Libraries Meet with FBI on Smiley Maps

As the Vineyard Gazette reports this morning, representatives from the libraries hit by map thief E. Forbes Smiley met behind closed doors in New Haven yesterday with the FBI, to examine the recovered items and to express concerns that Smiley was involved in more thefts than he's admitted.

The British Library has now admitted that four historic maps are missing from its collections: Peter Apian's 1520 world map, another world map by George Best (1578) and two copies (1624 and 1625) of Sir William Alexander's chart of New England and the Maritime Provinces. Clive Field, the BL's director of scholarship and collections, said library records indicate that Smiley is the only patron to have examined all four of those maps since 1997.

Smiley refused comment when reached at home by the Gazette reporter.

WSJ on the "Classics Market"

On Friday, the Wall Street Journal ran an article on the current market for classic works of literature, particularly translations. It gets at the question of the necessity/desirability of "updated" translations - is it true, as Viking publisher Paul Slovak says, that "Times change, and there is a sense that every generation can find a new translation that speaks to them"?

(h/t: GalleyCat, to which a link has been added on the sidebar)

Antique Torah Subject of Legal Battle

A former curator stole a 13th-century manuscript Torah from the French national library. Christie's auction house sold said Torah to Brooklyn art/antiquities dealer Yosef Goldman. The Bibliotheque Nationale has sued Goldman for return of the Torah, who has now in turn sued Christie's for selling it to him in the first place. The AP has the story, calling the situation "an antiquities lover's triangle."

New Links

There are a few new links on the sidebar:

- Fine Books & Collections: The Blog - The good folks at Fine Books & Collections magazine have put together a fantastic blog to accompany and complement the print version - this is one of my new favorite sites and I've been using some spare time to go back and read over their archive (highly recommended). One of the newest posts is quite interesting as well; it discusses the Archimedes Palimpsest and the use of technology in the rare book universe.

- Weekend Stubble - Author and professor Paul Collins posts here on book-related things. Collins wrote the well-known Sixpence House, in which he and his family take up residence in the "book town" of Hay-on-Wye in Wales. That's currently approaching the top of my "to read soon" stack, but for now, I'm enjoying the blog.

Book Review: "The Magic Circle of Rudolf II"

Cultural historian Peter Marshall's forthcoming The Magic Circle of Rudolf II: Alchemy and Astrology in Renaissance Prague (Walker & Company) offers a look inside one of what must have been among the most fascinating royal courts of Europe in the late sixteenth century, that of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. A curious scientist at heart, Rudolf's tastes ran more to observation, experimentation and study than to governance: he brought some of the "most creative, original and subversive minds" of Europe to live and work in his presence, and in doing so allowed the seeds to be laid for great advances in the worlds of art and science which would bear fruit in the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution.

Marshall provides five pillars of influence that contributed to the atmosphere Rudolf created at Prague: Neoplatonism, hermeticism, Cabalism, magic, alchemy and astrology. As a young man Rudolf's interest in the occult was piqued - this translated into a lifelong obsession with alchemical processes, the Philosopher's Stone and associated corollaries. Since Rudolf had the funds to indulge his fancies (and the power to avoid the long arms of the Inquisition), he was able to amass massive collections of natural curiosities and artistic wonders in his palaces, and to create alchemical laboratories (where upwards of two hundred men could work at a time!) in the pursuit of his goals.

A fair portion of Magic Circle is given over to short biographical sketches of many of the talented artists, scientists and alchemists that enjoyed Rudolf's patronage over the years. From the artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo (whose major works are figures from Rudolf's court, including my favorite "The Librarian", actually Rudolf's court historian Wolfgang Lazio) to the English duo of alchemists and prognosticators John Dee and Edward Kelley to Giordano Bruno (later burned at the stake for his acceptance of Copernican cosmology) and astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler (among many others), Rudolf created a safe haven for scientific (including what we would today call pseudo-scientific) and artistic exploration to occur, even as the quakes of Reformation and Counter-Reformation were being felt throughout the rest of Europe.

Of course the idyll couldn't last, and Marshall's retelling of Rudolf's decline, ouster and death (and the eventual sacking and dispersal of his collections by the Catholic and Protestant forces over the years) is depressing (but well done). While Rudolf's faults as an administrator are clear, his acceptance and toleration of dissent and openness to new ideas and beliefs are just as admirable in a historical leader as we might find them today.

A fine work indeed.

Conference on Book Trade History

Shelf Life points out what looks like a very interesting conference in London this December, "Books On The Move: Tracking Copies through Collections and the Book Trade" sponsored by the Antiquarian Book Association." Workshops will include "Lost': The Destruction, Dispersal and Rediscovery of Manuscripts," "What Can We Learn by Tracking Multiple Copies of Individual Editions?", and "Bibliophily and Public-Private Partnership: the Library of Gustave van Havre (1817-92) and its afterlife in Antwerp libraries".

More information here. Unfortunately this meeting comes just at the end of my fall term, but I'm going to look into making the trip nonetheless.

Bush's Ranch Reading

Boston Globe books editor James Concannon comments in "Off the Shelf" on the books President Bush is taking with him on his ten-day trip to Crawford: Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power by Richard Cawardine; Lincoln's Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural by Ronald C. White, Jr.; and Polio: An American Story by David M. Oshinsky.

Concannon adds "I'd suggest a fourth, Truman by David McCullough, which chronicles how an average man in the same job (which he often wasn't sure he was up to) labored mightily during wartime to make decisions that were best for the nation, regardless of political consequences. This president might draw comfort from that one."

I wonder what Laura's reading.

Domesday Book Now Online

The UK National Archives has released an e-version of the Domesday Book; the web exhibit includes a searchable text, page images, and an excellent introduction to the eleventh-century census. Reuters has more (including a new survey which found that 2% of Britons thought the Domesday Book was a novel written by Dan Brown).

(h/t Jack Kessler)

Yale: "We're Satisfied"

The ever-vigilant Everett Wilkie notes a press release from Yale dated August 1, in response to news reports which lumped that institution with the BL, Harvard and the BPL in believing that E. Forbes Smiley stole more maps from them than he's admitted to:

"Several recent news stories have mischaracterized Yale University's views regarding the federal investigation of map thefts by E. Forbes Smiley. Yale is confident that the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office have conducted a thorough investigation of the thefts, and the University is grateful for the extraordinary efforts that the federal authorities have made to recover maps stolen from Yale."

UC Libraries Could Partner with Google

The LATimes reported late Tuesday that the University of California's library system - with its 34 million volumes - is in talks with Google about joining that company's ambitious Book Search Library project to digitize and offer access (in some form) to many of the world's books. The report notes "UC President Robert C. Dynes and top UC librarians are negotiating a contract to follow six other prestigious library systems, including Harvard's and Stanford's," into the program, which began several years ago. "A UC deal with Google could be announced within a month, officials said. However, the arrangement first faces close scrutiny from the UC regents and the publishing world for potential copyright issues and concerns that UC might lose out on future revenue."

The project is the subject of ongoing litigation by authors and publishers who say that Google cannot scan copyrighted materials even if it doesn't provide full access to them. UC associate vice provost for scholarly information told the Times that the California system would probably follow the example of the University of Michigan, which allows Google to scan books in and out of copyright.

Google plans to digitize "several million books in UC's holdings over the next six years or so" - UC will receive copies of the scanned books and will save book purchase and other costs (although the project will require an initial outlay of several million dollars for equipment, storage, and logistics).

I'm a huge fan of the Google Book Library Search project; although I agree that there could be some legitimate concerns, I think Google has acted in good faith to mitigate them. It's excellent to see other large academic libraries getting involved, and I hope that the UC partnership is approved.

Note: Those libraries currently affiliated with the project are Stanford, Harvard, University of Michigan, New York Public Library, Oxford University and (provisionally) the Library of Congress.

(h/t: Bibliophile Bullpen)

Book Review: "Nature Revealed"

Award-winning Harvard biologist Edward O. (or E.O.) Wilson is one of the most interesting and elegant writers of scientific nonfiction I've ever read - his Consilience might be my favorite work of scientific philosophy, and his memoir Naturalist is a beautiful tale of his life in science. Nature Revealed is a new collection of Wilson's writings, recently published by Johns Hopkins University Press.

This volume basically reprints Wilson's articles in their original formats, which at times makes for tricky reading where the text has been compressed. It also skews toward the technical; this won't bother trained scientists, but for the general reader (like me) it meant that I skimmed just a few of the more detailed pieces.

Those are, however, my only quibbles with this book. It is an excellent cross-section of Wilson's career, from his longtime work with ants to his expositions of island biogeography, sociobiology and the idea of consilience, to his growing advocacy for the protection of biodiversity around the world in this age of environmental degradation.

One of the things I enjoy most about Wilson's work is that he doesn't feel compelled to stick to the laboratory; one of my favorite pieces in Nature Revealed is an article published for the first time (an earlier version appeared in Nature last year), in which Wilson has examined archival and historical documents in an attempt to determine which species of ants plagued several Caribbean islands some centuries ago. He argues (in Consilience among other recent publications) that the major academic disciplines can be "united in one skein of cause-and-effect explanations" - that the unity of explanation "is inherently natural to the human mind and accurately reflects the real world." Wilson's own work has clearly benefited from this inter-interdisciplinary approach, and I think that as educational institutions around the world seek new methods of instruction in the 21st century, consilience and its offshoots will play an important role.

For Wilson devotees, those interested in his ideas, or anyone who enjoys excellent scientific writings, Nature Revealed is well worth your time.

Coincidentally, as I was reading this book I came across an excellent web interview with Wilson, in which he discusses religion, science, sociobiology and many of his other ideas. He speaks just as well as he writes, and if you've got a spare hour, I highly recommend this exchange. Also watch for his forthcoming The Creation: A Meeting of Science and Religion (although I understand the title may be different now). That's due out next month.

Plight of the Lebanese National Library

NPR's "Day to Day" profiled the Lebanese National Library on Tuesday, highlighting the difficulties posed by decades of war. The library's materials, including rare manuscripts dating back centuries, are now being stored above a shop in the port of Beirut; they were nearly hit by an Israeli strike on the port in mid-July. The books and manuscripts are already in need of significant work after years of inadequate storage and neglect.

The report notes that restoration work is ongoing on the National Library's collections, funded partly by grants from the EU. The emir of Qatar has donated $25 million to restore a building for the library's use ... the building is currently housing more than 1,500 refugees, and plans for the library may have to be put on hold now that funding will be needed to replace infrastructure destroyed in the recent fighting.

Just a grim reminder of yet another cost of war.

Book Review: "The Most Famous Man in America"

Debby Applegate's new book (her first), The Most Famous Man in America, details the life and times of Henry Ward Beecher, a public figure whose fame in his own time has been largely eclipsed in the period since his death. The son of famed minister Lyman Beecher and brother of novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry's story is well-told in this fascinating and readable biography.

Applegate gently integrates her narrative of Beecher's life with a useful social, religious, and political history of America from the first quarter of the nineteenth century through the late 1880s at the height of the Gilded Age. The tensions of the era are evident at every turn, seen through the lens of Beecher and his interactions with his family, his friends, and the wider world. As Beecher came to slowly reject the staid Calvinism of his father and preach a new religion based on God's capacity to love, he mirrored the changes occurring simultaneously in the society around him.

From his earliest days, Beecher faced extreme pressure to excel, and worked hard to do so. Overcoming a speech impediment, Henry transformed himself through hard work and practice into a brilliant orator and minister, eventually accepting a call to head up the large Plymouth Church in blooming Brooklyn. It was here that Beecher made a name for himself through his preaching, lecturing, and writing - his stature grew to such a height that Lincoln chose Beecher to make the keynote speech at Fort Sumter when the Stars and Stripes were raised there at the end of the Civil War.

The final section of Applegate's book focuses on what must be seen as the defining period of Beecher's life, his entire career notwithstanding. A lurid sex scandal with all the trimmings (blackmail, additional allegations, cameo appearances from the leading figures of the day, incriminating documents in the newspaper, a salacious civil trial) consumed the last years of Beecher's career; Applegate recounts these events deftly, weaving them into the context of Beecher's entire life - while this section of the book reads more monographically than biographically, it is certainly riveting.

Beecher has found a fine biographer in Ms. Applegate; I recommend The Most Famous Man in America without reservation.

Restoring an Archimedes Manuscript

Via Rare Book News comes this report from today's San Mateo County Times (CA), about the ongoing recovery of a manuscript containing treatises and diagrams of the Greek scientist Archimedes. The manuscript was discovered under the text of a Greek prayer book (the text of which had been painted over by a French forger with illuminations of the early evangelists), and is now being examined with a particle accelerator and x-ray beams in the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory.

The palimpsest, owned by Baltimore's Walters Art Museum, is called by curator William Noel "the ugliest manuscript I have ever seen. ... It doesn't look like a great document. It's a pig's ear of a manuscript, and that's because it's 1,000 years old, it's been reused, it's been burned and been eaten by mold. But these are foundational text[s] for the history of the Western mathematical tradition."

Ian Hoffman's article outlines the very interesting history of this document, which is "probably a copy of a copy of a copy of Archimedes' original writings on papyrus. The copy on the parchment appears to have been made in Constantinople, the center of the Byzantine world, then kept in a library in the Holy Lands, possibly in Jerusalem. In A.D. 1229, a monastery scribe ran short of parchment and recycled Archimedes' treatises and four other books from the library. With pumice and lemon juice or milk, the scribe erased the five books, then he cut them in half, rotated the pages and wrote a prayer book."

It's only because the Archimedes texts were erased that the document survived, say some; otherwise it might have been destroyed. In 1906 the palimpsest was noticed and photographed, but then disappeared until 1970 when it was discovered with the pages painted over. The work was purchased anonymously for $2 million in 1998, allowing the restoration process to begin.

The article notes that the Exploratorium will broadcast a live webcast of the restoration efforts at 4 p.m. PDT on Friday, August 4.

More on the Thieving Librarian

A neat followup to Saturday's post on Manchester librarian Norman Buckley, who stole more than 400 items from the Manchester Central Library: Grumpy Old Bookman publishes the statement made to police by the Somerset bookseller who cracked the case and alerted the library to the thefts.

The report is an excellent write-up of the events as they unfolded, revealing that the American bookseller who first raised questions about the items up for auction on eBay was Vic Zoschack of Tavistock Books; Clive Keeble of Keeble Antiques noticed the alert and contacted the Manchester library, getting the ball rolling and eventually stopping Buckley in his tracks.

As GOB adds, "I think this case demonstrates a number of things, not least that there are some very responsible and public-spirited people around in the secondhand and antiquarian book trade, and such integrity deserves to be recognised. Hint: buy more books from them." Quite so.

Fred Kilgour, Founder of OCLC, Dies

One of the leading figures in modern librarianship has died. Frederick G. Kilgour, 92, founded the company known today as OCLC, changing the library catalog forever through the implementation of WorldCat and other cooperative database efforts. A full obituary for Kilgour can be found at It's all good, a joint blog by several OCLC employees.

What is "Project X"?

While the general focus of this blog is not new books, I can't help but mention this interesting publisher's gimmick: HarperCollins imprint William Morrow has announced the upcoming release of a book ... and much beyond that. Their release notes: "A world wide publishing event, this book will make headlines around the world. A shattering, provocative and mesmerizing true story, it will receive major national media attention here in the U.S. in addition to making news around the globe." Title, author, subject - all "to be revealed upon publication."

The initial print run of this title is 300,000 - and the retail price will be $25.95. Some clues to its identity come in the shelving suggestions from Ingram: Biography & Autobiography, and Childhood Memoir. Galleycat suggests it might have something to do with Michael Jackson. In an update today, they note that Publishers Weekly got HC publicists to deny that the book was by a White House insider. The PW article mainly focuses on many booksellers' suspicions of the embargoed title and their unwillingness to order large quantities of it without more information, noting that these stunts can backfire just as often as they drive up sales.

Grumpy Old Bookman, following up on the Michael Jackson theme (which will be rather disappointing if true, because I couldn't care less), suggests that the author could be Macaulay Caulkin.

Plunking the ISBN (0061138959) into Amazon reveals a book info page titled simply "Project X" - how very mysterious!

Beware the Dread Copyright Pirates

Copyright issues are some of the thorniest matters facing the book world in this digital age. A recent column from business writer Denny Hatch focuses on one print-on-demand publishing firm which seems to have a rather questionable approach (to put it nicely) to intellectual property rights. Additionally, this lot have been the subject of many discussions in the bookselling community in recent months after a suspicious cycle of purchases and returns.

Yale Displays Shakespeare's Will

A current exhibit "Searching for Shakespeare," at the Yale Center for British Art includes a most interesting document: Shakespeare's will, which has never before left England (the exhibit also includes the six portraits ostensibly of the Bard, original period theatrical costumes, and early editions of Shakespeare's plays).

Will's will is the subject of a profile in the July/August Yale alumni magazine, available online here. The document, "dated March 25, 1616, less than a month before Shakespeare's death, is a rich trove of information - and of questions. One provision alone, Shakespeare's bequest to his wife of his 'second best bed,' has generated reams of scholarly and not-so-scholarly speculation."

The piece interviews three Shakespeare experts on the relevance and importance of the will: Harold Bloom, Lawrence Manley, and Lena Cowen Orlin. All have interesting comments on some parts of the will, including that rather odd "second best bed" provision.

(h/t to Jack Kessler via Ex-Libris, who notes that the photos in the magazine are quite nice, as is the original document).

BPL Believes Smiley Stole More Maps

The Boston Public Library has now joined the British Library, Harvard and Yale in maintaining that E. Forbes Smiley stole more maps than he's acknowledged, reports the Boston Globe. BPL president Bernard Margolis said "I think all of the affected institutions believe [Forbes Smiley] took other maps." He declined to say how many additional maps are missing at the BPL or whether the library has any evidence linking Smiley to the thefts.

Smiley admitted to stealing thirty-four maps from the BPL; all but three of those were recovered by the FBI, and Margolis told the Globe that another "will be returned to the library by a private collector who heard about the thefts and realized it was stolen."

[Update: Harvard's list of thirteen missing maps is now available here - if you have any information on them, please contact lhcl@fas.harvard.edu.]