.
- A collection of 19th-century dust jackets, most from the 1870s-1890s, is up for grabs from South Carolina book dealer Books Tell You Why. Rebecca Rego Barry highlights the collection at Fine Books Blog.
Reviews
- "Decoding the Renaissance," the current Folger exhibition; review by William Grimes in the NYTimes.
- Peter Gay's Why the Romantics Matter; review by Peter Swaab in the Telegraph.
- Andrew Levy's Huck Finn's America; review by Parul Seghal in the NYTimes.
- Martha Hodes' Mourning Lincoln and Richard Wightman Fox's Lincoln's Body; review by Jill Lepore in the NYTimes.
- Richard Marsh's The Beetle; review by Michael Dirda in the WaPo.
- Robert Middlekauff's Washington's Revolution; review by Daniel Shribman in the Boston Globe.
- Michael Rosen's Alphabetical; review by Carlos Lozada in the WaPo.
- Richard Brookhiser's Founders' Son; review by Drew Gilpin Faust in the NYTimes.
- Ruth Guildings' Owning the Past; review by Nigel Spivey in the TLS.
- Mary Pilon's The Monopolists; review by Jen Doll in TNR.
- Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinger's Robert Love's Warnings; review by Kristin O'Brassill-Kulfan at Reviews in History.
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