Sunday, February 02, 2014

Links & Reviews

Lots of updates this week:

- The BSA, Caxton Club, and the University of Wisconsin Libraries are hosting a symposium on 26 April, "Bibliography, Collections, and the History of Science." Speakers will include Michael Shank on stop-press corrections in early modern astronomy, Florence Hsia on Bodleian Librarian Thomas Hyde, and Nick Wilding on the Galileo forgeries. Worth noting: Richard Lan will speak during the afternoon session.

- New at The Appendix, a fascinating index to the published articles. If you're not already reading this great publication, you should remedy that right away.

- The University of Missouri has discovered that some 600,000 books in an offsite storage facility have been damaged by mold. More here from Jennifer Howard at The Chronicle.

- Aaron Brunmeier recaps the recent Liverpool conference on Libraries in the Atlantic World.

- On 5 March, Bonhams will sell books from the collections of the Los Angeles County Law Library.

- The Robert Livingston/Richard Henry Lee draft petition to the British people written in July 1775 sold for a whopping $912,500.

- Andrew Scrimgeour, dean of libraries at Drew University, writes on marginalia in the NYTimes.

- At The Appendix, Benjamin Breen highlights a sorcery manual (now online via the Wellcome Library).

- Over at Student Science, a look at the high-tech efforts being made to hunt for palimpsests in the texts housed at St. Catherine's monastery in Egypt.

- A manuscript leaf, one of a number stolen from the Archdiocese of Turin in 1990, has been returned to Italy.

- The Vatican Library and four Japanese historical institutions will work together to inventory, catalog, and digitize the Marega Papers, an archive of some 10,000 documents related to the persecution of Christians in Japan during the 17th-19th centuries.

- The BL has uploaded more than 15,000 images of Persian manuscripts from its collections.

- BookFinder.com has released its annual list of most-searched-for out-of-print books at BookFinder.

- Your must-read of the week is Sarah Werner's "It's History, Not a Viral Feed," about those annoying context-less photo-sharing Twitter accounts.

- The Boston Globe profiled Lisa Fagin Davis about the stories she's been telling over at the Manuscript Road Trip blog.

- I'm delighted to see that the New York Society Library has completed their cataloging of the John Sharp Collection. See their blog posts on the collection here and here.

- A guest post by Thijs Porck at medievalfragments, about scribal abuse in the middle ages.

- At The Junto, Roy Rogers explains his new shelving system for his personal library. Which reminds me, I meant to share the one I came up with for my own. Someday!

- A couple security alerts from the ABAA this week, mostly involving fraudulent credit card transactions. See the full reports here and here. The books are well described, so if you've seen them or recognize them, contact the ABAA Security Committee.

- UVA English professor Brad Pasanek is interviewed for the Ploughshares "People of the Book" series.

- Over at the MSU Provenance Blog, Adversaria, a copy of the 1688 edition of Dryden's Poems containing lots and lots of manuscript annotations and extra manuscript material on inserted leaves.

- At medievalfragments, Irene Daly notes M.R. James' work as a scholar of manuscripts and how that played into his ghost stories.

Reviews

- Valerie Martin's The Ghost of the Mary Celeste; review by John Vernon in the NYTimes.

- Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation; review by Lydia Millet in the LATimes.

- Douglas Egerton's Wars of Reconstruction; review by Eric Foner in the NYTimes.

- Greg Grandin's The Empire of Necessity; review by Alan Taylor in the WaPo.

- David Brion Davis' The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation; review by John Stauffer in the WSJ.

- Randy Sparks' Where the Negroes are Masters; review by Jonathan Yardley in the WaPo.

- Alan Jacob's The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography; review by Matthew Mason at Fare Forward.