Sunday, April 28, 2013

Links & Reviews

- Over at The Collation, Sarah Werner rounds up all the available online facsimiles of the First Folio (there are eight, by her count).

- A fire at the National Library of Wales this week led to water damage throughout the part of the building where the fire occurred (which houses office space and new acquisitions, not the bulk of the library's collections).

- In an Italian court this week, Marino Massimo de Caro and thirteen others were indicted for criminal conspiracy and will go to trial in early June (this is on top of the previously-handed-down sentence of seven years in prison for theft).

- Micah Vandegrift explores the DPLA and what it may mean in the long run for libraries.

- I mentioned the recent recovery of a bunch of books stolen from the Lambeth Palace library two weeks ago; new on that front is a BBC Magazine story on the case with some new and interesting details. The employee/thief is described as a "low-level employee" and that he had defaced many of the stolen books to remove provenance markings, suggesting that he probably intended to try and sell them (some of the stolen books have not been recovered, and may have been sold).

- On the occasion of the anniversary of her birthday, Gary Kelly proposes that we might think of Mary Wollstonecraft as the "first modern woman."

- Adam Hooks at Anchora profiles the leaf book A Noble Fragment.

- From Tablet, a profile of historian and book/document thief Zosa Szajkowski.

- From The Bibliophile's Lair, Rick Ring notes his recent acquisition of a cuneiform tablet (an itty-bitty one!) for the collections at Trinity's Watkinson Library.

- At Selling Enlightenment, the first major article drawing on the big French Book Trade in the Enlightenment project: Mark Curran's "Beyond the Forbidden Best-Sellers of Revolutionary France," which looks quite interesting indeed.

- In The New Yorker, Sally McGrane highlights a recent article in the German newspaper Die Zeit, a diary of the "Hitler Diaries" hoax by one of the editors of Stern at the time of the diaries debacle.

Reviews

- Mary Roach's Gulp; review by Jon Ronson in the NYTimes.

- Nathaniel Philbrick's Bunker Hill; review by Walter Isaacson in the WaPo.

- Michael Pollan's Cooked; review by Bee Wilson in the NYTimes.

- Denise Kiernan's The Girls of Atomic City; review by Scott Martelle in the WaPo.

- Elizabeth Strout's The Burgess Boys; review by Sylvia Brownrigg in the NYTimes.

- The Selected Letters of Willa Cather; review by Tom Perrota in the NYTimes.