Library News for Rare Books

Exhibition: Expressions of Jewish Life through Texts and Objects

This week we're installing the exhibition Expressions of Jewish Life through Texts and Objects. The exhibition opens on Monday, April 6, and continues through Sunday, June 28, 2009.

The exhibition begins in Olin Library's Grand Staircase Lobby, where materials on loan from the University of Michigan's Jewish Heritage Collection Dedicated to Mark and Dave Harris (pdf) are on display. The collection, founded in 2003 through a gift from Constance and (the late) Theodore Harris, was formed to reflect Jewish life, and it does so in an unusual assemblage of some 3,000 books and objects dating from the 15th century to the present. The selection shown at WU focuses on the Passover holiday and includes household objects relating to the Seder, or ritual dinner, and editions of the Haggadah, the text that guides the Seder.

The exhibition continues in the Olin Library Ginkgo Room, where materials from the WU Libraries' Shimeon Brisman Collection in Jewish Studies are displayed. Shimeon Brisman (1920-2004) was the esteemed Jewish Studies Bibliographer at UCLA, and it was through his offices that WU was able in 1972 to purchase a significant collection of materials (duplicates of books already belonging to UCLA) in support of its growing programs in Jewish Studies. The collection includes stock from the Bamberger & Wahrmann bookshop in Jerusalem as well as works from the library of scholar and book collector Moses Gaster (1856-1939). This portion of the exhibition was curated by Jill Storm, a PhD candidate in WU's History Department, and coordinated by Deborah Katz, Subject Bibliographer for Jewish and Near Eastern Studies, and Shelli Kastin, Supervisor of the WU Libraries' Original & Adaptive Cataloging Unit.

Shown above is a 1655 edition of a work that will form the focus of an upcoming related lecture. On Wednesday, April 29, 2009, Dr. Martin Jacobs will speak on "Hebrew Belles Lettres and the Memory of Spain: Ibn Verga's Staff of Judah, an early printed book from Washington University's Brisman Collection." The lecture will take place on Wednesday, April 29, 2009, at 4:00pm in the Olin Library Ginkgo Room. It is free and open to the public.

Rare Books in the News: March 31, 2009

Restorers 'wiped away' precious details from rare William Shakespeare portraits
But it has emerged that art conservators who joined forces to restore the two portraits by removing the top layer of paint to reveal the "authentic" portraits beneath, were actually wiping away priceless insights into the changing appearance of Britain's greatest playwright.

Either / Or: Today: Mike Glenn
As a collector of books and artifacts, is it easy to find what you’re looking for, or does what you’re looking for find you? “My mentor is a man named Charles Blockson, who has a collection at Temple [University]. He’s been encouraging me. He told me, ‘It’s a spiritual quest, a spiritual journey you’re on. Books will find you.’ He said, ‘Keep collecting what you can,’ and that’s how some of what Phyllis Wheatley wrote in 1773 found me. I’ve had so many cases where things found me.”

Words I’d love to hear: ‘I know a great little shop…’
While I am delighted that the massive Kinokuniya bookstore is shaking things up in Dubai, and that other international megastores continue to encourage the consumption of the printed word, there is no replacement for the quirky, charming, and seemingly random independent bookshops. In the best examples the shopping process becomes inverted, and you go to the store to discover what you desire. Time and again I find myself thrilled to have learnt something either by running across a volume randomly while browsing, or by heeding the knowledgable advice of the shopkeeper.

Collectors flock to show for treasures on printed page
Walt Danilowicz plans vacations around the Michigan Antiquarian Book and Paper Show, a biannual event geared toward both browsers and collectors. "It's a nice show," the Georgia resident said Sunday, toting some children's books around the Lansing Center. There were several for his granddaughter Lexi, 7, of Northville.

Top Earners Hold Mixed Views on Plan for Higher Taxes
David Fandetta, 51, and John-Peter Hayden Jr., 68, would have agreed with Mr. Colmenares. The two sellers of rare books were shopping on Madison. “We’re trying to do our bit,” Mr. Hayden said. “You’ve got to go out and spend.” Mr. Fandetta said that their business was down as much as 20 to 30 percent, judging from their sales at the recent New York Arts of Pacific Asia Show. “It’s the wrong time to raise taxes,” he said. “Everybody’s trying to squeeze every nickel out of every rock. They need my 8 percent? Start laying off some bureaucrats. We have a bloated bureaucracy, and that’s bloated with a capital B.”

The Collector: Sir Terence Conran: The British Design Icon Takes Us Inside His Home
How do your collections influence your design work? The things I collect have in common that I love their shape and material. Many of them also have a practical use. Because of my design work I am obviously interested in shape and form and how things are made. I can pick up a glass I really like, for example, and can get inspired by its shape.

The Massacre at No Gun Ri: Army Letter reveals U.S. intent
Harvard historian Sahr Conway-Lanz first disclosed the existence of Ambassador John H. Muccio's 1950 letter in a scholarly article and a 2006 book, "Collateral Damage." He uncovered the declassified document at the U.S. National Archives. When asked last year, the Pentagon didn't address the central question of whether U.S. investigators had seen the document before issuing their No Gun Ri report. Ex-Army Secretary Louis Caldera suggested to The Associated Press that Army researchers may have missed it.

Panelists highlight human-rights issues’ future at conference
James Smith, chief executive of the anti-genocide organization Aegis Trust, said universities’ ability to contribute to projects that won’t have immediate results offers a significant advantage over the typical five-year view most non-governmental organizations take when deciding what to support. Aegis Trust works with the UT library system, he said, on a program that protects and digitally preserves archives and other primary sources in danger of being lost that document genocide. “Without the participation of UT, it would have probably gone nowhere,” Smith said.

KU artist explores family roots in persecution
Those were mostly paintings. Lately, though, he’s reverted to media that he feels better suits the subject matter. Mostly, that means graphite drawings on paper, covered in salt. “I see (salt) as the essence of something that’s evaporated, or left behind,” Kligman says. He also works with ashes gathered from burning books, goldleaf and other materials. “I think that’s one of the particularly strong things about his work,” says Cima Katz, an art professor at KU. “He uses not just images in a symbolic way, but materials in a symbolic way.”

The evolution of the comic book
Some people consider a literary medium such as graphic novels or graphic narratives to be a lesser form compared to novels or other types of literature. “I think that’s changing,” Najmi said. She has felt an academic shift in the last few years “that means something,” according to Dr. Najmi, more professors and instructors are using this accessible literary and art medium as a tool to teach. “There was very little out there to address 9/11,” Najmi said. “It was a different political climate.” With Spiegleman’s “In the Shadow of No Towers,” Najmi finds a medium, “that speaks to the power of the graphic form.”

Comic Titans Are in the Grips of the Dreaded Inflationist
“Comics are a legit form of entertainment, and there are highly respected and well-paid individuals creating them,” he said. “People have an affinity for nickel and dime comics from the 1940s, but we’re competing with video games, film and television.” He added, “We need to keep the talent on the books to make them work.”

New exhibit displays Obama items from Africa
That's Swahili for "Yes We Can," President Barack Obama's signature campaign line that became just as ubiquitous in his father's native Kenya as it did in the United States. Those words can be found on textiles and posters featured in a new Library of Congress exhibit, "Obamabilia From Africa!," which reflects the excitement Obama's candidacy and victory produced in sub-Saharan Africa.

Museum, library release Ike's papers
More papers from President Dwight D. Eisenhower have been released for review by researchers at the former president and Army general's museum and library. The release comes as the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum in Abilene marks the 40th anniversary of Ike's death on March 28, 1969.

MDC receives film archives documenting Miami's past
South Florida's most prized film and video collection -- millions of feet of footage documenting nine decades of events that shaped Miami-Dade -- has just been been donated to Miami Dade College. The Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archives are made up largely of newscasts aired by the area's first station, WTVJ -- the flagship station of Wometco Enterprises. WTVJ first went on the air in 1949, fronted by pioneer newscaster Ralph Renick. It is now NBC6.

Documentary footage of bluegrass musicians shown April 8
Chuck Hemrick is a traditional musician who worked as a camera operator for the High Point-based television station WGHP. He produced “Blue Ridge Views,” a popular weekly news feature highlighting cultural traditions, especially traditional music. These two-to-three minute features were broadcast from 1990 to 1993. When he retired, Hemrick donated the original tapes of “Blue Ridge Views” to the library’s W.L. Eury Appalachian Collection.

Wise writings can be viewed on new site
The American Jewish Archives will put a slice of Cincinnati and American history online starting today when it unveils a new digital home for the papers of Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise. Wise, the 19th-century rabbi who was the founder of Hebrew Union College and one of the fathers of American Reform Judaism, wrote about conversations with Abraham Lincoln and exchanged letters with Harriet Beecher Stowe during his tenure in Cincinnati. Those documents are only a few available in the new digital archives at www.americanjewisharchives.org/wise.

She'll share her tales of Hemingway
In Cuba, the political situation was deteriorating as Hemingway's eyesight and health were failing. He sent his protégé to Europe. In the wake of his suicide, she helped Hemingway's wife surreptitiously ship out trunks of art, manuscripts, musings and letters. Danby-Smith then spent four years organizing and cataloguing everything, preparing Hemingway's life's work for the Kennedy Library.

Edward Upward: An artistic vision at odds with his politics
The Mortmere stories circulated in manuscript form amongst their friends, and their skill and invention became a landmark for the "Auden generation." Auden regularly read them to his poetry audiences. The pinnacle of the cycle, "The Railway Accident" (1928), was eventually published in 1949 under the pseudonym Allen Chalmers, the name Isherwood used for Upward in his autobiography Lions and Shadows (1938). Upward later destroyed most of the Mortmere manuscripts, and did not allow the remaining fragments to be published until 1994.

Knowledge of the past pinched
An invaluable slice of Taranaki history has been stolen and with it the family history of thousands. The 1901 Star Almanac, an annual publication by the Hawera Star from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s, has disappeared from the Tainui Historical Society museum at Mokau within the last week.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi at the Royal Academy: as close as art can get to comics
This first encounter led to a 30‑year obsession that saw [Arthur R.] Miller build up the biggest Kuniyoshi collection in the world – which he is now giving to the British Museum through its not-for-profit organisation American Friends – and which forms the basis of the Royal Academy's exhibition. I'm sitting in the vaults of the British Museum with some of the jewels of this magnificent bequest laid out in front of me. While Japanese prints are horribly prone to fading, these look as pristine – their vibrant colours as clean and fresh – as the day they came off the wooden printing blocks in Edo (Tokyo) more than a century-and-a-half ago.

NYC show explores Japanese comic books, animation
The gallery of the normally serene Japan Society has been overtaken by scenes of ruined cities, rocket travel, giant fighting robots, prostitution and teenagers in the throes of eating disorders. The carnage and dysfunction are central to the elaborate fictional worlds of Japanese comics (manga), animated films (anime) and video games now on display in midtown Manhattan.

Oxford Jewish Library to Add Rare Medieval Works to Collection
The next installment of a five-figure annual grant from Toronto’s Samson Family, whose daughter studied at Oxford University, will allow the Oxford Chabad Society’s current collection of more than 3,000 volumes to expand into the realm of medieval rabbinic literature.

Ketterer Kunst to auction Maria Sibylla Merian’s magnificent book on insects
It might be yours for just € 25 000: the Bernard edition of Maria Sibylla Merian’s two great books on the insects of Suriname and Europe. Published in Amsterdam in 1730, the work, featuring 256 stunning copperplate engravings, is to be sold at the Ketterer Kunst auctions in Hamburg on 18 und 19 May 2009.

From the Design Desk: Promos in the Mail
As a follow up to our neat mail post from two weeks ago, not all of those cool envelopes contain invoices. We also get a lot of promotional material that’s as diverse as the books we publish. For example, below (from left to right): letterpress “matchsticks” from Swink, a wooden postcard from Deep Craft, a multimedia card from Laura Tarrish, and a tiny letter from Sally Faulkner.

‘Creative Capital’ Providence found inspiration elsewhere
Josh Silverman, owner of Schwa Design, came up with the city’s P and using the orange color was suggested by North Star, the branding firm. “The foot or the serif at the bottom of the ‘P’ and the serif at the top of it suggest both looking back and going forward,” explained Silverman. “You won’t find that combination of serifs on any typography. It’s a distinct accent. It can be iconic, trademark-able even, but it’s also scalable –– meaning recognizable at all sizes, from pins to billboards.”

Cooking the Books with Rebecca Federman
PW: Do you think that with the advance of digital publishing, cookbooks will become obsolete? RF: I love cookbooks. I love reading them. But I have friends who are very good cooks but rarely use cookbooks. They go online. But I think cookbooks will stick around. They seem to be published more and more every year.

Rare Books in the News: March 30, 2009

MoMA Acquires Gilbert And Lila Silverman Collection
The collection, which was assembled in Detroit over three decades by the Silvermans, comprises approximately 3,000 works in mediums ranging from printed ephemera, multiples, drawings, and sculptural objects, to photographs and film. In addition, an archival component includes more than 4,000 files with such items as artists’ correspondence, notebooks and scrapbooks, as well as documents and photographs related to Fluxus performances and events. The final component of the Silverman Fluxus Collection is a reference library of over 1,500 related books and catalogues.

A Tug of War Over Robert Motherwell
Dueling legal complaints filed on the same day in different New York courts present strikingly contradictory portrayals of Joan Banach, who for 10 years was a personal curator and cataloger for the Abstract Expressionist artist Robert Motherwell.

Reading in a digital age: Everything is changing
He jumped into his topic from the platform of a National Endowment for the Arts study which showed that the annual reading of a novel or a collection of short stories by Americans has been eroding by percentage points since the 1980s. In 2009, Bohjalian said that the study only indicated 50 percent of the public could make that contention, "because reading is changing and the Internet is changing reading behavior."

Detroit newspapers hope fewer days can add up
Detroit is trying a hybrid: keeping daily publication, but cutting back on its commitment to serve homes every day. The newspapers hope that by nurturing their ink-stained legacy, and reaping only partial savings in production and delivery, they can keep enough revenue and staff to grow beyond print and become profitable on the Internet, cell phones and other mobile gadgets.

Stop The Presses! Newspapers As We Know Them May Cease To Exist ... But What Will Become Of The News Itself?
And what about the "local angle"? (Editors always tell their reporters to "get the local angle.) Well, you can't get more local than the suburban community of Montclair, New Jersey, where Debra Galant and Liz George have launched a Web site, Baristanet.com. "We are much more different because we are more dynamic," George said. "People are coming to have a conversation, and you cannot do it with a newspaper."

Archie Green, 91, Union Activist and Folklorist, Dies
At the same time, Mr. Green energetically promoted the idea of public folklore — that is, that folklorists should work outside the academy to gather, preserve and publicize local cultures through government agencies, museums, folk festivals and radio stations. His signal achievement in this area was the lonely lobbying campaign he conducted for nearly six years to create a national folklife center, which became a reality when Congress, by a unanimous vote, passed the American Folklife Preservation Act, signed into law by President Gerald R. Ford in January 1976.

The Beat goes on: Michelle Kraus helps preserve the voice of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg
Her career has been in the field of technology, which, she says, dovetails nicely with a dream she nurtured decades ago as a "scholar on fire." In her afterword for "Allen Ginsberg," she wrote: "Public access to nontraditional information was the motivating force behind this compilation. As computer technology is adapted to library systems, one hopes that this process of data retrieval will be simplified. However, in lieu of advances in application, this sourcebook has been provided with material that is not readily available."

Help solve the mystery of the Gardner art heist
The pilfering of the Manet deviates from the rest of the theft in other ways. It was the only painting stolen from a gallery not on the second floor. Mysteriously, no alarms were triggered on the entire first floor during the thieves’ 81-minute spree - despite the fact that “Chez Tortoni” was taken from a first-floor gallery. What does this tell us about how the theft was conducted?

Hidden treasures in antique books
The resurrection of these lost titles to the world market has attracted the interest of large customers, mainly universities with reputable book collections. İşli adds that there are still valuable and rare items out there, waiting to be brought to light, but one would have to look east: Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. He explains that the former Iron Curtain countries have impeded the flow of such books across national borders.

Hitler, assassination plot, personal documents
Stefan Fisher of Blue Lake purchased the personal military papers of the German Cmdr. Johannes-Georg Klamroth more than 30 years ago -- having no idea that they belonged to an intelligence officer tried, convicted and executed for his advance knowledge of a 1944 plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

Recession sees business boom for Norwich second-hand traders
The enthusiasm of buyers has also helped. He said: “One of the things about specialist book sales is buyers know that if they see a rare book and don't buy it, they may never see it again as it will be out of print. “If book buyers see a £100 edition they want and only have £90 in their pocket they will go without food and beg, borrow and steal to get that extra £10 because they want it.

Celebrating 400th Anniversary of Henry Hudson’s Historic Voyage
The 400th anniversary of Hudson’s departure will be celebrated this week in Amsterdam and in Manhattan, where the Museum of the City of New York opens “Amsterdam/New Amsterdam: The Worlds of Henry Hudson.” The exhibition includes 275 artifacts in an installation that evokes the hull of Hudson’s 85-foot-long ship, the Half Moon.

Celebrating kids literature
The children's book festival also highlights the de Grummond Children's Literature Collection. Founded in 1966, the collection holds the original manuscripts and illustrations of more than 1,200 authors and illustrators, as well as 100,000-plus published books dating from 1530 to the present. "We are especially thrilled to have someone of Judy Blume's stature to receive the Southern Miss Medallion," said Ellen Ruffin, de Grummond Children's Literature Collection curator. "Her influence with young people is incomparable."

Stalker who loved Dickens
The stalker’s identity is revealed in the diary of Annie Fields, a Boston society hostess and the wife of Dickens’s publisher, who attended some of the novelist’s shows. Her account of the “Bigelow terror” forms the basis for several scenes in The Last Dickens, a bestselling novel by Matthew Pearl, a New York historian who found it in archives.

Laser etch your laptop with the map to Super Mario Land
From customizing shoes to Pac-Man shirts on Threadless, the remix culture really knows no bounds. Now anybody can slap a Mario sticker on their laptop and call it unique, but RevolvingDork over at hypercombofinish has a new twist on the practice: making it permanent through laser etching.

Rare Books in the News: March 29, 2009

New York Court Orders Return of $600,000 Book Stolen in WWII
A New York court ordered a book collector to return a 16th-century volume valued at $600,000 to a museum in Stuttgart, more than six decades after it was stolen by a U.S. army captain at the end of World War II.

Spoils of war return home
The rare book collector, Rod Shene, purchased the book in 2001 from a St. Louis dealer for $3,800. The dealer, Sheldon Margulis, had originally purchased it from the nephews of U.S. army captain John Doty when they where cleaning out their uncle’s estate, according to a 2007 report in St. Louis’s Riverfront Times.

Art looted by Nazis to be returned to owners
A government bill would soften a long-standing ban on museums selling items of national importance in their collections. The Holocaust (stolen art) Restitution Bill would allow curators to return paintings and other artefacts to families who did not wish them to remain in national collections.

World's Top Online Archive Of Mexican, Mexican American Recordings Launched
The UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center announced today that the public can now access the Arhoolie Foundation's Strachwitz Frontera Collection of Mexican and Mexican American Recordings - the largest online digital archive of its kind. The archive includes more than 41,000 recordings and is a treasure trove of historical Spanish-language songs dating from the early 1900s to the 1950s.

Vines: Lowe has come a long way
One big difference in archival material that [Alan] Lowe will deal with at the Bush library will be electronic records, he said. Bush has taken with him more than 100 terabytes of stored data, he said. (A terabyte is equivalent to one trillion bytes.) In contrast, Bill Clinton had three terabytes of stored data when he left the White House, Lowe said. "It's a different world of archiving and (figuring out) how to preserve and eventually make available," Lowe said.

blog post subhead large
The future arrives gradually. Unless you’re Rip Van Winkle, you don’t even notice. But once in a while there’s a signpost that says, “Yup. You’re living in the future.” I saw one this morning, and it arrived courtesy of the Los Angeles Times.

MLK archives to reopen at Boston University
The Boston University center that holds a key collection of papers from Martin Luther King Jr. is reopening after being closed for two years. The Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, which houses the collection, was closed while researchers created an electronic search system. The archiving project allows scholars to search by subject and name in BU's collection and Morehead College's Martin Luther King Jr. Collection.

‘To Sleep, Perchance to Dream’
“To Sleep, Perchance to Dream” is an entrancing exhibition of 17th-century manuscripts, images and other sleep-centric artifacts at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. The included dream manuals and recipes for sleep potions reflect the era’s belief, Edward Rothstein writes in his review of the exhibition, that sleep “should not be thought of casually: it is mysterious, powerful, central, inextricably linked to the world.”

Yale’s Art Gallery Presents Bookish Picasso, Lady’s Man: Review
At the pinnacle of his profession, in 1935 when he was just 53, Pablo Picasso stopped painting. Instead, he wrote hundreds of poems in French and Spanish, with surrealist titles like “On the back of the immense slice of burning melon.” The poems, along with other artifacts of Picasso’s literary fixations, are part of a quietly stunning exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery. Picasso didn’t just put words on paper; he drew them in elegant, open swirling letters, with his own invented abstract symbols dotting the page.

Are there any Mormon books left to collect?
But this doesn't mean there are not fun and historically important things to collect related to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. On Friday, March 27, Crawley told a class of collectors and enthusiasts at BYU's A. Dean Larsen Book Collecting Conference about three collecting categories within reach of collectors with average means. "More importantly, (a collector) would actually make a significant contribution to the bibliographic record," Crawley said.

Nevermore: A Graphic Adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s Short Stories (Sterling)
The collection Nevermore, which presents nine of Poe's stories and poems plus a biography, interpreted by nine different creative teams, is a welcome addition to the field. Some of the adaptations stick fairly close to their source, while others reimagine Poe's works in different historical and cultural contexts. So sorry, kids, but you can't use Nevermore to shirk your assigned reading. On the other hand, these adaptations are so vivid that they just might induce you to read originals for fun. And if you're already familiar with Poe, you can enjoy these fresh takes on some of his most popular tales.

Designer of Shadows and Light: Currier’s Poetry Finds a Format
That idea led to Charlotte’s “poem box”; a beautiful box containing poems framed like paintings and photos on tiny, matted cards, printed on rolled-up vellum, or found on small folded sheets. Each poem was designed to be pulled from the box, held, and read. One of Charlotte’s original poem boxes now resides in the Yale University Library Book Arts Center.

Book Review: Dream City
If you collect paper, old paper, paper so cheap it was meant to crumble in your desperate hands, the evolution of Halligan's bloodless obsession is all too familiar. There are good reasons why he dotes on the Big Little Books: They remind him of a time when his mother was alive, when their heroes -- Dick Tracy, the Lone Ranger and Buck Rogers -- not only guarded his universe but explained it to him.

Book Review: Books at center of murder tale
A day later, another woman is found in the same apartment, bludgeoned to death with a rare book beneath her body. The second victim’s employer, Minerva Hunt, says the book was stolen from her family. Minerva and her brother are sibling rivals trying to persuade their ailing father, a major benefactor of the New York Public Library, to change his will so they can benefit from his estate. Barr, who had been working for a private collector, once was employed by the library and worked on the Hunt collection.

'Batman' movie creator coming to Virginia Tech
I was a comic book nut. My mom swore I taught myself to read before I was 4 by comic books. When I was 8 years old, I became a Batman fanatic. He was my favorite superhero -- more than Superman or the Hulk or Spider-Man -- because this guy had no superpowers, and so I could identify with him more strongly. I think of my heart of hearts, when I was 8 years old I believed that if I worked out real hard and studied real hard and my dad bought me a cool car, I could be this guy. That was part of the whole thing. And then I collected comics avidly, and the collection would be about 60,000 right now, but I've donated 45,000 of my comic books to the Indiana University rare books library, the Lilly Library, so it's always been a part of my life.

Comic-book symposium slated for Lakeland Community College in Kirtland
Nationally known artists and local comic historians will highlight a full day of comic-book discussions at the Sixth Annual Lakeland Community College Comics Symposium on Saturday, April 4.

Rants! Adult Comics
Why are adult comics so taboo? I am not sure. For years adult book were always a big seller for me. I always carry the new stuff and stocked a good selection of back issues, but back issues are hard to come by. I have bought almost every collection offered to me there is never more than one or two issues of adult comics. I have scoured shows, stands, stores, and everywhere in between. Many dealers and stores do not like to carry adult comics. I just do not know why?

27th Annual Akron Antiquarian Book Fair, April 10-11
Jim Best, a Kent book dealer and another co-founder, recalled they were in Frank [Klein]’s office on a cool, rainy evening in 1982 with a whiskey bottle when the inspiration hit. These book lovers and vendors savored printed works of all types. They created NOBS to stimulate public interest with an annual book fair. The first was held in April 1983 at Schoolhouse Antiques with 16 vendors and modest success.

3D imaging reveals new grooves on old rock
As technology advances, so does research on – and evidence against – the Kensington Runestone. With each new test, there is more proof that the stone, unearthed in 1898 by Olof Ohman on his farm near Kensington, is authentic and not a hoax.

On the Road: Personalized gravestones
This pictorial panorama is only possible because local artist Jodi Wilken has turned her talented hands to carefully etching whatever the customer wants on polished blocks of black granite.

Hungry for a good read? You'll eat up the ones at the Edible Book Festival
But contestants go far beyond baking cake as they become consumed with the idea of turning something to eat into something to read. Past books have been made out of tortillas, pastry, crackers, fruits and vegetables. "It is obviously a little absurd," said organizer Jeff Abshear, director of the Kalamazoo Book Arts Center. "It's related to April Fool's Day."

Rare Books in the News: March 28, 2009

IU Archives of Traditional Music awarded third NEH grant to preserve endangered recordings
The Indiana University Archives of Traditional Music (ATM) has been awarded a third grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, valued at $347,682, to continue its collaborative research and development project with Harvard University that will digitally preserve critically endangered sound recordings.

Long Beach Opera revives lost Vivaldi work
Several of those existed only as libretti and one, almost legendary, was the first ever written about the Americas. That opera, "Motezuma," made its second and triumphant appearance on the operatic stage when its score was discovered in a Kiev library full of neglected musical manuscripts that were taken from Germany by the Russian army at the end of World War II. Now, more than 270 years later, Vivaldi gets his starring moment in Long Beach.

Warsaw unveils Chopin Museum plans
The idea of the project is to impact on the emotions of the visitors and eliminate the barriers between them and the exhibit. Among traditional exhibits one will find touch screens allowing for virtual browsing of Chopin manuscripts. The sounds that will fill the rooms will not just be Chopin music, but also the sounds of streets of Paris, where the composer lived for much of the time. Visitors will also be able to smell violets – the artist’s favorite flowers.

Getty Museum ads try hip humor to lure KROQ listeners and YouTubers
If you see a Rembrandt walking toward you in a crowd, you may be hallucinating. Or perhaps you should call the LAPD's art-theft unit. Or -- and this is most likely -- you're being targeted by the Getty Museum's current advertising campaign grounded in the humorously hip.

New concept to market young artists' visual works introduced
The National Art Gallery has introduced YouSpace, a new concept tailor-made to market the visual works of young artists. YouSpace project manager at the National Art Gallery Brenda Gogwe- Sibanda said the main purpose of the project is to give a wide selection of artists a stage to show case their work beyond restrictive dictates of a formal selection process that is controlled by art judges and curators.

Hanging with Bukowski at the Gotlieb Center
So when I saw Bukowski listed among the 2,000 or so collections at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, my eyes lit up. He was a presence for me in college, but of greater significance in sobriety. Bukowski marches fierce and poignant observations naked onto the page, propped against the abyss with only a period. I still tape his poems to my computer. One of my favorites, “Art,” is just seven words long: As the spirit wanes, the form appears.

Cushing library completes four millionth volume
Two books completed the Don Quixote collection at Texas A&M, the only American university to hold the collection in its complete set. They complete the four millionth volume for the A&M library system. The two books were pocket sized, their pages yellowing with age and rough on the edges, as if someone took a pair of shears and cut them. The books were displayed along with other millionth volumes on the second floor of the Cushing Memorial Library and Archives.

Michelle Obama comic taps a market for 'Female Force'
Vinnie Tartamella, a freelance illustrator, is the lead cover artist for "Female Force," a series of four biographical comic books featuring Obama, Hillary Clinton, Caroline Kennedy and Sarah Palin. Tartamella, 28, expects that the Obama issue -- debuting in comic book stores nationwide in April -- will join the national craze for Obama-themed merchandise.

Rare children's pictures on display
A collection of works illustrating 400 years of children's poems will go on display at the British Library on 1 April. Children's Laureate Michael Rosen has helped curate the exhibition.

Illinois Style: Raggedy Ann museum closing
She has already donated several manuscripts from her father to the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, N.Y., and most of the Arcola museum's artwork, murals and other items will be taken to New York by December. "We want Raggedy Ann and Andy to go on to a facility that will be able to maintain" their legacy, said Wannamaker. "It's a huge children's museum in upstate New York, and we think it's a perfect spot for Raggedy Ann and Andy to be."

Dyslexia spells creative art
Many turned out to the Peggy Phelps Gallery at CGU to experience the mixed media art exhibit entitled “The Unwritten Works of C.M. Venice McCurdy,” which incorporates how the artist has had a love/hate relationship with books throughout her life. McCurdy, who is dyslexic, has had a fear of books due to the ridicule she received growing up struggling with a disability that many did not understand. To overcome this she turned to art, where she excelled, and was able to allow people to view the world as she sees it and turn something that had been a negative in her life into a major positive.

A classic art form goes from digital to print in new chapbook release
Likewise, some of the chapbook poets strayed from those roots to a more widely attainable online format. This is the case of Belinda Subraman, whose last chapbook release was the award-winning 1998 release “Notes of a Human Warehouse Engineer.” She had used her website to garner interest for her past works and works from others, produce podcasts and audio links of her spoken word poetry, and post videos of visual interpretations of her poetry from YouTube. While that was sufficient for most of the aughts, a decade defined by its rampant multimedia junkiehood, Subraman recognized the importance of having a tangible collection of print work. "I needed something to hand out to people, something to point to," she said.

Heavenward Glances: Galileo Exhibit At The Franklin
The Franklin brings the celebration home to Philadelphia with the world exclusive exhibit “Galileo, the Medici and the Age of Astronomy,” presented by the Italian fine watchmaking company Officine Panerai. The exclusive exhibit, opening April 4, showcases the effect Galileo and his contemporaries had on science and on the world, bringing together more than 100 artifacts from the Istituto e Museo della Sotria di Scienza in Florence and the Medici Archive Project. Many of the artifacts are displayed together for the first time in history.

'The Making of Mr. Gray's Anatomy: Books, Bodies, Fortune, Fame'
There are a good many curious things about Gray's Anatomy, not the least of them being that although the book's famous selling point has always been its illustrations, the name of the man who drew them is hardly known. The book has been seen as Henry Gray's, and Gray's alone, and always referred to as if that really was the case. Gray was obviously a key force in the book's creation—the words are his, and the name on the spine is his—but above all else Carter's illustrations gave the book its distinctive visual appearance.

Anderson Center exhibits tackle nature of war
Images of war, both ancient and modern, are at the heart of two related exhibitions opening Friday at the Anderson Center at Tower View. "The Drawings of the Iliad" by Leonard Baskin and "Fading Memory and the Need to Remember: The Holocaust Paintings of Fritz Hirschberger" both deal with the nature of war, officials said - Baskin with the Trojan War as depicted in Homer's epic, "The Iliad," and Hirschberger with World War II and the Nazi death camps.

Palace museum releases calligraphy album
In Beijing, the Palace Museum housed in the Forbidden City is known for its incredible collection of traditional Chinese artwork. But now, admirers can appreciate some of these treasures WITHOUT going to the renowned establishment. That's thanks to the museum releasing a series of calligraphy albums.

The strange tale of a Chinese emperor's French prints
Of all the East-West encounters, few are as strange as the story at the heart of the Louvre show of 44 French 18th-century prints on view until May 18, under the title "The Chinese Emperor's Battles: When the Qianlong Emperor Sent His Requests for Prints to Louis XV." From 1755 to 1759, the army sent by Emperor Qianlong (1735-1796) fought a tough war to conquer Mongol lands and, further west, the vast territories of the Uighurs in Turkistan, now called Xinjiang. Executed at the behest of the emperor, the prints offer an idealized vision of a considerably harsher reality.

Peabody Essex Museum exhibit connects with ‘Mahjong’
[Uli] Sigg and his wife Rita have a wide collection today, and in addition to the 100 pieces they have as their personal exhibit in their Switzerland home, Sigg has brought to the PEM a collection of 250 artists’ contemporary Chinese works – over 120 pieces that offer an interesting fragment to represent the production of Chinese art.

Indiana Letterpress operates in Flora
"At one time, printing companies did all of this, but now they do offset printing, and most of them outsource their letterpress work," Kappes said. "It doesn't pay them to keep the equipment when they don't use it every day. And as the old guys retire, there are fewer and fewer people who know how to run a letterpress."

Papermakers Converge on Burnie
“Tasmanians have long recognised the importance of paper’s traditions in terms of its creative, environmental and commercial significance,” he said. “This congress is an event in which art and design, as well as cultural and industrial heritage converge on an international stage. It is an event where Tasmania can celebrate and share its papermaking traditions.”

Rare Books in the News: March 27, 2009

To the Highest Bidder: The Written History of Horology
“Guiseppe Brusa was a collector, a world renowned research historian and author of horology,” said Mr. Chayette. “To the Brusa collection, we have added over 1,000 books from two other collections. This will be one of the largest sales of books on horology ever assembled.”

StoryCorps adding Utahns' tales to touring collection
Ken Sanders needed three years to put a book swindler in San Quentin prison and nearly as long to track down the name of the bedtime story he told his children. It was the latter tale Sanders, the rare-books collector, shared with StoryCorps as the oral-history project opened shop Thursday in Salt Lake City.

A Change is Gonna Come
But at AAUP in Montreal last summer, Sue Havlish, the famously plainspoken marketing director for Vanderbilt University Press, hinted at trouble in paradise. “Some librarians think that putting a text in a repository is ‘publishing’ it,” she told me. “There’s a fear of our role as publishers being subsumed by the libraries. But I still want -- and I think most people still want -- a book that been edited, that’s been shaped into something and marketed to me by a publisher that I’ve heard of already.... We’re afraid that people are going to forget that there’s a difference between publishing something and just printing it.”

Publishing collapses, Kindle arrives, utter chaos ensues
In a world without the high fixed costs of printing and distribution, as the distance between writers and their audiences shrinks, what essential service will Random House and Simon & Schuster provide? If the answer is primarily cultural arbitration and editing, the publishing behemoths might dwindle while a much lighter weight model of publishing — clever kids working from coffee shops in Brooklyn — emerges. (((I wouldn't mind a method of cultural production run out of bohemian cafe' society, but I do wonder what weird form of American culture emerges when nobody has ever cracked a book. "Mark Twain? Yeah! I read some Twitter tweets from him!" Yeah, maybe.)))

Can a Rebel Stay a Rebel Without the Claws?
You will be seeing a lot more art by Shepard Fairey on the streets of New York this spring. But it won’t be in the form of the illegal guerrilla strikes he has been committing since his days as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design 20 years ago, nor anything like his famous Obama Hope poster. For starters, it is in the windows of Saks Fifth Avenue, for whom he has also designed swanky red, white and black Russian Constructivist-style limited-edition shopping bags.

Is Shepard Fairey a deserved Design of the Year winner?
Mike Dempsey, founder of Studio Dempsey, says, 'It is the equivalent of Banksy having done Blair in 1997.' Politics and graphics go back a long way, he points out. 'World War I's Your Country Needs You poster, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament logo - these graphic designs stir the public imagination on a very basic emotional level, and in times of trouble, graphic design comes into its own.'

Innovation ambassadors drawing up 'manifesto'
Erik Spiekermann, a professor and typography designer from Germany, said he was pleased to hear the term "manifesto" used as it implies the beginning of a movement. "When you hear that word you usually think of the Communist manifesto – even the Dadaists had a manifesto. Every movement in history has written a manifesto, which means what we're doing here is starting a movement. We don't want this to go away when the Year is finished. In fact, the first manifesto was the Ten Commandments. I envision seven or ten commandments that we want to live by, and hopefully other people will join the movement."

Quirky approaches to designing exhibition catalogues
High-end, hardback and glossy or quirky, conceptual and low-budget, the exhibition catalogue has always provided a popular outlet for print creatives. The catalogue needs to strike a fine balance between reflecting the theme of the exhibition, however temporary, and being a desirable object in its own right. Some museums prefer a standalone book that can sell on in perpetuity, while others think a strong visual link to the exhibition is vital, and a limited print run can throw desirability and collectability in the mix.

When the Curator Becomes the Attraction
Curators love to tie up loose ends; artists prefer to leave them hanging. That’s why it can be so refreshing when a museum allows an artist to rummage through its permanent collection. The Artist’s Choice series at the Museum of Modern Art is one example; the Cooper-Hewitt’s Selects series is another. (It’s also a cost-effective way to put on a show, so chances are we’ll be seeing more of this type of exhibition.)

Book unveils Superman co-creator’s dark side
The artist who co-created Clark Kent and Superman had his own secret identity — as an illustrator of sadomasochistic pulp books. “This stuff was highly illegal — you couldn’t mail it across state lines,” said artist and comics historian Craig Yoe.

Rare Burns book found at museum
The copy of "A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs", which was co-edited by the poet, was found at the Burns Birthplace Museum in Alloway. Burns gave the book - which prominently features his handwriting - as a gift to his boss's daughter.

From the Land of the Taj Mahal: Paintings for India's Mughal Emperors
The Emperor Jahangir and his son and successor, Shah Jahan, were responsible for the creation and protection of these artworks. They reigned from 1605 to 1658 and were descendants of rulers we know as Ghengis Khan and Tamerlane. Tamerlane's descendants ruled eastern Iran for more than a century and established a tradition of commissioning richly decorated manuscripts.

Artist Spotlight: Fishing inspires biologist to pratice art of Gyotaku
Andrew Jensen’s work as a fisheries biologist for the State of California combined with a surf perch catch at age 3 and a long family history of fishing have influenced him to learn and practice the art of Gyotaku, or Japanese Fish Prints. His business, One 4 Fish Prints, is dedicated to education about fisheries resources, conservation of existing fish populations and the advancement of the Gyotaku art form.

Russia's History Museum opens exhibition of Nikolai Gogol's paraphernalia
Occupying the central place are the paraphernalia of the Gogol-Yanovsky family, the manuscripts of the writer's works, letters to relatives, and drawings. The visitors can see a handmade book 'The Miscellanea', which Gogol made with his own hands while being a student of a public school in the Ukrainian town of Nezhin, a letter to criticist Vissarion Belinski, his bitter ideological opponent, the writer's white surtout, a black frock, and a silver ring.

Planet Comicon draws collectors who don’t mind the economy
During hard times it’s good to work in a recession-proof industry. But selling comic books? Believe it, said Frank Mangiaracina, owner of three B-Bop Comics stores in the Kansas City area.

Executive collection: Vendor brings six decades of presidential memorabilia to book show
At the request of his wife, Cook plans to purge some of his inventory this weekend at the 49th Antiquarian Book & Paper Show, where he’ll join dealers from eight states operating 200 booths. Show organizer Ray Walsh encouraged Cook to sell at the show, which mostly features old books and ephemera, because of the rare and unusual items in his collection.

UCSB Gets Lou Cannon Papers
UCSB has acquired the papers of the prolific and prodigious political reporter Lou Cannon, who has written five books about Ronald Reagan among the nine he has published.

Holt Hockey Archives launches original hockey guidebook online
Hardy credits the staff of the Milne Special Collections and Archives at UNH for their professional approach to creating and maintaining the archive. "Outside of the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto, the Holt Archives are arguably the most substantial, professionally processed and maintained collection anywhere. Our mission is to preserve this history for future researchers," says Hardy.

Conservation Completed: Piranesi's Vedute di Roma

We just received our latest volume treated through the WU Libraries' Legacy of Books conservation program. This has been a wonderfully successful program, and in later posts I'll be highlighting the many objects that have been conserved since the program began in 2004.

This most recent beneficiary is a magnificent volume of etchings by the Italian architect and printmaker Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778). Awed by the grandeur of Rome's ancient ruins, Piranesi created the series of massive prints known as his Vedute di Roma over the course of some thirty years. At the time of his death in 1778, the artist had completed 135 views. The plate shown here is Altra Veduta del Tempio della Sibilla in Tivoli.

Because WU's volume had both of its covers detached it was difficult to handle safely. So noted conservator Richard Baker removed the old binding, cleaned the plates with a non-abrasive shredded vinyl eraser, and created a binding of archival goatskin over boards covered in new period-style pastepaper. The pastepaper is pretty remarkable -- Richard made a number of models in varying shades and saturations before settling on a style that would capture the spirit of the earlier binding.

Our sincere thanks to Jane and Lawrence Kahn, who had the volume restored to celebrate their 65th wedding anniversary, June 3, 2008.

Rare Books in the News: March 26, 2009

Adopting Shakespeare at Folger Shakespeare Library
What gives the evening an extra frisson of excitement is that all these documents are up for "adoption." And they go fast; little "Adopted" flags started appearing on the tables almost as soon as the doors opened. Curators hovered around, answering questions, and guiding donors to the front desk (check or charge; fully deductible). Prices ranged from $250 (a 1855 playbill from the Cleveland Theatre) to $69,340 (that 1660 map of London, one of only two extant in the world). A bookplate will identify each adopter in perpetuity. By the end of the night, the library had raised about $40,000.

Will a Bad Economy Wipe Out Oregon History?
Last week closed with nearly all of the research librarians and archivists at the 110-year-old Oregon Historical Society picking up their personal effects and exiting into the crisp March air. The newly unemployed staff were greeted by almost 100 Oregon historians and friends of the archives in a hastily organized protest across from the library in the Portland Park Blocks.

Ashley Takacs: Selling cultural cred to the highest bidder
There's gold in them there art museums - but please don't tell the University trustees. As endowments shrivel and budgets tighten, Penn is no doubt looking for ways to make ends meet. But, let's hope they're not eyeing our veritable treasure trove of art, rare books and artifacts as a solution. Most of us can agree that selling these items to replenish the endowment is simply out of the question. And normally, I would trust Penn to protect our cherished archives, but I'm sure that the students at Brandeis made the same assumption.

Students get rare, hands-on research opportunity in Spanish archives
Bassett was one of three William & Mary undergraduates who joined History Professor Lu Ann Homza on a research trip to Pamplona, Spain over Spring Break to peruse two sets of archives and get a better understanding of Spanish history through the hand-written accounts of the people who lived it.

Smithsonian exhibit of samurai hero vs. monster is fit for action movie and emperors
The largest "Tale of the Shuten Doji" scroll, 78 feet long, would have been the equivalent of a feature length video for a private gathering, the curator explained. The masterpiece would have been unrolled as a narrator told the story depicted by illustrations painted on silk (instead of the usual paper).

Dr. Getatchew Haile to deliver HMML’s Ex Oriente Lux spring lecture “Ethiopia: Endangered Garden of Christianity’s Earliest Traditions”
Since the 1970s, HMML has partnered with Ethiopian scholars and officials of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church to photographically preserve Ethiopia’s manuscripts. The most prominent of these scholars is Haile. He escaped Ethiopia during the Marxist revolution, after being shot by the new government’s soldiers. Haile had helped HMML microfilm manuscripts in Ethiopia and so HMML invited him to settle in the St. Cloud area, offering him the position of Curator of Ethiopic Manuscripts at the library. He accepted and worked at HMML until his retirement in 1995.

Iconic shot of Obama began as just another assignment
But what about the photograph on which the poster is based? Taken by Mannie Garcia while on assignment for the Associated Press in 2006, the picture is now on sale at a Chelsea gallery in a limited edition of 200. The prints are going for $1,200 apiece, and at least one has been purchased by a museum: the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

HLS establishes the Morris L. Cohen Fellowship in American Legal Bibliography and History
David Warrington, Librarian for Special Collections, said: “The Library is particularly pleased to offer the fellowship in Professor Cohen’s name. Morris has spent his career in facilitating scholarship in American legal history, not only through his teaching of legal research and his writing on legal bibliography but also through his service as Librarian for three Ivy League law schools, all of whose collections of historical law books have been enriched by Morris’s acquisitions.”

Ukraine returns Torah fragments
Ukraine returned 14 old Torah fragments to the Jewish community of Lvov. Mordechai Shlomo Bold, the chief rabbi of Lvov, told JTA on Sunday that the fragments returned the previous day by the Central State Historical Archive in that western city would be buried in accordance with Jewish law. Community rabbis say all Torah scrolls and fragments being held by the Ukrainian State Archives must be returned to their original owners.

Hobby becomes an obsession
Book-lover Dick Rohfritch didn’t set out to buy 12,000 modern first editions once owned by an eccentric lawyer-collector found murdered in his rural Missouri home. It’s just that he doesn’t like to play golf. And thereby hangs the tale of how The Woodlands got Good Books in the Woods, a new secondhand bookstore full of remarkable finds.

Dead Sea Scrolls scholar's son arrested in NY
A New York City lawyer who is the son of a Dead Sea Scrolls scholar was arrested Thursday, accused of using the stolen identities of academics to discredit his father's professional rivals. Raphael Haim Golb, 49, used New York University's computers to hide his identity while he used dozens of Internet aliases to trash adversaries and skew debate about the Dead Sea Scrolls, District Attorney Robert Morgenthau said.

The Flowering Genius of Maria Sibylla Merian
From the perspective of contemporary biology, Kim Todd has also treated Merian in a ruminating, speculative, hugely readable biography, Chrysalis. Ella Reitsma's catalog for "Maria Sibylla Merian & Daughters" takes a similarly personal view, detailing the author's own growing interest in Merian's meticulous art. In each case, although in quite different ways, a conspicuous—and illuminating—personal involvement on the part of these authors compensates for the frustrating dearth of information we have about what really made Maria Sibylla Merian tick.

'Ted' Hollingworth remembered as newspaperman, father
He typeset by linotype and printed by letterpress, on a Heidelberg Press now on display and used at the Shelburne Museum in Vermont. "He was publisher, editor, printer, he wrote things," Todd said. "He really did it all."

The End of Newsprint, Not Newspapers
The problem today is monetizing it. And again, that's the fault of the newspapers and their owners. There are ways. People make money on the web. People on the cutting edge. Trust me, I've seen Drudge's house. Arianna is the digital maven of the 21st Century. And more people are watching TV online now than ever before (our TV and computers are about to merge, as TV manufacturers simply produce monitors in future).

History or hoax? $10 spyglass is inscribed to Hemingway, but the truth is clouded
So all Heath knows is what appears in faint, whitish block letters on the brass piece. "To Ernest Hemingway," it reads. "Dec. 25, 1953." It's signed "Philip 'Pops' Percival," below which appears this thought: "With Age Goes Sight." Gauging authenticity requires knowledge about the scope's "provenance," or chain of ownership. And there's a huge gap between 1953 and now.

Out of Africa
The artifacts were collected by the library's field office in Nairobi. Who even knew the Library of Congress had a Nairobi field office? It has similar operations in Cairo, Islamabad, Jakarta, New Delhi and Rio de Janeiro. Why does Hollywood make all these movies about CIA agents? Shouldn't it be making one about intrepid librarians serving in far-flung places, chasing down rare books and periodicals?

Rare Books in the News: March 25, 2009

Currier explores work, artistic process of David Macaulay
“Building Books: The Art of David Macaulay” is the first in-depth museum exhibition to explore his body of work and artistic process. “David Macaulay is one of the most creative and innovative artists working today,” said Susan Strickler, director of the Currier. “His books have inspired and intrigued more than two generations of readers around the world. We are delighted to bring his original works to northern New England.”

SXSW: Objectified Teaches Us 'You Are What You Own'
These designers are truly inspired men and women, though. When they discuss the things they've made, they speak with a striking depth of emotion. Bill Moggridge, designer of the first laptop, quietly pauses and chuckles to himself when he shows off a simple tweak that prevents pencils from getting trapped in the screen's hinge. Naoto Fukasawa idly fondles his cellphone while he traces its final design to a childhood memory of cooking potatoes. These are special moments, captured keenly and quietly by the filmmaker.

Inspired by a Master: Renowned architect Tilak Samarawickrema recounts a journey back to ‘Mediaeval Sinhalese Art’ and Ananda Coomaraswamy
The main objectives of our project centred on reviving waning crafts traditions, sensitively modifying and adjusting traditional designs and motifs to make them meaningful to contemporary markets and improving the technical quality of the products. As I established a Design Unit I was tasked with recruiting design staff, establishing a Design Studio at the NDC and providing staff members with the necessary training.

Gospels to return to North East
Campaigners have urged they be given a permanent home in the North East. But the British Library has said they can be returned to the region for just three months every seven years. The decision follows a review by a team of experts, who concluded the gospels could survive being loaned temporarily to "appropriate institutions."

Native Comic Artists Inspire, Amaze and Amuse
"The first time I saw that pictograph, I immediately drew that comparison between it and Captain America," said Tony Chavarria, the curator of ethnology at the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture in Santa Fe, N.M. "It comes from a time of drought and mass exodus of the Pueblo peoples from the Four Corners region. Like Captain America, it became an icon."

Guggenheim Rings in Noisy Nirvana With Bells, Clashing Artists
It also means marveling that the shelves of empty beer bottles by Tom Marioni, the run-on prose of Jack Kerouac, a black painting by Ad Reinhardt, a white-on-white painting by Agnes Martin and Tehching Hsieh’s recorded punching of a time clock every hour of the day for a year (1980-81) could all seep from the same aesthetic stew. That might explain the show’s title, which comes from a book of randomly chosen texts that are cut and pasted into a narrative by Beat writers William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. The exhibition is actually rooted in the books American artists on both coasts have embraced and incorporated into their work: the Bhagavad Gita, the Mahabharata and the writings of D.T. Suzuki and Lao Zi.

That Postcard Might Be an Art Project
But even if you aren’t Frank Warren, the man from Germantown, Md., who started PostSecret in 2004, you can start your own call for anonymous artistic postcards. This month, a 33-year-old Belgian artist has started a project called I Got a Postcard, where people leave self-addressed stamped postcards that encourage the people who find them to personalize and mail them.

Graffiti Artists Hold Panel With Old Nemeses in Blue
The event was occasioned by the publication of “Vandal Squad: Inside the New York City Transit Police Department, 1984-2004,” by Joseph Rivera, a veteran anti-graffiti officer who retired from the force in 2004 and has written perhaps the only book to look at the graffiti movement from the law enforcement perspective.

Inking her own story, one tattoo at a time
Ms. von D is a cauldron of contradictions. Just read her body. There are portraits of her parents, who divorced three years ago, and her siblings, alongside profanities. The approval-seeking daughter who often worries what others say about her has “the motto of my life” – an acronym for “Does It Look Like I Give a Fuck?” – written on the outside of her right hand. She does not seek attention, she asserts. Her flashy clothes, makeup and tattoos are “a form of self-expression.”

Nosing Around in Many, Many Forms
In new film projections created by the artist William Kentridge for his staging of Shostakovich’s 1930 opera version of “The Nose” next year, the nose has even more adventures. It lands in archival film clips found by Mr. Kentridge, as well in as his own animations and films. It joins Shostakovich at the piano. It climbs a stepladder and falls. It joins a protest march. And in the process it inserts itself into the fraught history of Constructivist typography, avant-garde art and Soviet politics of the 1930s.

Quintets From Army Band, Russian Orchestra Perform Royal Music
"Anybody can go to the Library of Congress and view the sheet music, but nobody can hear it," he said. "The exciting thing about this, from a musician's perspective, is that you're bringing art back to life." The Library of Congress bought the original manuscripts in the early 1930s, when the library was trying to expand its foreign holdings. The library's full Russian Imperial Collection contains books, jewelry, religious artifacts and artwork from five of the czar's palaces in St. Petersburg, in addition to the musical manuscripts.

NPM adds over 8,000 rare books to its collection
The National Palace Museum (NMP) yesterday announced the latest addition to its world renowned collection of Chinese artwork - over 8,000 rare books dating from the Tang Dynasty to the 20th century. Donated by the Hong Kong Chinese Cultural Association, the publications were previously housed at the special administrative region's Sun Yat-sen Library, which closed its doors in 1997 following the region's handover from the United Kingdom back to China.

From Trash to Treasure: Rare Sir Edmund Hillary Memorabilia Donated to Nation
The radio recording is believed to be the only copy of a live ABC Australia radio broadcast with Sir Edmund Hillary in early August 1953, not long after he completed his historic Everest climb. It was discovered amongst books and papers purchased from a deceased estate in Sydney, Australia.

Networks of Plunder
During the Archaeological Institute of America’s annual meeting, held in Philadelphia in January, researchers offered analyses of auction and Internet data documenting an ongoing demand for archaeological artifacts. Buyers show no hesitation when offered desirable items that have no documented ownership history, or provenance. Auction-house catalogs of available items contain a fair number of fake pieces and genuine ones illegally obtained.

Couple's collection of hundreds of pop-up books shows they're not just for children
"This is my favorite," said the University of Akron art professor about his and his wife's collection of some 500 pop-up books. For those afraid of things like spiders, flying, clowns and heights, Gary Greenberg's The Pop-Up Book of Phobias, delivers plenty of chills.

Point Taken: Where to buy 80,000 books. Cheap.
”We also have 1,300 old Marvel comic books, all in plastic covers,” she said. “Apparently a collector died and the family didn’t feel like dealing with them. So some lucky girl is going to get a scholarship because of some old comic books. ”That’s the fun of it. You never know what’s going to show up. Someone once gave us a cookbook that a friend of Andy Warhol had done. And inside, Warhol had done an illustration.”

The un-paper book
“Yes. It is really a pigment to avoid giving you eyestrain the way backlit displays do. It lets you read in bright sunlight. It will not beep at you. Nothing takes away the incredibly pleasurable experience of being immersed in a great book. And we know gadgets today are as much a fashion statement as they are service tools. Until readers truly break into the mainstream, you will still look awkward reading off any of these no matter what. But a Booky Talky, in our opinion, will make you look far less weird than something like the boxy Swindle. Although, of course, it may be some time before you get used to seeing people with a flexing LCD in their hands.”

Score for Psycho to fetch £40,000
Bernard Herrmann's music for the 1960 Alfred Hitchcock horror film is set to sell for up to £40,000. The score, including the music from the infamous murder scene in the shower, is one of a collection of his scores, manuscripts and books at a Bonhams auction on 24 March.

Collating Spenser

This morning we had a visit from the Spenser Lab, a group of students working with Professor Joseph Loewenstein and WU's Humanities Digital Workshop to produce a 21st-century scholarly edition and digital archive of the works of Edmund Spenser.

In this photo, Dr. Loewenstein (left), IPH major Deva Estin, and PhD candidate Lee Spitzer prepare our copy of Spenser's Complaints for collation against scanned pages from another institution's copy. They're using "Hailey's Comet," a portable collator designed and manufactured by R. Carter Hailey while a doctoral student at the University of Virginia, to demonstrate for lab participants how scholars discover printing variants between two copies of an early printed book.