Sunday, April 09, 2017

Links & Reviews

A very nice Virginia Antiquarian Book Fair is in the books; if you missed it this year, make sure you get it on your calendar for next spring. Well worth a visit.

- Philip Durkin writes for the Shakespeare's World blog about a new use of "white lie" discovered by a transcriber, antedating the previous OED citation by nearly two centuries!

- Now on display at UVA's Special Collections library, a new exhibition on Borges and his publication history, curated by Nora Benedict.

- What looks a very interesting new concept from the American Philosophical Society: a circulation-driven recommendation tool for archival and manuscript repositories. It'll be very interesting to see this in action.

- Rachel Chanter writes for the Peter Harrington blog about a Bob Dylan artwork forgery: a cautionary tale indeed.

- JHIBlog is hosting a "book forum" on Jeffrey Andrew Barash's Collective Memory and the Historical Past. Michael Meng has the first post.

- Hugh Gilmore has the first in a series about a recent house-call to look at a professor's book collection.

- Always look through the box of random books.

- Over at Modern IP History, Zvi Rosen writes on his efforts to find and make available more than 2,000 pages of pre-1870 American copyright records that had been presumed lost.

- The Kickstarter campaign for Bruce Kennett's biography of W. A. Dwiggins remains open; though the project was fully funded, you can still sign up for various rewards, &c.

- The Watkinson Library (Trinity College) has received a nearly-complete set of the Modern Library's first series (some 600 volumes).

- The Daily Beast has a report on the January theft of rare books from a London warehouse.

- Videos of the 2017 Sandars Lectures by Toshiyuki Takamiya are now available.

- A complaints book of the Plantin Press journeymen for the period 1713–1769 is available online [via Aaron Pratt on Twitter].

- The Library of Congress and the National Museum of African American History and Culture have jointly acquired a photo album containing and early and previously unknown photograph of Harriet Tubman.

- Atlas Obscura has a piece on the work by researchers at the UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage who are trying to "capture, analyze, and catalog historic and culturally important scents."

- Will Pooley's "Floundering" is a great read on the sometime drudgery of archival research.

- Acme Binding's Paul Parisi is the subject of a brief profile in the Boston Globe.

Reviews

- A. C. Grayling's The Age of Genius; review by Thomas Colville for Reviews in History.

- Yale's new edition of the Voynich Manuscript, edited by Raymond Clemens; review by Eamon Duffy in the NYRB.

- Paul Watson's Ice Ghosts; review by Ian McGuire in the NYTimes.

- Brian Doyle's The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World; review by James McNamara in the WaPo.

- Michael Dirda highlights several recent books about books in the WaPo.

Upcoming Auction

- Rare Golf Books & Memorabilia at PBA Galleries on 13 April.