Sunday, November 11, 2012

Links & Reviews

- New from WMQ, an article by Wilson Kimnach and Kenneth Minkema on Jonathan Edwards' study, and an online exhibit to accompany it. And yes, I do want one of those lazy susan reading tables.

- ILAB has posted a great interview with their new president, Tom Congalton. Read the whole thing.

- Rare Book School's 2013 schedule is up!

- "60 Minutes" ran a segment on the Barry Landau thefts recently. Travis McDade posted on the OUP blog about a specific aspect of the report: the custom-made suit jackets Landau used to smuggled documents out of libraries (part of a long tradition of such things, as he notes).

- Peter Harrington announced this week that the presentation copy of Frankenstein to Lord Byron has been sold to a UK collector for an undisclosed sum, with the understanding that the book will be made available for future exhibitions and viewings.

- Telegraph reporter Leah Hyslop talked to the owner of Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company

- The ABA has responded to the conviction of serial forger Allan Formhalls, noting that an online guide to Formahalls' forgeries is planned.

- From the ABAA Security blog, a report of significant thefts from the Samuel May, Jr. library at Becker College.

- Robin Sloan talked to The Millions this week about his new book, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore (which I'm reading at the moment, and enjoying immensely).

- Rare book dealer John Fior purchased an Alice in Wonderland themed chess board in 2011; turns out the board was illustrated by John Tenniel himself. Now 150 exact replicas of the board have been made: they'll sell for £3,500 apiece.

- The transcript of the Supreme Court argument in the recent copyright case Kirtsaeng v. Wiley is now available [PDF].

- Over at The Collation, Heather Wolfe profiles a remarkable compilation volume from the Folger's collections.

- Mark Davies at BYU has built a really useful interface for Google Books corpus searching.

- Garrett Scott at Bibliophagist highlights some books "written" from beyond the grave.

- An excerpt from Ian Sansom's new book Paper: An Elegy appeared in the Guardian on Friday.

- Mark Grimsley posted this week on the uses and misuses of counterfactual history.

- Christine Frost has posted an overview of the Radcliffe Take Note conference. Jennifer Schuesller reported on the conference for the New York Times, too.

- The Morbid Anatomy Anthology kickstarter proposal, which I mentioned a couple weeks ago and was very happy to back, has better than tripled its goal, with almost a month left to go. Awesome news.

- From Notabilia, a nice example of 18th-century circulating library wrappers.

- A couple good new posts from Caleb Crain at Steamboats are Ruining Everything: "The Future of Books and Copyright" and "Those People Were a Kind of Solution."

Reviews

- Jill Lepore's The Story of America; review by Rachel Shteir at TNR.

- Robin Sloan's Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore; review by Rebecca Rego Barry at Fine Books Blog.

- W. Jeffrey Bolster's The Mortal Sea; review by Michael Kenney in the Boston Globe.

- Jon Meacham's Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power; review by Joyce Appleby in the WaPo.