Earliest-known book jacket discovered in Bodleian Library
The wrapper was discovered by the Bodleian's head of conservation, Michael Turner, when sorting through an archive of book-trade ephemera that had been bought by the Bodleian in a sale in 1892. The jacket had been separated from its book, and had never been catalogued individually. It remained hidden until the library was contacted by an American scholar of dust jackets looking for the earliest known example.
Happy 50th Anniversary to the National Union Catalog of Manuscripts
From the About Page: The mission of the NUCMC program is to provide and promote bibliographic access to the nation’s documentary heritage. This mission is realized by NUCMC production of cataloging describing archival and manuscript collections held by eligible repositories located throughout the United States and its territories. The program’s mission is further realized by the provision of free searching, via NUCMC gateways, of archival and manuscript cataloging in OCLC WorldCat. A free-of-charge cooperative cataloging program operated by the Library of Congress, the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC) creates online records in OCLC WorldCat on behalf of eligible archival repositories throughout the United States.
Alice Walker exhibit opens at Emory University
Even from a young age, author Alice Walker was keeping a record. The Georgia native began storing her notebooks, journals and photos as a teenager, creating a personal archive spanning 40 years that paints a vivid picture of her development as a writer. The yellowing letters and fading photographs tell a story of a woman who found a mentor in activist and writer Howard Zinn, doodled short stories in between her college class notes and was the first black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction writing. Now, that catalog is open to the public at Emory University in Atlanta, where Walker is placing her archive.
Canada's top archivist retires
Ian Wilson never stopped following the paper trail. The outgoing national archivist of Canada, who was educated and started his career at Queen's University, still believes in the importance of paper documents and records. At the same time, he acknowledges that the ongoing digitization of such records puts them before many more people than he could have imagined when he began his career in Kingston in 1966. "What I am delighted about is that over the course of my career, I have seen us take these things that are fragile and couldn't stand that much handling and we have digitized them and put them out where everyone can see them," said Wilson, who retires as the country's top archivist, and first national archivist and librarian, today.
Jesuit's archive adds to evidence showing Pius XII to be ‘greatest hero of World War II’
The Pave the Way Foundation has told CNA that the archives of the late Fr. Robert Graham S.J., who was the Vatican's top expert on the wartime role of Pope Pius XII, will add to the evidence showing Pope Pius XII to be “the greatest hero of World War II.” The Vatican has been collecting evidence of Pope Pius XII’s assistance to Jews in Italy, which will be opened in 2013 when its cataloguing efforts are complete. However, some Jewish groups have accused Pope Pius XII of not doing enough to stop Nazi persecution of Jews in the Holocaust. The non-sectarian Pave the Way Foundation (PTWF), based in New York City, will have exclusive access to the documents of Fr. Graham.
Sorrow, Pity, Celebration: France Under the Nazis
One of the astonishing things about the exhibition “Between Collaboration and Resistance: French Literary Life Under Nazi Occupation,” at the New York Public Library, is that it feels as if we were looking at scores of relics tossed from speeding trains, each of them heading in a different direction, each expressing different hopes and expectations. There is a postcard from the man who would later become the prophet of the avant-garde French novel, Alain Robbe-Grillet, who informs his father how much he is enjoying the companionship of his countrymen during forced labor in Germany. There is a 1940 letter from the philosopher Henri Bergson, who had been prepared to convert to Roman Catholicism but, out of solidarity with his people, signed the new French government’s register as a Jew. “I have seen this coming for several years now,” he writes. “We have touched the bottom of the abyss. At least we will now know where the evil comes from.”
The Pop of Warhol (Jazz and Rock, Too)
Mr. [Paul] Maréchal called the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh to ask if there was more where that came from. The archivist Matt Wrbican sent him the titles of 23 albums whose covers Warhol was known to have designed. (They had been found in the artist’s vast trove of possessions, which the museum was cataloging.) Over the next 12 years Mr. Maréchal hunted down all of them — contacting record dealers in Montreal, Toronto, New York, Los Angeles and London — and in the process found another 28, or 51 in all. (Since the book was published, collectors in Europe have sent him two more, including a 1984 album by the Swedish band Rat Fab; the father of one of the band members had known Warhol in the ’60s and paid him to design the cover for his son.)
The Children's Book by AS Byatt
Easily the best thing AS Byatt has written since her Booker-winning masterpiece, Possession (1990), it shares strong affinities with it. Possession opened in an institution full of cultural riches, the London Library. The Children’s Book begins in another, the South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria and Albert). As three boys wander among its fabulous collection, the mother of one of them, Olive Wellwood, a charming and successful writer in her thirties, consults the curator about a tale of ancient treasure she is planning.
The write stuff
In The Independent Type, the State Library of Victoria's exhibition about books and writing in Victoria, Hartnett is one of the featured writers, and the correspondence about her first novel sits alongside the 2008 Astrid Lindgren award, a huge framed document with beautiful artwork and calligraphy in Swedish. You can discover the literary history of any part of Victoria on an interactive map, listen to 10 tracks of spoken word performances from the past 30-odd years, see the objects that have intrigued and inspired writers, and inspect their first hasty, scribbled drafts.
'Peanuts' and Beethoven
Amid the 17,897 "Peanuts" strips drawn by Schulz before his death nine years ago, Beethoven — his life, his loves and, most of all, the wonders of his music — is a running subtext. Now it has been decoded, thanks to the exhibit, co-sponsored by the Center for Beethoven Studies and the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center in Santa Rosa, where Schulz resided for years (and where "Schulz's Beethoven" first opened last summer). If you visit the exhibit in downtown San Jose, you will see Schulz's original drawing of the "Hammerklavier" strip, dating to Jan. 25, 1953. You will see the title page to the first-edition score of the "Hammerklavier," published in Vienna in 1819, as well as Schulz's own scratchy LP recording ("He played the hell out of it," says [William] Meredith) of the same sonata, by the pianist Friedrich Gulda.
Morris Library to celebrate partnership, collection
A display and symposium May 4 at Southern Illinois University Carbondale’s Morris Library will celebrate a partnership that has brought to the library such significant records as early manuscripts and correspondence from Alexander Graham Bell, John Dewey, George Herbert Mead and Ernest Mach. Thanks to the partnership between the Hegeler Carus Foundation and Morris Library, the Open Court Publishing Co. records and collection are on permanent loan from the nonprofit foundation to Morris’ Special Collections Research Center (SCRC). Blouke Carus, chairman of Carus Publishing, is the featured speaker for the 3 p.m. celebration at the Morris Library Auditorium. He’ll address the “Significance of Open Court Publications.”
Web site features 110 years of blue and white memories
Penn State alumni and current students will be able to take a trip back in time beginning this weekend by accessing more than 100 years worth of yearbook issues online.
The six-month effort to make archived issues of Penn State's La Vie yearbook from 1890 to 2000 available online will come to fruition when the Web site debuts today.
DU Central Library: Lack of preservation causes rare books to decay
Due to lack of proper preservation, century old 'puthis' and manuscripts, newspapers and periodicals printed in Bangladesh during the last century, have been decaying at the Dhaka University Central Library. About 300 rare manuscripts and at least 600-microfilmed newspapers have already been damaged, although there is a supervisory committee to look into this. Another 500 hundred 'puthis' and newspapers are going to meet the same fate if preventive steps are not taken, said sources at the library. The university library has a collection of more than 30,000 such books and manuscripts, dating back to the medieval period, written on palm and banana leaves, barks, stone slabs and handmade papers in Sanskrit, Bangla, Arabic, Pali, Urdu, Persian, Maithili, Uriya, Hindi and a few other dialects.
Ancient Christians in India
DE SAM LAZARO: But also here, in the subterranean Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, is one of the most extensive records of sacred texts from around the world.
Reverend STEWART: This project of preserving manuscripts photographically was started out of our Benedictine tradition of being guardians of culture. The monasteries have been places where texts particularly have been treasured.
DE SAM LAZARO: Father Columba Stewart’s quest to record church history, to fill in its blanks, has taken him to the farthest trails of early Christianity — Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and, perhaps the least well-known destination, Kerala, a province in southwestern India where he recently brought a delegation of his museum’s benefactors.
The Collecting Craze
My collecting began in the 1970s with a conversation in Darlington, Wisconsin. I sat in the grandstand with D.K. Schreiter, an old gentleman who ran the harness racing program at the Darlington fair. He told me that a local horseman had died recently and all of his books and horse memorabilia wound up in the local dump. “Of course, the same thing will probably happen when I’m gone,” he told me. His wife had died and they had no children. He said it was time for him to clean house. I told him I’d be interested in what he had. Two years later we made a deal and soon countless boxes began to arrive by rail freight. They contained every issue of The Horseman & Fair World since 1926, numerous Wallace Year Books and Registers, and many Christmas issue of The Horse Review. That was when the disease first took hold of me.
Book Printer Commits to Forest Stewardship
Throughout 2009, whenever a title printed at Malloy displays an FSC or SFI Chain of Custody (CoC) logo for the first time, Malloy will split a ten dollar donation between the Plant a Billion Trees program operated by The Nature Conservancy and the Legacy Land Conservancy in Southeast Michigan. In this unique promotion, "We are putting our money where our mouth is to show our strong support and commitment to forest stewardship,states Bill Upton, Malloy President. "We think one of the most environmentally favorable attributes of the printed book is the fact that it's made from a renewable resource, trees. In fact, there is no more environmentally friendly form of agriculture than growing trees provided the areas from which we harvest trees are managed in a sustainable manner and key forest resources are protected.
With Kindle, Can You Tell It’s Proust?
But to other writers and editors, the Kindle is the ultimate bad idea whose time has come. Anne Fadiman, the author, was relieved to learn that her essay collection, “Ex Libris,” was not available on Kindle. “It would really be ironic if it were,” she said of the book, which evokes her abiding passion for books as objects. “There’s a little box on Amazon that reads ‘Tell the publisher I’d like to read this book on Kindle,’” she said. “I hope no one tells the publisher.”
