- A blog-birth announcement: Special Collections Research Center, written by the SCRC staff at the University of Chicago. Very interesting posts so far. I've put up a sidebar link and added the blog's feed to my Google Reader.
- The town of Dover, NH is set to receive three volumes of its early town records after they were nearly sold at auction in Texas last week, the Foster's Daily Democrat reports. After the town learned of the impending sale and called the auction house, the records' consignor agreed to donate the volumes to the town (rather than face a lawsuit that might have forced their return). [h/t Everett Wilkie]
- From BibliOdyssey this week, engravings from Mausoleum Potentissimorum ac Gloriosissimorum Regni Apostolici Regum et Primorum Militantis Ungariae Ducum' (Mausoleum of the Most Powerful Kings and Dukes of Hungary) by Ferenc Nádasdy, 1664; also a "geomancy almanac" from the 1550s, described as "a combination of astrological/astronomical treatise, religious almanac and prediction calendar."
- The George Washington University Law School's Jacob Burns Law Library has acquired French law book collection of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, comprising some 600 volumes of French legal texts from the 16th-19th centuries.
- The University of Iowa Special Collections has unveiled the Atlas of Early Printing, "an online, interactive map depicting the early years of printing in the fifteenth century and the spread of the new technology across Europe." The site may require a FlashPlayer update.
- Ed has another dispatch from his recent visit to Philly, where he witnessed the arrival of the Poe Toaster.
- In the Harvard Magazine, Cambridge booksellers James and Devon Gray are profiled. [h/t John Overholt]
- The University of South Carolina's Thomas Cooper Library has opened an exhibition of medieval manuscripts: "Pages from the Past: A Legacy of Medieval Books in South Carolina Collections." The catalog is available here.
- Jim Watts asks "Is there growing contempt for books?" I think his analysis here is spot-on.
- Over at Steamboats Are Ruining Everything, Caleb comments on a truly nefarious practice by publishers: selling print-on-demand copies of out-of-print backstock. "Inside hard covers deceptively similar to those of the other volumes, the publisher had stuck a text block that was only a shoddy knock-off of what ought to have been there. But, reader, they charged full price." Not cool.
- From the University of Seville, a huge list of digital books available through their website, so if you are in need of any Spanish antiquarian titles, do check here.
Reviews
- Richard Cox review and discusses Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering, noting that the book "provides considerable discussion about the creation of new kinds of public and private recordkeeping ... Although it is not Faust’s intent to write a meditation on the archival impulse, archivists and others interested in archives reading this book will come away with a deeper sense of why records are created and why they are preserved."
- In the LATimes, Art Winslow reviews Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason.
