Sunday, November 06, 2011

Links & Reviews

- Steve Ferguson points out some very useful Flickr sites for provenance research.

- Houghton Library has announced the acquisition of a spectacular collection of 16th-century annotated books.

- Jacob Bernstein covers the Barry Landau story for The Daily Beast.

- Paul Collins writes a history of prank calling in defunct.

- The November Fine Books Notes is out: it includes my review of Eric Rasmussen's The Shakespeare Thefts, Ian McKay's writeup of the English Bibliophile sale, &c.

- A lawsuit by the Armenian Orthodox Church against the J. Paul Getty Museum has been allowed to continue. The church is demanding the return of pages from the Zeyt'un Gospels, purchased by the Getty in 1994.

- The David Livingstone Spectral Imaging Project has unveiled a digital edition of Livingstone's 1871 field journal.

- The Library Company is now making podcasts of its events available through iTunes.

- Also out this week, the November AE Monthly.

- Robert Darnton has a new NYRB piece on the DPLA; I haven't gotten to read the full version yet, but will probably comment further once I've done so.

- New from the Folger, Impos[i]tor, a nifty new imposition simulator.

- From the AAS blog, a list of books published recently which draw upon their collections.

- At The Awl, Jenny Hendrix has an essay about the legacy of Sherlock Holmes: "Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Impudent Scholars."

- New blog: American Book Collecting, by Kurt Zimmerman. I've added a sidebar link.

- Oxford University Press has launched their always-great holiday sale.

- The Fine Books Blog "Bright Young Things" series continues with Kent Tschanz of Ken Sanders Rare Books.

- On NPR this weekend, Neil McGregor talked about his book A History of the World in 100 Objects, and Robert Massie discussed his new biography of Catherine the Great.

Reviews

- Umberto Eco's The Prague Cemetery; review by Arthur Sabatini in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

- Claire Tomalin's Charles Dickens: A Life and Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's Becoming Dickens; review by David Gates in the NYTimes.