Library News for Rare Books

Rare Books in the News: July 1, 2009

John James Audubon subject of NEH-funded 'Picturing America' institute at IU Bloomington
One particular problem with looking back at Audbon's writings, [Christoph] Irmscher said, is that although his body of writing was vast initially, his writings were censored by his granddaughter, particularly the journals. "She destroyed some and ended up rewriting others out of a notion of Victorian propriety," he said. Much of the institute will take place at IU's Lilly Library, one of the foremost repositories of rare books and manuscripts in the world and home to unparalleled Audubon resources, among them a pristine set of Audubon's Double Elephant Folio of Birds of America and an early, paper-wrapped edition of the Royal Octavo edition of the same work.

Mapping Manchester exhibition
The University of Manchester's John Rylands Library is displaying a unique collection of Manchester maps in a new exhibition. Mapping Manchester – Cartographic Stories of the City shows material from the University of Manchester, Manchester City Library and Archives, Chetham's Library and the Manchester Geographical Society. The 80 maps featured in the exhibition have been unseen in public for up to 200 years.

NYC Museum Features Bowne Stationers
New York was the center of the letterpress printing industry during the 19th century. Printing offices and "job shops" clustered between Park Row and Fulton Street. Along the north-south streets crossing them were paper suppliers, newspapers, type foundries, book binders, and ink makers. Bowne & Co., Stationers, a part of the South Street Seaport Museum, resembles a typical job shop of the late 1870's. The space would have been rather dim and lit by gas. Printing was done on presses that were powered by a treadle that had to be pumped with the foot. The shop employees had to hand-pick each piece of metal type to hand-set the text.

Lost in Cyberspace
That’s because on June 8 Scripps made the jubilant announcement that it was finalizing an agreement with the Denver Public Library “to ensure responsible stewardship of the storied newspaper’s archives and artifacts.” The library “would assume ownership of the Rocky’s voluminous archives, including all digital and paper newspaper clipping files,” while the Colorado Historical Society would receive “such other artifacts as signs, photographs, special editions, artwork and other information that documents the history of the Rocky.” [John] Temple assumed that “archives” and “digital files” meant that the entire contents of the Rocky’s site would be preserved by the library. But they won’t. Jim Kroll, who as head of the library’s department of western history and genealogy is receiving the Scripps bequest, tells me the library’s going to get “photos that appeared in the paper, photos that are outtakes, PDFs of the newspaper for the past four years, streaming video, some other things I’m not quite sure of yet.”

Hemingway grandson publishes revised version of A Moveable Feast
Ernest Hemingway's classic memoir of his time in Paris in the 1920s, A Moveable Feast, has been reworked by his grandson to give "a much better impression of what he was trying to accomplish". The first version of the posthumous memoir was published in 1964 – three years after the death of its author – edited by Hemingway's fourth wife, Mary. Now his grandson, Seán Hemingway, has edited a new edition, which includes previously unpublished sketches of Hemingway's life in Paris, including moments with his first wife Hadley and his son Jack, irreverent portraits of F Scott Fitzgerald and Ford Madox Ford, and Hemingway's memories of his early attempts at writing. A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition will be published by Scribner in the US next month, with a foreword by Hemingway's only surviving son, Patrick.

A blessing for Obama from the American Jewish community
US President Barack Obama is about to receive a unique gift. Shlomo Perelman, owner of judaism.com, has spent the past six months assembling a prayer scroll for the president, made up of over 3,000 personalized blessings that constituents submitted between December 26 and January 31. The idea came to Perelman after he heard about a gift presented to president-elect Abraham Lincoln by the head of the Jewish community of Chicago in 1861 - an American flag on which tailor Abraham Kohn had embroidered the opening verses of the Book of Joshua, including the words "be strong and of good courage."

Another Gandhi auction, bidders still at wits' end
Thanks to a loophole left by the government after the last auction of Gandhi memorabilia held four months ago in New York, Indian collectors will again be at a disadvantage at the next one due on July 14 in London. For, the reform introduced after the New York controversy is limited to "antiques of an age exceeding 100 years", although none of the available Gandhi belongings is that old. The exclusion of items that may be younger but are of no less "historical interest" will hamper Indian bidders at Sotheby's on July 14 when it will auction the belongings not just of Gandhi but also of Nehru.

Bill of treason found in university archives
Archivists at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont. have discovered a bill of treason, written on parchment against one William Rogers for taking up arms with William Lyon MacKenzie in the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837. "In Canadian history the rebellions of Upper and Lower Canada are an important passage in what happened in Canada at that time," the director of archives and research at McMaster University, Carl Spadoni, said Tuesday. "William Lyon MacKenzie organized a number of people, farmers and others, hoping to take over the government ... but the rebellion was quashed."

Russia won't participate in Jewish documents suit
Russia told a U.S. court on Friday that judges have no authority to tell the country how to handle sacred Jewish documents held in its state library that were seized by the Nazi and Soviet armies. The documents are at the center of a lawsuit brought by members of Chabad-Lubavitch, which follows the teachings of Eastern European rabbis and emphasizes the study of the Torah. The group is suing Russia in U.S. court to recover thousands of manuscripts, prayers, lectures and philosophical discourses by leading rabbis dating back to the 18th century.

For the moment | Donatella Versace
Then there is the shopping. I adore Argosy, a bookstore on East 59th Street that sells rare books, prints and maps, and I always go there to stock up on art books.

Rare Books in the News: June 30, 2009

Seminary scales back library plan
Princeton Theological Seminary, a school with one of the largest collections of theological books in the world, has scaled back its proposed plan for a new library to replace the aging Speer Library on campus because of neighbors' concerns and project costs. The seminary has filed an appli cation for a site plan review with the Regional Planning Board of Princeton seeking approval to demolish the 69,000-square-foot library and replace it with a library that would be 92,000 square feet. The footprint of the proposed library would actually be smaller than the existing library, but the building would be one story higher.

Doster Edgerton receives Berea Fellowship
Meredith Doster Edgerton has received an Appalachian Sound Archives Fellowship at Berea College. Appalachian State University graduate student Meredith Doster Edgerton is researching the shape note singing tradition in the South, particularly at two churches in Watauga County. Her work is supported by an Appalachian Sound Archives Fellowship at Berea College. Shaped notes, such as these in a hymnal in Appalachian State University’s Appalachian Collection, help singers more quickly read the vocal sections of a hymn. Appalachian State University graduate student Meredith Doster Edgerton is researching the shape note singing tradition in the South. The fellowship program encourages scholarly use of Berea’s non-commercial audio collections that document Appalachian history and culture, especially the areas of traditional music, religious expression, spoken lore and radio programs. The fellowship will support four weeks of research in the college’s archives.

Breathing life into the Dead Sea Scrolls
The eight Dead Sea Scrolls now on display at Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum are tiny, broken things. Each one is but a handful of fragments that fill a space no bigger than a half sheet of paper, contain perhaps a few hundred words, and must be viewed in a setting as dim as a nightclub. You need to peer closely to make out the small, neat lines of Hebrew letters, which may be difficult to do among the crowds that can be expected to descend on the exhibition this summer. And the crowds will surely descend: If it is hard to overstate the slightness of their physical presence, it is equally hard to underestimate the cultural importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The cache of documents, found in 11 caves at Qumran on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea between 1947 and 1956, includes the oldest extant versions of the Hebrew Bible, whose stories form the foundation for Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the three religions that worship the God of Abraham.

Libraries statewide receive rural heritage grants
Community libraries across Washington are receiving state grants to help them preserve and celebrate their rural heritage and history. The grants, which can be spent starting in mid-August, will be used to expand online digital collections being developed by the library districts. The grants are funded by the Library Services and Technology Act through the Federal Institute of Museums and Library Services (IMLS). The grants are part of the Washington Rural Heritage grant cycle that will end Aug. 13, 2010. The Cathlamet, Denny Ashby, Fort Vancouver, Mid-Columbia and Pend Oreille libraries are first-time participants and awardees in the project. The Columbia County, Ellensburg and Whitman County libraries received similar grant awards in previous years.

Keeping a record : Pryor Center makes new Web site live
In a far corner of the University of Arkansas library, there's a quiet room with dim lights and state-of-the-art video equipment, where the visual and oral histories of Arkansans are being captured, indexed, immortalized and broadcast to the world via Internet. The work is revolutionary, more comprehensive than that of any other state, Kris Katrosh, director of the Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History, said. The center's new Web site launched this week, making available a select few of hundreds of exhaustive interviews conducted across the state. The initial focus is on elderly Arkansans, older than age 65, preserving their stories before it's too late.

The sour Wikipedian
Forget altruism. Misanthropy and egotism are the fuel of online social production. That's the conclusion suggested by a new study of the character traits of the contributors to Wikipedia. A team of Israeli research psychologists gave personality tests to 69 Wikipedians and 70 non-Wikipedians. They discovered that, as New Scientist puts it, Wikipedians are generally "grumpy," "disagreeable," and "closed to new ideas." In their report on the results of the study, the scholars paint a picture of Wikipedians as social maladapts who "feel more comfortable expressing themselves on the net than they do off-line" and who score poorly on measures of "agreeableness and openness." Noting that the findings seem in conflict with public perceptions, the researchers suggest that "the prosocial behavior apparent in Wikipedia is primarily connected to egocentric motives ... which are not associated with high levels of agreeableness."

The First Sir Paul Getty Bodleian Bookbinding Prize Awarded
The Sir Paul Getty Bodleian Bookbinding Prize was awarded for the first time last night in a special ceremony which celebrated the official opening of the exhibition BOUND FOR SUCCESS: Designer Bookbinders International Competition 2009. Recognizing the best of craftsmanship and creativity in the contemporary art of bookbinding, the first prize was awarded to Alain Taral of France, for an extraordinary binding made of pear wood covered by a myriad of exotic veneers. Taral uses ‘fusion’ marquetry as his cover decoration, utilizing many different precious wood veneers including palm tree, yew, bubinga, lati, plane tree, amboina, elm burrs, thuya and faiera. Other elements of Taral’s bookbinding include wooden joints with a steel axis, suede flyleaves, a marquetry title and a wooden slipcase covered by Karelian birch veneer.

Gone With The Wind Published 73 Years Ago Today
It was on this date in 1936 that the Macmillan Publishing Company took a chance with a manuscript by an Atlanta newspaperwoman who called herself Peggy Mitchell. The rest, as they say, became history. Margaret Mitchell insisted she was never happy submitting her work for publication. She wrote for her own amusement, she said, and the characters in her book were fiction -- although modern researchers have foud remarkable similarities with people she knew or heard of.

University of Iowa Library Digitizes Collection of Historic Scores
A collection of musical scores by French composer and music publisher Ignaz Pleyel (1757-1831) is now available online in the Iowa Digital Library. The Rita Benton Music Library at the University of Iowa has released the Ignaz Pleyel Early Editions Digital Collection, which is located at http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/pleyel. This collection of nearly 250 early printed and manuscript scores represents in entirety the music library's holdings of Pleyel's work. It consists primarily of keyboard and chamber music, including arrangements of large orchestral works. Also included in the collection are songs with keyboard accompaniment and method books providing instruction in certain instruments.

Heidelberger Bibliotheca Palatina komplett online
Die Heidelberger Bibliotheca Palatina, eine der wertvollsten Sammlungen deutschsprachiger Handschriften des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit, ist vollständig digitalisiert im Internet zugänglich. In einem auf drei Jahre angelegten Projekt hat die Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg alle 848 Codices Palatini germanici der ehemals Pfalzgräflichen Bibliothek (Bibliotheca Palatina) mit insgesamt ca. 270.000 Seiten und ca. 7.000 Miniaturen digitalisiert und für die Online-Nutzung aufbereitet.

‘Public Enemies’ rekindles interest in gangster’s local exploits
Johnny Depp stars as Dillinger in the movie “Public Enemies,” which opens Wednesday at Regal Hollywood 20 at Fairfield Commons in Beavercreek. Depp posed for a mug shot in the film holding a police placard identifying Dayton as the locale of his capture. The still photo, also used in the movie trailer, replicates the authentic Dillinger mug shot preserved in the Dayton Police Department Collection in the Special Collections Archives at Wright State University.

Rare Books in the News: June 29, 2009

1,500-Year-Old Hidden Record Of Christ's Words
Sotheby's might want to send a bidding paddle to Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown. In its July 7 London manuscripts sale, the auction house is offering a 1,500-year-old biblical document that includes layers of text and meaning--in three languages. Known as the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, the piece was written over the span of three centuries and stowed in a sacred monastery until landing in the hands of a pair of British twins by way of local Egyptian dealers. Now an English college is cannibalizing its library and cashing out, to pay for some building renovations. The ancient manuscript could sell for close to $1 million, according to Sotheby's ( BID - news - people ) estimate.

A memory stick. A barn. So many ways of storing words...
In the world of pdf files and email attachments, the existence of words becomes increasingly virtual. I have a friend, for instance, whose new novel, due to be published in the autumn, exists at the moment exclusively on a memory stick. So is Gekoski's catalogue, you begin to wonder, a monument to an irretrievably lost world? The answer, I think, is yes - and no. More probably, this discreet inventory dramatically illustrates the parallel worlds of modern literature and creativity. Unlike Virginia Woolf or Dylan Thomas, inveterate scribblers, we no longer write hundreds of letters, but we still generate countless emails. Will a future Gekoski carefully catalogue bookish texts and tweets?

Michael Jackson, Fanboy
A huge comic book collector, Jackson was photographed in October 1998 at the Golden Apple comic book store. He brought his three children for a comic book shopping spree that resulted in piles of comic purchases. This spring, the auction of Jackson’s personal items included several fanboy items. Apparently Jackson was the proud owner of his very own Batman Suit, specially fitted just for him. He also owned several life sized Spider Man figures and a huge Superman Statue.These items are all pictured in the auction catalogue. The most telling connection to Jackson’s love of comics is his attempt to purchase Marvel comics in the late 1990s to help out Stan Lee, the creator of so many Marvel classic comics. Jackson retained counsel to work out the deal, but it never panned out. The story is detailed in The Comics Journal.

An Artist’s Treasures
In her recipe books, which turned up a few years ago at a reclusive collector’s home in Mexico City, Kahlo scribbled notes about which desserts and monkey brain dishes Rivera would eat “with great gluttony,” and how he would paw through tortillas on the table at Christmas and make them “simply disgusting.” She imagined a love potion that might tether him to her: concocted from wormseed twigs and ground-up toads, it would take effect after a “serenade during a night of an eternal moon.” Carlos and Leticia Noyola, antiques dealers in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, bought the Kahlo archive four years ago, along with suitcases and chipped lacquered boxes painted with Rivera and Kahlo’s names. The trove also contains Kahlo’s embroidered blouses, coral jewelry, lottery tickets, hotel receipts, taxidermied hummingbirds and a French medical textbook about amputation. “I am only a circus spectacle,” Kahlo wrote in the book’s margins, probably soon after her gangrenous lower right leg was removed in 1953.

A Manuscript, a Confrontation, a Shooting
Forty-one years later, Margo Feiden finally opened a folder containing a manuscript that had sat on her bookshelf since the day Andy Warhol was shot. She had put it there after spending three hours with Valerie Solanas, who was on the fringes of Warhol’s circle, she said. Ms. Solanas had written a play with an unprintable title and had shown up, uninvited, at Ms. Feiden’s apartment, unkempt and irrational, hoping to talk her into producing it. Ms. Feiden, who later became an art dealer and the agent for the caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, said in a recent interview that she told Ms. Solanas she would not stage it. She said Ms. Solanas countered, “Oh, yes you will, because I’m going to shoot Andy Warhol.” A few hours later, around 4 p.m. on June 3, 1968, she did.

Poet's manuscript lost at Spancilhill Horse Fair
The only copy of a new collection of work by internationally renowned Limerick poet Desmond O’Grady was lost at the Spancilhill Horse Fair in Clare this week. Limerick man Barney Sheehan (75), who had the copy in his possession, is appealing to people in Clare and beyond to return an unpublished manuscript. A reward of several hundred euros is also being offered for the return of the draft book. Entitled My Limerick City, the manuscript was due to be dropped off at the printers this weekend for publication.

Digital Age Provides Hope For Ancient Manuscripts
The case of ancient manuscripts being found missing or damaged at the Radyapustaka Museum in Solo, Central Java, has drawn world attention and prompted efforts to digitize the collection to help preserve it. Together with the British Library, Manusa, a nongovernmental organization working to preserve the ancient manuscripts, held a four-day workshop on document digitalization aimed at developing ways to save thousands of works that have been sitting in museums, libraries and private collections here and abroad gathering dust. The workshop will end today. Manusa chairman Oman Fathurrahman said that the surviving manuscripts were written in various languages and scripts, including Arabic, Malay, Javanese, Sundanese, Sasak, Balinese and the Wolio language of Buton Island.

Ethiopia - U.S. Embassy Provides Grants for Cultural Preservation in Harar
The second grant that was signed, from the U.S. Embassy, provides USD $ 35,150 to catalog and preserve the collection of Islamic manuscripts currently held at the Palace. This grant will provide the equipment and supplies needed to establish a Manuscript Presentation Center at the Palace. The Center will protect and conserve this important collection of Islamic manuscripts in Harar. The Embassy is also supporting an American Fulbright manuscript specialist to visit Harar later this summer to do an assessment of the manuscripts and develop a work plan for their preservation and presentation to visitors at the Palace.

Printer stresses craft's old ways
In some ways, this print shop is like any other, with lots of whirring and shuffling and stacks of paper. But the Weekend Printer is a far cry from your neighborhood FedEx Office branch. Instead of individual computer stations and pristine countertops, you get antique printing presses and boxes of lead and wooden type. Instead of name-tagged, uniformed staff, you get Dave Eckler. Eckler is a pressman. He fell in love with letterpress printing during ninth-grade shop class at Spry Junior High School, back in 1964.

Typography fans pick apart Microsoft Bing logo
Around the launch of Bing, members of the Typophile forums had a good time picking apart the logo design of Microsoft's new search engine. The logo was designed by Razorfish in Portland, Ore. Razorfish is owned by Microsoft. There has been considerable negative response to the Bing logo. But keep in mind this is the Internet, where skeptics and curmudgeons go to play. Here are some posts from across the Web:

Rare Books in the News: June 26, 2009

Longtime Utah bookseller Sam Weller dies at 88
Sam Weller, the venerable Salt Lake City bookseller known for his energetic personality and an uncanny ability to match a customer to the perfect book, died Tuesday. He was 88. His death, attributed to causes of age, marks the passing of a literary era for Utah readers as well as for the nation's dwindling community of independent booksellers. "It's a big ending," said Linda Brummett, manager of the general book department at the Brigham Young University Bookstore. "Sam really became a mentor to me and many other booksellers. In one way or another, we can all trace our heritage as booksellers back to Sam."

Cambridge eyes anti-war poet Sassoon's archives
Sotheby's, which is handling the private sale of the archives, called them "unquestionably the most valuable collection of Sassoon's papers ever to be offered for sale." Cambridge has valued the archive, comprising seven boxes of material, at 1.25 million pounds ($2.0 million). It includes Sassoon's journals, pocket notebooks compiled on the Western Front, poetry books, photographs and love letters to his wife Hester. "These journals make up one of the most important literary and documentary records of trench warfare in existence," Sotheby's said. The papers also include 34 volumes of journals dated 1920-1959, many unpublished, documenting Sassoon's post-war life including his affair with aristocrat Stephen Tennant.

Economic Woes Threaten Future of UMaine Folklife Center
There's also plenty of music on file. "This material is unique. It's the story of hundreds and hundreds of individuals who have spent their life in Maine, lobstermen, lumbermen, housewives, nurses, doctors -- it's the intimate personal details of daily life that for most of us is history," [Pamela] Dean says. "It's not all generals and presidents and battles. It's what everybody does everyday." Budget cuts are forcing the layoffs of two of the three employees of the Maine Folklife Center, and Dean is one of them. She's applying for grants in an effort to preserve her job and continue working to transfer the archives at the Center into digital format. Otherwise, she fears they'll deteriorate in the storage areas of UMaine's Fogler Library. "The goal, that's the goal, is to be able to have people have access to that material," says Jeff Hecker, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at UMaine. He says it was a difficult decision to cut the budget of the Folklife Center by about 60 percent.

Language change can be traced using gigantic text archives
"Historical collections that include everything ever written in a dozen American and British newspapers since they started are now available electronically. Donald MacQueen from Uppsala University, Sweden, has carried out the first comprehensive study that makes use of this resource in order to track changes in language usage, a method that makes it possible to attain an entirely new degree of precision in dating. The gigantic newspaper archives contain news and feature articles as well as editorials and commercial and classified advertisements. Together they comprise tens of billions of words. In his dissertation in English linguistics, Donald MacQueen has examined the word million in English, especially how language usage shifted from the previously nearly totally dominant "five millions of inhabitants" to today's "five million inhabitants." With the help of these electronic collections of texts that only recently became available, he has succeeded in pinning down when and where the modern expression began to take over.

Sony: Lost in transformation
The Sony Reader is the most jarring recent example of the way Sony's internal structures and culture have led to missed opportunities. The device had first been developed in isolation by a group of engineers in the home-audio division; that group's urgent focus was to try to revitalize the Walkman brand in the face of the iPod onslaught. [Howard] Stringer, who collects rare books, was a strong proponent of the Reader, but earlier versions of the product fizzled in the Japanese market. Limited enthusiasm in Japan curtailed the project, even though more than three-quarters of Sony's sales are outside the country. Stringer blames himself for not pushing harder for the Reader -- which also lacked Kindle's deep publisher relationships -- and vows to catch up with a new wireless model. "It rankled me," he says of the episode, "because it made me aware of the limitations of my power."

19th annual MWABA Book Fair June 26th and 27th
The Midwest Antiquarian Booksellers Association is comprised of 100 book vendors from the American midwest and Canada. They'll hold their 19th annual Book Fair this weekend at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds in St. Paul. Regional vendors will offer rare, antiquarian, and out of print books, as well as modern literature, children's books, cookbooks, maps and militaria, among other genres. The sale runs from 4 to 9 pm on Friday, June 26th, and 10 am to 4 pm on Saturday, June 27th.

A Rare 'Velveteen Rabbit,' but How Rare?
It's not unusual to find an old children's book that's been forgotten among boxes of childhood souvenirs. Recently, a woman brought us an early edition of Margery Williams's "The Velveteen Rabbit," the 1922 children's story about the animating power of love. The first edition, first printing of this beloved children's book sells at auction for as much as $8,000, but it is extremely hard to identify. The first printing, published in London, is notable for its chromolithographed illustrations, which were replaced by cheaper photo-mechanical reproductions in later editions.

Rare Sybil Andrews books discovered
The Campbell River Arts Council has discovered the last known collection of unsold editions of Sybil Andrews' classic book Artists Kitchen. "This is a fabulous rare find," said the Arts Council's Executive Director Ken Blackburn. "We discovered a Calgary book collector who was holding the last known unsold copies of Artists Kitchen. He had obtained them directly from the publisher's wife in England. From what I'm told, they had been forgotten about in the basement of the publisher since 1992." The Artist's Kitchen was written in 1985 in Campbell River and was published by R.K. Hudson of London, England. It was printed using a Gestetner 211 Offset Duplicator in the publisher's home.

Dead Sea Scrolls ready for Canadian exhibit
The show will go on despite the objections of Palestinian officials, who earlier this spring appealed to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and ROM executives not to display the scrolls. The exhibit is a joint project by the Israel Antiquities Authority and the ROM. The Palestinian Authority accuses Israel of having illegally obtained the scrolls from the Jordanian-owned Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem in 1967. "We would like that the Canadian people and the Canadian government officials …understand the Palestinian point of view: that such an exhibition, in this way, will have an adverse consequence on … Palestinian cultural rights," Ahmed Taha, Palestinian deputy minister of tourism, said from Ramallah. The museum feels the scrolls are legally held and both the federal and provincial government have expressed their support of the exhibition.

Tai-Phake priest reveals ‘golden’ literary past
Five ancient religious manuscripts on pure gold plates are languishing in a monastery library in a Tinsukia village and would have probably remained unknown to the world had a priest not taken the initiative to reveal the “golden past”. Bhante Gyanpal Bhikkhu, the head priest of the Buddhist monastery in the historic Nam-Phake village, has revealed for the first time that they have in their possession five manuscripts in pure gold. He has now sought the government’s help to preserve the rare manuscripts which are believed to have been brought to Assam from Myanmar around over 200 years ago.

Holocaust assets conference opens Prague
Holocaust survivors, Jewish groups and experts gathered in Prague Friday to assess efforts to return property and possessions stolen by the Nazis to their rightful owners or heirs. The five-day conference, which brings together delegates from 49 countries, is the first follow-up to a 1998 meeting in Washington that led to agreements on recovering art looted by the Nazis. During the Holocaust, Adolf Hitler and his followers killed 6 million Jews and seized billions of dollars of gold, art and private and communal property across Europe. But while countries such as Austria have stepped up restitution in recent years, critics claim some Central and Eastern European states still have a long way to go.

City, University of Tulsa team up to save city records
Jenks officials debated the possibility of the town being left without water after a provider discontinued service, clerk Mary Mayo wrote. No, there wasn’t a city council meeting held last week; these are minutes from an Aug. 1960 Jenks Town Board meeting. The minutes are among the hundreds of documents recently preserved by the University of Tulsa’s Special Collections and University Archives. City Records Manager Kathy Williams was excited about the preservation of the records, some of which are over 100 years old.

The Art of the Archive: Or how I spent my summer vacation
One of my professors at Duke, Dr. David Steinmetz, once said, quoting his mentor in Germany, that the number one thing a scholar needs is the ability to sit still for a very long time. (Dr. Steinmetz had an appropriately long and guttural German word for this, but I unfortunately cannot remember it.) Specifically, at least in my line of research, the scholar needs to be able to sit still for a very long time in an archive, which is a special kind of art. In case you should ever wish to develop this skill, or if you’ve ever just wondered how historians compile all those footnotes, a primer:

Rare Books in the News: June 25, 2009

Everything new is old
It was easy to become depressed after the lecture by Professor Leonardo Sonnoli at a conference marking the centenary of Futurism at Bezalel. The first reason was what Sonnoli had to say about the need to be familiar with the history of your field, in order to become a better designer - an issue that frequently seems no interest at all to the local design audience. The second reason was the examples Sonnoli presented when he spoke about the influence of Futurism on current typography and graphics. Nearly every aspect of today's typography, which seems so original and contemporary, has its source in a 100-year-old movement: double spreads in newspapers; typography that stretches the limits of readability and mixes top, bottom, left and right; the use of white space in order to break up text; different sizes, colors and types of letters on a single page, and so on.

Poor. Old. Tired. Horse at the ICA: As a new show at the ICA spells out, typography can be an art in itself
At first glance, it seems like a random collection of letters and numbers. But if you look at Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Sea Poppy 1 for a little while, various suggestions will begin to wander across your mind. The typography is not random, but, in fact, names of fishing boats represented by the initials of the port they come from and a number. They float on the surface of a page — or a wall — like a flower on water; the shape they form is also that of a mandala, a design that often represents the universe. Something apparently infinitely simple is revealed as something complex and resonant.

Language Technologies Introduces ReadSmart Edition Apps(TM) for the iPhone(TM) and iPod(R) Touch; Unique Apps Improve Ergonomics of Reading while Retaining Look and Design of Print Books
Language Technologies, Inc., a software developer specializing in reading technology, today announced the launch of its ReadSmart Edition(TM) applications designed for the iPhone(TM) and iPod(R) touch at the iTunes App Store(TM). The apps, available at the iTunes App Store via books.readsmart.com, are digital books for download that retain the look and design of a print book. The apps feature ReadSmart(R) high-definition typography, which enhance text without changing the wording and--unlike other e-book formats--also preserve the fonts and typefaces of print editions while improving reading comprehension, speed, and enjoyment.

Twitter co-founder, others back Small Batch’s web typography

We’ve built a technology platform that lets us to host both free and commercial fonts in a way that is incredibly fast, smoothes out differences in how browsers handle type, and offers the level of protection that type designers need without resorting to annoying and ineffective [digital rights management]. As a Typekit user, you’ll have access to our library of high-quality fonts. Just add a line of JavaScript to your markup, tell us what fonts you want to use, and then craft your pages the way you always have. Except now you’ll be able to use real fonts.

Later in the press release, chief executive Jeffrey Veen (also a co-founder at Adaptive Path) elaborates: “Typography is the last missing piece of great web design. We’re working closely with type designers to create a new market for their work.”

World's largest stone sutra expo park starts construction
Recently, the foundation stone-laying ceremony for the China Stone Sutra Expo Park was held at Yunju Temple in Beijing, announcing that the construction of the world's largest stone sutra expo park formally started. Yunju Temple is famous for its Fangshan Stone Sutras, the Buddhism Tripitaka carved on stones and a rare treasure of Chinese cultural heritage. The stone-carving of Buddhism Tripitaka at Yunju Temple started in 605 A.D., the Daye era of the Sui Dynasty, and has gone through Sui, Tang, Liao, Jin, Yuan and Ming dynasties. It has been honored with the title of "Dunhuang of Beijing" for its long history and the number of stone sutras.

Scrolls bring ROM back to life
For budding scholars Eva Mroczek and Chad Stauber, the Dead Sea Scrolls are very much alive, especially now with a historic showing of the 2,000-year-old texts opening at the Royal Ontario Museum this weekend. Gone, they say, are their days of being hidden away in a library, a windowless office or the back of a coffee shop sweating through a doctoral dissertation on the scrolls. "Now that this is happening, everybody wants to know what we're doing," Mroczek said yesterday at a preview of the scrolls exhibit. "We can talk about it at cocktail parties."

Exploiting “The Catcher in the Rye”: It’s Not Just About Holden
The quote above is from a June 18 New York Times article (“Holden Caulfield Hangs On to His Youth”) reporting that a Manhattan District Court judge has put a 10 day hold on the publication of 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye by “J. D. California” (aka Fredrik Colting). The only good thing I can say about a book-length exploitation of The Catcher in the Rye that makes an old man of Holden and a drug addict of his ten-year-old sister is that it inspired me to reread Salinger’s ageless novel with particular attention to the scenes with Phoebe. Not that Holden isn’t the main issue. He’s been named in Times headlines four days running as if he were a real person. A feature in Sunday’s Week in Review (“Get a Life, Holden”) promotes the idea that kids “just don’t like [him] as much as they used to.” Teachers, students, and experts on children’s literature are quoted in support of the article’s thesis that Holden is no longer relevant. You might as well say the same of Huck Finn, Jay Gatsby, Nick Adams, or Humbert Humbert. Holden and the book he lives in and will never grow old in are beyond topical blather about his alleged lack of appeal for 21st-century youth.

On Nixon Tapes, Ambivalence Over Abortion, Not Watergate
Most segments of the tapes relating to the Watergate scandal, which would lead to Nixon’s resignation 20 months later, have already been released. But there are some new materials that were previously held back because the audio quality was so poor that archives officials could not be certain whether they contained discussion of any classified topics. Improvements in audio technology have allowed archives staff to clear additional ones.

Hoover’s role in creation of NARA
Editor’s note: Tim Walch, director of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library-Museum, delivered the following remarks June 17 to Hoover Park staff at a picnic to mark the 75th anniversary of the creation of the National Archives and Records Administration.

We are here today to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the National Archives of the United States and to salute Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt, the two presidents who were central to the establishment of what is now the National Archives and Records Administration. On Feb. 20, 1933, President Herbert Hoover stood at a podium at the corner of Seventh and Pennsylvania avenues in Washington D.C. He was there to lay the cornerstone for a new federal building, something of a stimulus project in a bleak economy. But this building also had a noble purpose: to house the documentary heritage of a great nation. On that occasion, this is what Herbert Hoover had to say.

Viewpoint of the Defeated Turns 50 Years Old
More than 5 decades have passed by since Miguel Leon Portilla decided, driven by his mentor Angel Maria Garibay, to learn Nahuatl language and study ancient Precolumbian codices, where he deciphered stories about the Conquest from the viewpoint of the overpowered. After some investigation he realized that the manuscripts possessed the defeated spirit and decided to focus research in what today is a paradigm: the viewpoint of the defeated.

1984 attack robbed Sikhs of historical manuscripts, books and Scriptures
Prior to the Indian armed forces' attack of June 1984 on the Guru's Darbar at Amritsar, the Sikh Reference and Research Library had at least 15,000 books and more than 5,000 rare manuscripts including hand-written, hundreds of years old, volumes of Guru Granth Sahib. Besides that there were other invaluable manuscripts. The detailed list of these is available with the SGPC. But very few of the items then present in the Library are available today. The Sikh people world-wide and all right-minded individuals want to know what has happened to their precious heritage of a section of the human race.

Typography Soap: Love It or Leave It?
When soaps in the shape of video-game controllers swept the Internet a few months ago, I wanted to get my hands dirty just so I could make them clean. And now, this Typography Soap ($11) is making me want to get dirty all over again.

Rare Books in the News: June 24, 2009

Democrat Endorsed Cambodia Invasion
Yesterday, about 30,000 pages of documents were opened to the public at the National Archives facility in College Park and the Nixon library in Yorba Linda, Calif., part of a staggered declassification of papers and tapes from the Nixon years. The memos and tapes shed light on fateful moments of Nixon's second term, the Associated Press reported, among them a peace deal with North Vietnam, sea changes in domestic and foreign policy, and management of the Cold War. They also give insights into a well-known characteristic of Nixon and his aides -- a hair-trigger sensitivity to political rivals and quick resort to machinations against them.

William F. Wu is the Featured Guest at the First Annual Asian American Comicon (AACC)
Recently, New York University revealed that Wu has donated his extensive collection of comic books depicting the history of Asian and Asian American cartoon images to the NYU Fales Library and Special Collections, the college's primary collection of rare books and other special collections materials. The collection is currently being catalogued and will be the subject of a major exhibition and academic event this Fall. As part of AACC's partnership with NYU's Asian/Pacific/American Institute, Wu will share notable images from the collection and discuss the legacy of the Asian image in pulp and popular culture in a unique Spotlight discussion at the con.

Sotheby's Sale to Include a Rare Manuscript Containing the Earliest Depictions of Joan of Arc
Sotheby’s London sale of Western Manuscripts on Tuesday 7th July 2009 has a combined total sale estimate of £3 million and will include the sale of Medieval Illuminated Miniatures from the Collection of the Late Eric Korner. The highlight of the various-owner sale is a stunningly illustrated manuscript dating to the mid-15th century which has surfaced for the first time in half a century, and which contains three illustrations thought to be the earliest representations of Joan of Arc (lot 26, est. £1-1.5 million).

Defined by Line and Tone
In part because of enthusiasts such as Vasari and those who followed, we tend to think of drawing as beginning in the Renaissance. Yet it has a much longer history. It has even been suggested that the impulse to draw makes us human; witness the prehistoric cycles of vigorously limned bulls and horses known, inexplicably, as cave "paintings." Virtually nothing has survived from antiquity. But proof that the drawing impulse, far from being a Renaissance phenomenon, was powerfully alive during the medieval period can be found at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's fascinating exhibition "Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages."

Satanic verses
The discovery of a 100-year-old handwritten manuscript called Vetal Stotra demon prayer has pointed out that Vetal, the vampire spirit in the folktale of Vikram-Vetal that you grew up listening to, has a sect of worshippers. Manuscript scholar D V L Manjul found it with the Argade family in Pune. He plans to upload this poetic script comprising of 60 stanzas on the Internet for scholars to study. "Vetal Strotra is one of my recent findings," said Manjul. "Interestingly, Pune has a Vetal temple on Vetal Hill near Symbiosis Institute where the demon god is worshipped. Women are forbidden from entering that temple," he added.

Fashion Diary: Costume design gets its due at UCLA
Does UCLA have any costume holdings? The UCLA library special collections department has a fantastic holding of Dorothy Jeakins and Lucile sketches. And who knows? One day, the David C. Copley Center could be the next Fowler Museum. We could have the Ascot dress, oral histories from costume designers and a digital database. We could host conferences and exhibits.

Studs Terkel's Working: A Graphic Adaptation
Studs Terkel helped establish oral history as a popular literary form: with his radio show on Chicago’s WFMT and his many books, he proved again and again that there was meaning, even poetry, to be found in the most ordinary of lives lived by the most ordinary of people. Now selections from his 1978 bestseller Working, aptly subtitled People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do is available in a graphic adaptation by Harvey Pekar and 16 artists which successfully illustrates the voices of Terkel’s workers while providing new layers of meaning through the artist’s interpretations of the stories.

Rare Books in the News: June 23, 2009

John Berger's Archive Donated To The British Library
The British Library has acquired the archive of eminent writer, critic and thinker John Berger. The archive of previously unseen 'put-aside objects' (Berger's description of archives in his collection Here is Where we Meet) is to be transferred to the care of the British Library from its current home in a remote French Alpine village later this month (June 2009). Jamie Andrews, Head of Modern Literary Manuscripts at the British Library, will travel to the Alps (setting off on 20 June 2009) to help sort through the papers - currently stored in an old stables - and bring them back to the climate-controlled storage areas in the heart of the British Library's flagship St Pancras building.

The Bucket List: The Harry Ransom Center
Depending on how geeky your social circle is, you either regard the University Of Texas' Harry Ransom Center as the home to a world of untold cultural riches, or that ugly slab of international-style limestone across the street from the Dobie Center. I clearly fall in the former category. As I run with a crowd that released an audible "ooh" when we found out that, among its 36 million manuscript pages, 1 million rare books, 5 million photographs, and 100,000 works of art, the Ransom Center also boasts examples of correspondence between Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson. I'd often imagined of losing an entire afternoon to the center's suppressed first edition of Alice In Wonderland or Jack Kerouac's On The Road notebook, but was never able to make the time to do so until this past Sunday.

Diaghilev's Theater of Marvels Exhibit Opens At NYPL 6/26
Igor Stravinsky, Vaslav Nijinsky, Léon Bakst, Pablo Picasso, and George Balanchine are among the great collaborators who worked in Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, where they changed the face of modern ballet and influenced the course of the arts in the 20th century. Diaghilev's Theater of Marvels: The Ballets Russes and Its Aftermath, a new exhibition at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, draws on diverse materials from the Library's renowned collections to tell the remarkable story of the company and the impresario who founded it. Autograph scores by Stravinsky, costume and set designs by Léon Bakst, Nijinsky's diary, Diaghilev's notebooks, and hundreds of other treasures chart the trajectory of the legendary company, from its first stirrings within fin de siècle Russia to its astounding opening success on stage in Paris in 1909 and its 20 years of ground-breaking artistry, to its influence on the companies that followed in its footsteps.

U.Va. Offers a Modern Declaration of Independence Experience on July 4th
While John Hancock was involved in many important events in the founding years of the United States, he is perhaps best known for his big, bold signature on the Declaration of Independence. This Fourth of July, the University of Virginia invites the Charlottesville community to celebrate the patriotic holiday by using a new computing device to closely examine the signature of the president of the 2nd Continental Congress and other details of the Declaration of Independence. The U.Va. Library's permanent exhibit, "Declaring Independence: Creating and Recreating America's Document," which will be open to the public on July 4, features a new Microsoft Surface computing platform that responds to human touch. The 30-inch display, which exhibits the documents on a tabletop, allows users to zoom in and compare facsimiles of the declaration and letters from a few of the 56 signers, and also gives visitors the opportunity to view documents in the permanent collection that are not currently on display.

African music goes digital
Recordings of rarely heard traditional African music collected over a period of 50 years by music historian Hugh Tracey are now available to anyone on earth via the internet. The International Library of African Music (Ilam), based at Rhodes University in the Eastern Cape, is in the process of digitising the music, which Tracey recorded in the southern, eastern and central regions of Africa. Established in 1954 by Tracey, Ilam has digitised 20,000 songs, of which 14,000 are now available online from the organisation's archives.

Harvard Acquires 15,000-Film Collection
The Harvard Film Archive has over 15,000 films in our collection. Sometimes we acquire films one by one, sometimes we are given small collections, and sometimes we acquire large collections all at once. We open the HFA blog with the announcement of a large collection we are in the opening stages of acquiring, the Howard E. Burr Collection.

Digitization of Films: From Grain To Pixel
Not only video shops are struggling with the digitisation of films. Digitisation is also giving rise to problems in a completely different area. Film archives and laboratories have built up their work around the analogue film and due to the possibilities of digitisation are now confronted with a wide range of opportunities and problems. Dutch-sponsored researcher Giovanna Fossati investigated how film scholars can provide guidance to archives and laboratories. This is the first time that academic research has been undertaken into the possibilities for the digital preservation and restoration of films. Fossati is the first to try to bring together film scholars, archivists and laboratory technicians in such a manner. She believes they can gain a lot from collaborating with each other.

Collections represent chance to safeguard veterans' history, future
In or near the Aviation Special Collections, which are located on the third floor of the McDermott Library, World War II veterans volunteer to help process the vast archives given to the university. [Paul] Oelkrug himself is a Vietnam veteran and said current space constraints are the primary obstacle to such a proposal. The creation of a veteran's lounge in or near the collection would encourage communication between younger and older servicemen and women. The collection itself - which includes a set of U.S. General George Patton's General's stars, James Doolittle's desk and spectacular amount of knowledge about the U.S. military's past - seems a perfect neighbor for a space where veterans can use a computer, have meetings or simply seek a moment of refuge between classes.

Retired professor donates collections to Sul Ross State
Retired professor Herbert Cromwell Arbuckle III, 64, donated his personal art objects and library of about 2,500 books — with 53 complete specialty collections — to Sul Ross State University. “This collection represents a man’s life work” said Arbuckle, a Corpus Christi area high school math and history teacher and Del Mar College adjunct professor for about 35 years. Arbuckle wants to preserve his collection, and says it will bolster the school’s existing collection by Texas humorist H. Allen Smith. “It’s a big addition to what we have,” said Don Dowdey, dean of library and information technologies for the Bryan Wildenthal Memorial Library at the university in Alpine. “The professor has been a thorough collector, and a lot of items have Alpine connections.”

Diamond Bar resident's new book gives peek into Western book collection
If you decide to peruse Gordon J. Van De Water's latest book, you will find yourself immersed in history. The Diamond Bar resident's latest nonfiction, "A Stroll by My Western Bookshelves," covers various periods in Western history through selections from his grand collection of Americana books amassed over the years. "It's a book I enjoyed writing because it involves a big part of my life," explains Van De Water, 69. In the book, he takes the reader through his childhood journey - moving from Canada to California, and getting immersed in the history and drama of the American West.

Houstonian hooked on his hickory-shafted vintage clubs
It was through book collecting that Mark Wehring discovered a love for golf. But there’s a hitch. The 41-year-old Houstonian is not hooked on golf the way it is played today. He is hooked on the way it was played before 1931 — with hickory-shafted clubs and rubber-core balls. “I have been a book collector for a long time,” said Wehring, whose collection includes volumes about vintage golf clubs. “The British Golf Collectors home base is at Royal Liverpool . I went to their annual meeting (a few years ago), and everybody was playing hickories . I liked the sound of the ball, and I liked the sound coming off the club face. Since then, I have been hooked.”

Rare Books in the News: June 22, 2009

What will the literary archives of today's authors look like?
Coincidentally, last week I had a visit from Jen Tisdale from the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Austin in Texas, one of the world's great literary archives. Jen isn't an archivist – she works on the press and public relations side of the Center – but her visit (and my struggles with my Wodehouse files) opened up a line of speculation about the future of such materials. What, I wonder, will the literary histories and biographies of the future look like? Will the great libraries store and catalogue computer disks? Archives are already logging entries for film and video; where once it was essential to be able to read the chancery script of Elizabethan and Jacobean manuscripts, will it now be necessary to have an MA in the decoding of Microsoft Word? A PhD in email correspondence techniques?

Rivalry, friendship of Adams, Jefferson to be explored at BPL
Beginning today at the Boston Public Library, a weeklong conference, “John Adams & Thomas Jefferson, Libraries, Leadership, and Legacy," will explore the former presidents’ most private thoughts and beliefs. Participants will discuss elements of the two men’s vast personal libraries, the notes scribbled in the margins of their books, and the contents of the many letters they wrote each other. “They are who they are because of what they read," said Bob C. Baron, founder of a publishing company in Colorado, who decided nearly two years ago to organize the conference centered on the literary side of Adams and Jefferson. “I hope that we can keep telling that story."

For jolly photo of Einstein, E=$74,324
A photograph of one of the world's most famous, and perhaps most intelligent, tongues has sold for $74,324. The original, autographed shot of Albert Einstein wagging his tongue at reporters, snapped at Princeton University in 1951, was auctioned this week to a bidder in Long Island, N.Y. This was the highest price ever paid for a photograph of the legendary theoretical physicist, said Bobby Livingston, who auctioned the original print online Thursday for RRAuction.com, based in Amherst, New Hampshire.

Darwin in the Origin(al) & his Origin of Species
2009 marks the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth and the sesqui-centenary of his greatest work On the Origin of Species (1859). Special Collections, University of Otago Library, is celebrating these two occasions with an exhibition entitled: ‘Beetles, Barnacles, Orchids, and the Origin of Species. Charles Darwin and His Legacy’ which will begin on 8 April and run through to 3 July 2009. Darwin’s patient observations while on board the Beagle (1831-36) led him to develop his evolutionary theory by means of natural selection. Debate over the fundamentals of science, however, had already begun. French naturalists Buffon and Cuvier had their theories; British geologists and scientists such as Charles Lyell and Robert Chambers advocated their own notions. Even Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus was an early proponent of evolutionary thought.

Topsy-turvy times
Tristram Shandy, which doesn’t have a beginning, a middle or an end, ripped up all notions of narrative structure and scandalised literary London when it was first published. But this progenitor of the modern novel, which went on to influence writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, is still as fresh today as it was in the late 18th Century. Sterne enthusiasts and academics from all over the world now travel to this small, five-bedroomed house on the edge of the North York Moors to see where his complex masterpiece, the book that changed the world of literature, took shape. Shandy Hall was in a dilapidated state, riddled with dry rot and deathwatch beetle, when it was rescued by the Laurence Sterne Trust in the Seventies. Now it houses the world’s finest collection of this genius of English literature’s works, letters, illustrations and ephemera.

Priceless’ Roe papers fetch $300,000
A collection of 200 letters from WA’s first surveyor-general, John Septimus Roe, became one of the most expensive archives of early Australian history to be sold at auction when it was bought for $300,000 yesterday. Sydney antiquarian book dealer Anne McCormick, who outbid businessman Kerry Stokes and paid three times the pre-auction estimate of $100,000, yesterday described the letters as “priceless”. The delicate, yellowed letters — some still bearing the red wax used to seal them — start from 1807 when a 10-year-old Roe wrote to his parents from boarding school and include missives written by Roe from the Parmelia, en route to Australia in 1829.

New LDS Church history library going green
The 230,000 square-foot library is the first major project designed around green principles from the start, he said. The library houses the extensive collection of manuscripts, photographs, journals and other historical records for the 179-year-old church. Among the collection's more valuable items are the personal journals and writings of Joseph Smith Jr., who founded the church in 1830. It's also the home of the church history department. "We wanted the building to be a place where not only are our employees and our artifacts have a safe place to work and be preserved, but we wanted to represent in the community that shared value that is important to all us in terms of using sustainable materials and practices," Davies said.

The Lure of China: Writers from Marco Polo to J.G. Ballard, by Frances Wood
It's hard to think of a more suitable person than Frances Wood to lead a tour through the stacks of books Westerners have written based on their experiences in China. As the curator of the British Library's Chinese collections, she is familiar with both the classic and the obscure, and has written an exegesis of Marco Polo and history of treaty port life. She even contributed to the genre with a memoir of her own time as a student in "Beijing, Hand Grenade Practice in Peking: My Part in the Cultural Revolution" (John Murray, 2000). So it's not surprising that Ms. Wood has succeeded in turning what in other hands would have been a dull catalogue into a romp through the centuries of Chinese-Western relations.

Hemingway Exhibition in Havana Highlights Women in His Life
The wives, lovers and secretaries of Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) are the focus of one of the exhibitions on view during the 12th International Symposium about the American writer being held in Havana. The exhibition gathers photos, documents and objects that will be on show all year in the famous Room 511 of the Ambos Mundos Hotel in the Cuban capital where Hemingway lived in the 1930s. The pictures of Agnes Von Korowsky, the nurse who was his first love and inspired the novel "A Farewell to Arms," shares space with the photos of his wives Hadley Richardson, Marta Gelhorn, Pauline Pfeiffer and Mary Welsh, and some of his lovers including the Cuban Leopoldina. Gelhorn, who was a writer, journalist and the first wife with whom the Nobel Laureate in Literature lived on the island, is represented by a number of personal objects and books dedicated to Hemingway.

The Archivist’s Story, By Travis Holland
The archivist Pavel Dubrov no longer has very much to live for in the bleak days of Russia in the late 1930s. With his beautiful young wife killed in a train accident (and her ashes still not returned to him due to some clerical blunder), and now removed from his position as a literature professor (for his non-active role in some students’ denouncement of a colleague), Pavel finds himself in Lubyanka, the infamous Russian prison. His job is to archive literary works that he had so admired, then burn them at the end of the day.

British government spells end of ‘i before e’ rule
It's a spelling mantra that generations of schoolchildren have learned — "i before e, except after c." But new British government guidance tells teachers not to pass on the rule to students, because there are too many exceptions. The "Support For Spelling" document, which is being sent to thousands of primary schools, says the rule "is not worth teaching" because it doesn't account for words like 'sufficient,' 'veil' and 'their.'

Rare Books in the News: June 20, 2009

A poet clears his shelves
Earlier this month, London dealers Maggs Bros Rare Books, established in 1853 and one of the world's oldest and largest antiquarian booksellers, sent out catalogues detailing the 586 books on sale from the poet Richard Murphy's private library. The collection had originally been offered as a unit, with the hope that an institution such as a library might buy it. However, since many of the books were duplicates of what libraries already held, and with acquisition budgets being cut, no organisation came forward to buy the collection.

The Crosbys: literature's most scandalous couple
Though their true vocation was being Caresse and Harry, the couple also ran the Black Sun Press, a small publishing house that printed exquisite editions by leading modernist writers and commissioned some of the outstanding artists and illustrators of their day. Made with the finest paper and binding that all the Crosbys’ money could buy, and laid out by an obsessively precise old typesetter, Black Sun books were often issued in minuscule numbers, with even smaller runs of special deluxe editions. ‘If you’re interested in the best of what came out of Paris at that time,’ says the antiquarian books expert (and actor) Neil Pearson, ‘a Black Sun book is the literary equivalent of a Braque or a Picasso painting – except it’s a few thousand pounds, not 20 million.’

Intimate Collection Given To University Of Denver
A unique family view of history is now part of the University of Denver Penrose Library. Andrea Sears-Van Nest has donated her parents' entire collection of photos, letters, newspaper clippings and documents for historians and the public to view. This collection highlights the roles Vera and Edwin Sears played in the years around World War II. Edwin Sears was a law professor at the University of Berlin, where he also served as a secretary to Albert Einstein in the late 1920s.

Chris Vanocur Vlog: This week's "On the Record"
Sunday is, of course, Father's Day. One of the great lessons I got from my dad was a love of reading. So, on this week's "On the Record," we have someone who loves both books reading. His name is Ken Sanders, owner of Ken Sander's Rare Books. Sanders talk about the future of books and book stores. And, as a special treat, he also gives an impassioned poetry reading.

The Fine Art of Reading Customers
After nearly thirteen years of bookselling, we've gotten a pretty good handle on what customers, wittingly or not, are trying to say to us—not only with their words and tone of voice, but with their body language. This kind of "reading" comes more naturally to some folks than others, and certainly is refined through experience. So it occurred to us that bookseller colleagues might welcome a little tip sheet for staffers who might be newer to retail or just not as attuned to the signals customers telegraph. The examples below aren't comprehensive, but should serve as a basic guide to the kinds of things we encounter on the floor, at the register, and after the sale.

Rare Books in the News: June 19, 2009

A Trove of Steinbeck
“It was amazing to have all this unpublished material in my hands, a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” Mr. Eisenberg said. “It was all out of order, so I offered to sort it out.” It took him a year; then he returned it. On Tuesday, Bloomsbury Auctions in New York will sell the draft manuscripts along with others that had belonged to Martin’s Broadway co-producer, Cy Feuer. The large consignment, from the families of the two producers, also includes 12 signed Steinbeck letters, his unpublished introduction to the novel, his stage directions, character descriptions and pages of dialogue, corrected typescripts of the novel and the tapes of edits Steinbeck dictated and gave to a typist to transcribe as the novel progressed. (The Feuer-Martin archive goes on view on Friday at Bloomsbury, 6 West 48th Street in Manhattan.)

National archives reviews purchases of paper materials in digital age
Library and Archives Canada has put a moratorium on buying paper documents and books for its collection. Doug Rimmer, assistant deputy minister of programs and services at Library and Archives Canada, told CBC News this week the moratorium is temporary and only applies to items it buys. It will still acquire documents other ways, including gifts and donations, websites and government records. Rimmer said the archives spends about $1 million a year buying publications, and is reviewing whether that will continue in the digital age. "Because we live in a rapidly changing digital context in which more and more material is available through different means than before, and we have a responsibility to ensure that we're using our money as effectively and efficiently as we can," he said.

Digital Britain to allow commercial access to orphan works
The British Film Institute (BFI) is set to benefit from plans to allow commercial access to orphan works; content where the rights owner can not be identified or found. The proposed legislation set out in the Digital Britain report, published on June 16, will allow content creators to use material, including for commercial gain, without the consent of the rights holder but subject to appropriate safeguards. The changes would benefit all archive organisations as, at present, people who use the orphan works such as books, film or photographs on a commercial scale risk civil and criminal liability. Currently organisations are not able to restore or make copies of orphan works, even for preservation purposes.

Blaze threatens Coral Gables rare-books collection
Until he had a chance to inspect the interior, Ser said, he did not know whether any of his rare volumes and antique collectibles, most of which were kept on the first floor, were damaged by smoke or water. Firefighters used as little water as possible to douse the fire so as to avoid extensive damage to the bookstore, said Capt. Troy Easley, a Coral Gables fire spokesman. "They were fantastic," said Ser's son, Adam Ser, who was working in the bookstore when the fire broke out about 11 a.m. ‘‘It's my father's love. The hardest thing I've ever had to do was tell my father the store was on fire."

Library Collections Go Digital on iPhone
The newest version of DukeMobile, an application available for free on the Apple App Store, includes an image feature, which allows users to view the University's rare images collection on the iPhone and iPod Touch. The application, originally launched in March, was developed by the same firm that made iStanford, a similar application for Stanford University. DukeMobile currently provides unique images from 20 digital collections in a range of topics.

Bookbinding on show: Toby Clements is captivated by two new exhibitions
Arnold Schwarzenegger may think it nonsensical that Californian schoolchildren still use traditional hard-bound books when so much information is available in electronic form, but this week two exhibitions opened to celebrate the art of exactly that. An Artful Craft, at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, features some exquisite examples of bindings from two of the finest collections made during the last century: Albert Ehrman’s Broxbourne Library and Sir Paul Getty’s Wormsley Library. Bound for Success, also at the Bodleian, showcases not the craft’s past but its equally fascinating future.

Badiano Codex, Key to Study Indigenous Medicine
Returned to Mexico in 1990 by the Vatican, the De la Cruz-Badiano Codex, considered the first medical book of the new World, was digitalized and edited in a compact disc by the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), to be presented in June 17th 2009, with the comments of Miguel Leon Portilla, who was part of the committee in charge of negotiating the devolution if the ancient manuscript. This new digitalized version of the codex is part of the Codices of Mexico Series, INAH project that presents these documents in a digital format to promote them and motivate research. The original is lodged at the National Library of Anthropology and History (BNAH) under strict conservation and safety measures. “The De la Cruz- Badiano Codex is a treasure that awakes even more the interest towards indigenous medicine” declared Dr. Miguel Leon Portilla, who considers it one of the 5 existent historical sources that allows knowing uses and customs of ancient indigenous peoples regarding their medical treatments.

New: The Society of American Archivists Twitter Feed and Facebook Page
You can follow SAA happenings via Twitter by heading to: http://twitter.com/archivists_org. The SAA also has a Facebook page. You can “friend them” here.

Marshall home to Banjo Women exhibit
Banjo Women in West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky," a multimedia exhibit of photographs, text, and audio that celebrates the role of women in the development of banjo music in Appalachia, has opened in the Special Collections Department of Marshall University Libraries. The exhibition was created from information gathered in oral histories with 10 women banjoists - seven from West Virginia and three from Kentucky. Visitors can learn about the women included in the exhibit while listening to selections of music recorded during their oral history interviews. The Special Collections Department has the exhibit on display to highlight one of its many unique collections.

Gemlike Paintings, Set Free From Words
Most people would agree that tearing up an illuminated manuscript to sell it by the page is vandalism. But might it also liberate the art on those pages? That’s the underlying question of “Pages of Gold,” the Morgan Library & Museum’s quietly compelling show of leaves separated from manuscripts and sold to collectors of medieval art. The Morgan owns a large number of these “orphan” leaves, many acquired by the museum’s founder, Pierpont Morgan, but it has never shown them as a group. With an eye to the convoluted provenances of these works, William M. Voelkle, the museum’s medieval and Renaissance manuscripts curator, has installed 50 single leaves from the collection, 12 of which are being exhibited for the first time.

Those Medieval Monks Could Draw
Of course medieval artists — many of whom were anonymous monks working as scribes in scriptoria — drew. All those manuscript illuminations had to start somewhere. But did they actually make drawings that survived and were cherished as drawings, or that filled practical needs that only drawing can? To most of us, European drawing before the Renaissance and its emphasis on individual genius and the artist’s hand is a dark, uncharted void. Which may explain why “Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art feels so startlingly full of light. You may even find yourself rubbing your eyes and blinking.

From Gutenberg to Grisham
The search for a new director of the Boston Public Library last fall exposed fault lines between the library’s 27 neighborhood branches and the more rarefied research library in Copley Square. Which deserved more attention and resources? Which provided the “true" library experience? This being Boston, the debate devolved into factions. Charges of elitism and philistinism flew. “Cool and Collected," an exhibit in the entrance lobby of the Copley branch, is beginning to heal that gap.

Song of Whitman
Four years ago, Raymond Danowski gave Emory University a mammoth library of poetry —- some 75,000 volumes, representing modern verse from Walt Whitman to the present. Emory's colorful exhibit at the Schatten Gallery of about 200 selected books from that collection, including a first edition of Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," ends on Saturday. After that, these rare books return to the Emory archives; they remain accessible to the general public (not just scholars), but this week offers an unusual chance to see scores of them at a single glance. The exhibition includes some great finds (an artist's book by Andrei Codrescu; juvenilia from Adrien Rich and James Merrill) and leaves the lasting impression that the poetry of the past century and a half, far from being isolated in some Platonic aerie, was embedded in the political and cultural ferment of the times.

For Sale: One Torah scroll
Having raised $12,000, the cemetery committee now estimates that it needs another $8,000 for repairs and future maintenance. So they’re tying to sell an item of value that they no longer need — a Torah scroll. The scroll (and a Megillat Esther, a scroll of Esther, which is also for sale) came from the Sharey Zedek Synagogue, which was founded in 1892 and disbanded in the 1940s, according to Andrew Muchin, former director of the Small Jewish Communities Project of the Wisconsin Society for Jewish Learning. After 1940, the remaining Jews of Hurley prayed with the Ironwood community, which gathered in a Finnish social hall. When that hall closed, the synagogue’s religious items were left behind.

NPG makes archived content reusable
The terms were developed in consultation with the Wellcome Trust, the leading biomedical research charity. The re-use permissions apply to author manuscripts, of articles published in NPG’s journals, which have been archived in PubMed Central, UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) and other institutional and subject repositories. NPG’s re-use terms will be included in the metadata of these archived manuscripts. “The Wellcome Trust was keen to expand the Open Access articles available on UKPMC,” said Hoole. “We wanted to clarify the copyrights and terms of reuse for archived content, so that we could offer NPG author manuscripts for the UKPMC open access subset.” This move is the next step in NPG’s support for self-archiving and its objective to encourage authors of original research articles to self-archive the accepted version of their manuscript, for public access six months after publication.