- Library History Seminar XIII is being held in Boston this weekend. See the #LHSXIII hashtag for discussions on Twitter of what seems to have been an excellent conference. Among the projects highlighted is the great work at the UVA Law School to reconstruct the first legal library at UVA.
- The St Bride Foundation has announced a restructuring of its library and printing workshop, laying off two full-time staff members. Future access to both "will have to be pre-booked and [will] be dependent on staffing availability." The Association of European Printing Museums put out a statement calling saying that "these announcements can only add to the anxiety felt by the many scholars, typographers and designers worldwide for whom St Bride's is one of the foremost international resources in the field."
- I missed this in late June: Mary Wellesley's Lapham's Quarterly piece on how Belle da Costa Greene discovered the existence of the Spanish Forger is well worth a read.
- Mark Boonshoft posted the first in a series of NYPL blog posts drawing on Thomas Jefferson's manuscript account book: this one focuses on mentions of the Hemings family.
- Filmmakers fighting copyright claims to "Happy Birthday" have found what they're calling a "smoking gun," a 1927 version of the lyrics without a copyright notice.
- The August "crocodile" mystery is up at The Collation.
- The Centre for Bibliographical History at the University of Essex has launched Lost Manuscripts, a union catalogue of manuscript fragments in Britain.
- Sarah Werner has posted her RBS lecture from this week, "How to Destroy Special Collections with Social Media in 3 Easy Steps."
- The state of Georgia has sued "rogue archivist" Carl Malamud for posting the annotated state legal code online, claiming that the annotations are under copyright.
- Courthouse News Service reports that CNN talk show host Michael Smerconish has filed a legal complaint against Arader Galleries, reportedly concerning the sale of a signed Winston Churchill photograph. More here.
- Jessamyn West has posted a fascinating piece on selecting the next Librarian of Congress. Siva Vaidhyanathan, writing in Slate, calls on the president to choose a "visionary leader" for the post.
- Kurt Zimmerman of American Book Collecting has posted the video of his talk at the Texas State Historical Association meeting in March, looking back at twenty-five years of book collecting.
- Over at the University of Glasgow Library's blog, Robert MacLean writes about the provenance of the university's copies of Vesalius.
- The NEH announced the first recipients of its new Public Scholar grants this week: they include Nicholas Basbanes for his biography of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
- The British Library will digitize more than 2,000 Hebrew manuscripts from its collections and make them freely available online through a partnership with the National Library of Israel. See the full joint announcement.
- The August Rare Book Monthly is out: articles include a notice from Bruce McKinney that he is planning to sell his collection of booksellers' catalogues en bloc at auction (some 23,000 examples).
- The Man Booker Prize longlist for 2015 was announced this week.
Reviews
- A new collection of work by Shirley Jackson, Let Me Tell You; reviews by Paul Theroux and Dwight Garner in the NYTimes; Michael Dirda in the WaPo.
- Natasha Pulley's The Watchmaker of Filigree Street; review by Helen Wecker in the NYTimes.
- Greg Steinmetz's The Richest Man Who Ever Lived; review by Jerry Z. Muller in the NYTimes.
- Rosemarie Ostler's Founding Grammars; review by Sarah Kaplan in the WaPo.
- Michael Bundock's The Fortunes of Francis Barber; review by Kathryn Sutherland in the TLS.
- Matthew Battles' Palimpsest; review by Nick Romeo in the CSM.
