Sunday, April 27, 2008

Links & Reviews

- Ed Pollack has some Special Exhibition highlights up on his website, including some of the items he'll be bringing to the Boston Print Fair next weekend.

- Michael Lieberman notes that the McHenry Library at UC Santa Cruz will house an archive of Grateful Dead material. The library now has a webpage up for the archive, which includes "original documents, clippings, media, article and other publications about the Dead and its individual members, its tours and performances, productions, and business. Among the resources that will be invaluable for researchers are show files, programs, newsletters, posters, cover art, photographs, tickets and stickers. These artifacts document three decades of the band’s recordings and its performance of thousands of concerts. A collection of stage props, tour exhibit material, and, of course, tee-shirts gives dimension and visual impact to the collection." Processing is expected to take about two years.

- From BibliOdyssey, calligraphic portraits from the British Museum Prints Database. Peacay writes of trying to search for images in this style "The more esoteric and specific the style or theme, the harder it is to find desirable images, seems to me. More image captions and metadata please!"

- Congrats to PKS on his one-year blogiversary at Sylvia Plath Info.

- Writing for the AP, Natasha Robinson discusses the way fragile books are being scanned for Google Books; at the end, she includes comments from Brewster Kahle, founder of the open-source Internet Archive Text Archive.

- In the 1 May New York Review of Books, Garry Wills compares Lincoln's 1860 Cooper Union speech with Barack Obama's speech on race at the National Constitution Center earlier this year.

- J.L. Bell examines a 1741 set of informal rules for incoming Harvard freshmen, which are quite amusing. He also links to a lengthy discussion that's been going on over at The New Republic about the HBO "John Adams" mini-series.

Reviews

- Peter Conrad reviews Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night in The Guardian.

- In the NYTimes, Joyce Hor-Chung Lau reviews Don Jordan and Michael Walsh's White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America. I haven't read too many other reviews of this one, but their thesis sounds rather contentious to me.

- For The Scotsman, Michael Pye reviews Lisa Jardine's Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory. He didn't much care for this one.

- John Spurling reviews Arturo Perez-Reverte's most recent Captain Alatriste novel, The King's Gold.