Sunday, August 05, 2012

Links & Reviews

- Another $150,000 grant from Caleb Loring, Jr. will fund a second phase of the Boston Athenaeum's project to catalog, conserve, and digitize its Confederate imprints collection.

- In a Collation post, Sarah Werner offers a Q&A with Goran Proot, the new Curator of Rare Books at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Sarah also posted the August crocodile this week.

- Collen O'Connor's article in the Denver Post "E-reader generation gets a kick out of hunt for rare, unusual volumes" annoyed me on several levels (it's not just young people using e-readers, for one). But, as a piece to highlight the importance of regional book fairs, I'll take it.

- Houghton Library has acquired the newspaper Trotsky was reading when he was mortally wounded by an ice-pick-wielding attacker.

- Over at the Financial Times, Peter Temple highlights map and atlas sales.

- Some additional coverage over the ongoing saga of the possible breakup of the Mendham Collection by the Law Society: Diarmaid MacCulloch has weighed in, calling the proposed sale "vandalism."

- Anne Trubek writes on the Economist's Prospero blog about the Bronte family copy of Audubon's Birds of America, now in the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

- Mills Kelly's Lying About the Past course, which caused such a ruckus this spring, was profiled/reviewed in the THE by Jon Marcus.

- Writing in Slate, Jacob Silverman asks if the online literary world isn't just a little too chummy. Ron Charles responds.

- In China Daily, book restorers at Nanjing University are profiled.

- Five years on, the murder of book collector Rolland Comstock remains technically unsolved. The local sheriff said this week that the case is still open and they still hope to be able to bring charges.

- On the SHARP blog, Edmund G C King reports on a recent seminar presentation by David Finkelstein, "Assessing Don McKenzie's Legacy in the Digital Age: A Case Study."

- Launched this week, Scripto, an open-source system for crowd-sourced transcriptions.

- J.L. Bell notes an article in Colonial Williamsburg, "The Use of Myth in History."

- The Harvard metaLAB released a video animation this week highlighting the spread of print by displaying the publication dates of books in Harvard's libraries.

- The CBC reported this week on Library and Archives Canada's preparations to move into a new facility next year.

- In the You've Got Mail installment this week: a letter from libettist Lorenzo Da Ponte to Anthony Panizzi about Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (drawn from an autograph album compiled by Charles Sumner).

- Craig Mod has posted a Readlist on the Future of Books & Publishing which is well worth exploring. [h/t @B00KE]

- In case you missed, a Periodic Table of Typefaces debuted this week; it's meant to promote the paperback release of Simon Garfield's Just My Type.

- The August AE Monthly includes pieces by Michael Stillman on the recovery of an atlas stolen from the Royal Library of Sweden; Bruce McKinney on the upcoming auction at Leslie Hindman, and Susan Netzorg Halas on what she calls the "booksellers' lifestyle" (featuring Portland's own Ian Kahn).

- There's a new Common-place up, here. A series of articles on the War of 1812 bicentennial are included.

Reviews

- Jacques Bonnet's Phantoms on the Bookshelves; review by Rebecca Rego Barry at the Fine Books Blog.

- Jonathan Gottschall's The Storytelling Animal; review by David Eagleman in the NYTimes.

- Ken Perenyi's Caveat Emptor; review by Jonathan Lopez in the WSJ.

- Richard Slotkin's The Long Road to Antietam; review by John Swansburg in the Slate Book Review.

- Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Prisoner of Heaven; review by Yvonne Zipp in the WaPo.