Library News for Rare Books

Rare Books in the News: July 29, 2009

Kerouac’s Mother’s Will Is a Fake, Judge Rules
In a ruling that could have implications for the literary estate of Jack Kerouac (above right, in 1967), a Florida judge has ruled that the will of Kerouac’s mother, Gabrielle Kerouac, was a forgery, The Associated Press reported. When he died in 1969, Kerouac, the Beat Generation author, left his estate to his mother, who in turn left it to Kerouac’s third wife, Stella Sampas.

Back to font: medieval alphabet book stays in Britain after appeal
A unique alphabet book, offering a selection of spectacular and bizarre fonts to the luxury medieval manuscript illuminator stuck for inspiration, has been bought by the British Library after a £600,000 appeal. The importance of the small manuscript, dating from 1500 but concealed within an 18th-century binding, had been missed for the centuries as it sat unrecognised in the Earl of Macclesfield's library. The British Library mounted a public appeal to keep the alphabet book and finally bought it with help from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, and the Art Fund charity.

Anonymous No More
"Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages" is the most original museum show in this country since 2002's "Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence." These audacious exhibitions turn scholarly probity into artistic revelation; it speaks volumes about the curatorial esprit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that this great institution has been responsible for both events. "Tapestry in the Renaissance," which made a definitive case for the centrality of woven images in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century European art, was the defining moment in the career of Thomas Campbell, a relatively untested curator who is now the director of the Metropolitan. It is anyone's guess where the curator Melanie Holcomb will be in seven years, but there is no doubt that with this new, gorgeously focused show, she has reframed the place of drawing in the history of European art.

Collecting books is awesome, part two: a Q&A with Vanessa Brown
Meet Vanessa Brown, who finished in second place in Canada’s first national book-collecting contest. Last Wednesday, Brown was presented with a $1,000 cheque for her collection The L.M. Montgomery Collection in the Forest City . The contest, which was seeking Canada's best book collectors under the age of 30, was sponsored by The Bibliographical Society of Canada (BSC), the Antiquarian Booksellers of Association of Canada (ABAC) and the Alcuin Society.

Universities putting state archives about migration online
A yellowed brochure for one Cross Triangle Ranch seems, at first, like it could be for any Arizona getaway: The pamphlet touts the ranch's fresh air, abundant sunshine and wealth of outdoor activities. It also advertises the resort's low rates - $25 per week, $30 with horse - and warns: "POSITIVELY NO TUBERCULARS ACCEPTED," a nod to the tuberculosis scare at the time it was printed, nearly 100 years ago. This, along with hundreds of other items, is one of the first pieces of history to be archived in a project called "Why Arizona?," a collaborative effort among the three state universities to digitally archive migration-related materials in time for the Arizona centennial in 2012.

New York Harbor Quadricentennial Saluted with Extensive Exhibition Featuring Rarely Seen Treasures
The New York Public Library celebrates Henry Hudson and Dutch acumen with Mapping New York's Shoreline, 1609-2009, a comprehensive exhibition featuring rare and extraordinary maps, atlases, books, journals, broadsides, manuscripts, prints, and an animation superimposing historical maps on a three-dimensional Google Earth model drawn primarily from the Library’s Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, and from other New York Public Library collections. Mapping New York’s Shoreline will be on view at The New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street from September 25, 2009 to June 26, 2010.

Video: Sen. George McGovern Visits Special Collections
Former Sen. George McGovern, D-S.D., was on campus July 22, 2009, visiting the George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives. McGovern viewed the papers of Gordon Lee Weil '58, executive assistant to the senator during his unsuccessful 1972 presidential campaign and author of The Long Shot: George McGovern Runs for President (1973). Also on display for his review were correspondence between McGovern and Sen. George Mitchell '54, and a hand-print of Abraham Lincoln, the subject of McGovern's new biography.

Clarence Darrow's love letters revealed
Jordan Luttrell, the president of Meyer Boswell Books in San Francisco, had previously managed an acquisition of 340 letters written by Darrow. Many were addressed to Darrow's son, Paul, and more than 100 letters were written to Darrow from people such as Helen Keller, Sinclair Lewis and Upton Sinclair. The Clarence Darrow Archive was purchased by the University of Minnesota Law Library in 2004. [Elva Hamerstrom] Paulson was referred to Luttrell, who, with Minneapolis attorney Randy Tietjen, spent a weekend at Paulson and her husband Dale's home in Roseburg examining the collection. According to Paulson, a pile of gold on the table would have excited them less.

Booksellers' Alley a little-known literary hub
Local book buffs have been enjoying a little-known downtown browsing treat on recent weekends. They've been gathering outdoors, at a convivial strip just beside Montreal's indoor mecca for book lovers, the Grande Bibliothèque, near Berri-UQÀM métro. Now, their destination just got better. The fledgling Booksellers' Alley has added a third day, Sunday, on a trial basis. Since May 15, the outdoor strip has been bringing the joys of rare and used books, calligraphy, rare maps, postcards, engravings, the art of book-binding and other variations of the print revolution wrought by Gutenberg to Montrealers and tourists.

History By The Book: Moe's Books, the Well-Known Local Vendor of Used Volumes, Commemorates a Half Century of Business
A native of Queens, New York, Moe Moskowitz and his wife Barbara opened the first Moe's Books on Shattuck Avenue in 1959 but soon moved the store to its present neighborhood. A true eccentric, Moskowitz became a legendary figure in Berkeley. He could often be found behind the counter, smoking his characteristic cigar, loudly singing his favorite songs or examining the books that a potential seller had brought in for inspection, according to John Wong, an antiquarian expert who has worked at the store for 30 years.

Will bookshops be left on the shelf?
[Alan] Warnock has put his finger on the great advantage of online book-buying: that it's speedy but, more important, that you can get your hands on out-of-print, specialist, hard-to-find titles that retail bookshops no longer stock. At the same time, second-hand and antiquarian books are a profitable area for retailers who would find it hard to compete with the heavily discounted prices offered by Amazon for many popular titles. Indeed, the antiquarian area is where bookselling first developed an online presence, as ABE press and publicity manager Richard Davies explains. When ABE co-founder Cathy Waters tried to track down books for her customers in the Dark Ages, ie 1995, she "would put an advertisement in a book listings magazine and other booksellers would write back weeks later and say they had one. It was a terrible process. So her husband who was working in IT for the government in British Columbia said: "Well, why not put the two together?" And the rest is history. "Who would have thought that old books would be the perfect match for the internet?" Davies enthuses. Indeed.

Rare Books in the News: July 28, 2009

Rare books now available through deal between U. Michigan and Amazon
On Tuesday, university libraries revealed plans to make 400,000 out-of-copyright books in their collection available for reprint on demand through a partnership with BookSurge. The books, which the university expects to make available later this summer, will range from $10 to $45. The reprint program will expand the university's relationship with online seller Amazon.com, which has been offering a limited selection of books to the university for about five years. The agreement between the university and Amazon states that the program will last two years. Dean of Libraries Paul Courant said the project would focus mainly on works published prior to 1923 because they are no longer protected under copyright law. Courant added that the project would slowly add more recent out-of-print and out-of-copyright books.

Amazon deal to reprint rare books
Online retailer Amazon is teaming up with the University of Michigan to provide reprints of 400,000 rare, out-of-print and out-of-copyright books. The books from the university's library are in more than 200 languages from Acoli to Zulu and include an 1860 book on nursing by Florence Nightingale. Amazon's Book Surge unit will print the books in soft-cover editions at prices from $10(£6) to $45. It comes as the Ann Arbor college seeks to digitise its book collection. Financial details of the tie-up arrangement have not been revealed.

Jeff Bezos apologizes for Kindle gaffe
Attempting to turn the page (so to speak) on a messy chapter in Amazon's corporate history, CEO Jeff Bezos has officially apologized for the way the company handled the removal of unauthorized content on Kindle devices which the company had already sold to its customers. Over the past two weeks Amazon has been facing bitter criticism for its decision to delete without warning several titles which had been uploaded to the site for sale on the Kindle e-book platform. It turns out that those who uploaded the books didn't have the rights to sell them, and Amazon summarily deleted the titles from their store and from the devices of those who had already downloaded them, taking with them their notes and annotations in some cases. Cries of Big Brother were immediate and angry -- particularly since one of the titles deleted was George Orwell's 1984.

Forgotten Bookmarks: A bookseller blogs bits left in books
Forgotten Bookmarks blog, via MeFi. I work at a used and rare bookstore, and I buy books from people everyday. These are the personal, funny, heartbreaking and weird things I find in those books. (Librarians would have such collections, too. Or must they throw them away? Shhh... ) David left a letter from Julia in "The Remains of the Day" by Kazuo Ishiguro. The letter begins,

Dearest David, I am returning the beautiful necklace you gave me - not as a gesture if finality of our friendship, but because it is a special token in your family and I could not in good conscience keep it....

and Julia elegantly, gently and firmly turns him down.

Rare Books in the News: July 24, 2009

Previously unpublished Graham Greene novel to be serialized
It has not been decided who will finish the story. “We want to make sure the estate of Greene is happy with the outcome of this,” Gulli says. “There will either be a reader's contest or a writer will be commissioned to conclude the story.” Strand’s summer issue, containing the first chapter of The Empty Chair, has already been released and will be available until September. Of the response so far, Gulli notes, “The reaction has been overwhelming. Greene is still very much in demand and it's my hope that this will help introduce a new generation of readers to his work.”

At 90, Bauhaus Gets a Fresh Retrospective
Ninety years ago, Walter Gropius founded an interdisciplinary school in Weimar with the objective of developing a “total” work that would unite all of the design disciplines — architecture, graphic design, and typography — under one aesthetic vision. The Bauhaus school became one of the most important in modern history: its legacy can still be seen everywhere from your Ikea kitchen set to the Manhattan skyline. To celebrate the anniversary, the three largest Bauhaus research institutions and museums in Germany, in cooperation with the Museum of Modern Art in New York (a sister exhibit runs there from Nov. 8 to Jan. 25), will host “Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model”, running through Oct. 4. The exhibit will take place in the Martin-Gropius-Bau (Niederkirchnerstrasse 7; 805-999-62-37-70), a beautiful Renaissance-style building in central Berlin designed by Walter Gropius’s great uncle in the 1870s.

A Bubbling Font of Creativity: Oded Ezer and His Hebrew Designs
Despite its ubiquity, type design is easy to overlook; it’s the meaning of words that usually matters, not their appearance. Courtesy Oded EzerFlesh Made Word: From corporate logos to personal posters, Oded Ezer is bringing type to life.But for Oded Ezer, an Israeli artist and type designer, typography lends a whole other life to language. In his work, which has appeared in museums and won design competitions worldwide, letters aren’t static symbols but living, growing, breathing beings. “The Typographer’s Guide to the Galaxy” (Die Gestalten Verlag), a new book showcasing his designs, provides a sampling of his functional and experimental work, his corporate logos and sketchbook drawings, and projects so strange that they defy classification.

A Wilde discovery of letters
He may have excelled at the unexpected, but even Oscar Wilde himself would have to bow down to this delicious irony. Several of Wilde’s working drafts and personal letters were thought, by scholars, to have been lost for over half a century, until a gift to the Morgan Library and Museum in New York revealed otherwise, writes Belinda McKeon. Here were the drafts, nine of them in all, and here along with them were four precious letters, comprising some 50 pages of handwritten Wilde, beautifully bound in a red leather volume. And here, on the cover of that volume, stamped in gilt, was the coat of arms of the family which had cared enough to seek out those manuscripts and letters, to bring them together and to keep them so elegantly intact: the winged horses and the proud shield of the Marquess of Queensberry.

Library of Congress and DuraSpace Launch Cloud Technologies Pilot Program
The Library of Congress (www.loc.gov) National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP; www.digitalpreservation.gov) and DuraSpace (www.duraspace.org) have announced that they will launch a 1-year pilot program to test the use of cloud technologies to enable perpetual access to digital content. The pilot will focus on a new service, DuraCloud, developed and hosted by the DuraSpace organization. Among the NDIIPP partners participating in the pilot program are The New York Public Library and the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Getty Museum Exhibition to Trace Perceptions of Aztec Culture
Drawing primarily on the collections of the Museo Nacional de Antropología and the Museo del Templo Mayor in Mexico City, the exhibition will also feature the Sahagún’s Florentine Codex from the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, and 16th to 18th-century works relating to Mexico from the Getty Research Institute’s Special Collections. “European response to pre-Columbian and colonial-era Latin America has long been a focus of collecting for the Getty Research Institute,” says Lyons. “Its rich holdings on Mexico show how remarkable Aztec objects were 'translated' by Europeans.”

Razor-Gang Blues
The NLA has always had a perception problem, being seen by government as a place that just keeps old stuff. Indeed, the library recently learned that its print collection stretched 300 years further back than was thought. A collection of Chinese artefacts it acquired in 1961 included a volume of woodblock-printed sutras dated 1162; a question mark was added because nobody could believe it. Three painstaking authentications later, it can be given an 846th birthday party and, thanks to the extra plant fibre in period Chinese paper, looks fit for many happy returns. But it is not such relics that tax the NLA most: it is the cornucopia of digital materials in technologies dying almost as soon as they are born.

Volunteers match names to faces in USI archiving project
"We're getting these (photos) ready for digitization. Hopefully by the end of next month we'll have the Rice Library Image Collection up and running, and the public will be able to view these images," said Jennifer Greene, reference and archives librarian. The photos will have description fields that will enable more than 30 names to be added to each photo. The photos also will have the ability to be searched based on the names in the description fields.

Letter: Haverhill is losing a precious resource
To the editor: I'm writing from New York City and I just received bad news from the librarian at the Haverhill library. Recently, I wrote to the Haverhill library requesting help with information regarding Charles Wesley Bradley, who died on Sept. 22, 1884. He was buried in a quiet cemetery in Haverhill. The reply I received from the librarian is disheartening. Here is what she wrote me: "We regret to inform you that due to severe budget cuts the library has closed its Special Collections Department. The library can no longer accept telephone, e-mail, or standard mail requests for research pertaining to local history, genealogy, the Gale Art Collection, and archived microfilm or microfiche.

Rare Books in the News: July 22, 2009

'The Cocom Codex': A Rare Document Sparks Intrigue in the Yucatan
What would you do if one day you received something in the mail that would forever change the course of your life? "The Cocom Codex" (published by iUniverse) by Nelson Reed details the adventures of one such archeologist as he and a cast of others in Yucatan struggle to claim a valuable and rare Maya document as their own. Out of the blue, Stuart Walker opens his mail to find a photo and letter from a childhood friend, inviting him to bid on the Cocom Codex. Though Stuart's tenure as a professor at Washington University is a bit shaky, in part because of his drinking problem, he drops everything and leaves for Yucatan immediately, hoping the document will revive his once promising career. Also vying for the prized artifact are Catherine Pilkington, a fellow archeology professor who believes her mediocre career has been curtailed by the old-boy network, and Peter Van Raemdonck, an unscrupulous dealer who specializes in pre-Colombian Mexican art.

Amazon deal to reprint rare books
Online retailer Amazon is teaming up with the University of Michigan to provide reprints of 400,000 rare, out-of-print and out-of-copyright books. The books from the university's library are in more than 200 languages from Acoli to Zulu and include a 1898 book on nursing by Florence Nightingale. Amazon's Book Surge unit will print the books in soft-cover editions at prices from $10(£6) to $45. It comes as the Ann Arbor college seeks to digitise its book collection. Financial details of the tie-up arrangement have not been revealed.

Gates Puts Feynman Lectures Online
However, Mr. Gates, who is also well known for his sharp and varied intellectual interests and his philanthropic commitment to education, said this week that he had purchased the rights to videos of seven lectures that Dr. Feynman gave at Cornell University called “The Character of Physical Law,” in an effort to make them broadly available via the Internet. Microsoft Research announced on Wednesday that Mr. Gates, who purchased the rights to the videos privately from the Feynman estate, BBC and from Cornell University, in cooperation with Curtis Wong, a Microsoft researcher, has created a Web site that is intended to enhance the videos by annotating them with related digital content.

A good read: Bringing the Bible’s scattered pages together online
At a British Library conference to launch the website, the monastery brought the exciting news of a “new new find”. A few months ago, a Greek doctoral student, Nikolaos Sarris, was examining the binding on an 18th-century Greek manuscript when he spotted that pasted to the backboard was a piece of writing that might once have been part of the Codex. It has since been confirmed that the fragment, part of the book of Joshua, almost certainly came from there. Does the fragment’s use for book-binding imply a lack of respect for the Codex? Far from it, says Nicholas Pickwoad, a conservator who knows St Catherine’s. An Italian traveller in the 18th century noted that the text, or at least the vast bulk of it that remained in good order, was treasured by the monks; if a page was reused, that was only because the writing had become damaged. It was the spiritual message, not the gold letters or the vellum, that the monks revered.

Da Vinci's Atlantic Code goes on display in Milan
Leonardo Da Vinci's Atlantic Code, seen containing the widest range of the Renaissance genius's ideas, will go on display from September in a show taking six years to see all 1,119 pages. Milan gave a taster for the full show on Friday, showing off two pages of the code, original name Codex Atlanticus, in the city hall. The full exhibition will run up to Milan's international Expo in 2015. "There are different types of pages, some just writing and including the writer telling fables and funny stories as well as engineering designs and cooking recipes," Don Francesco Braschi of Milan's Ambrosiana Library, the Code's home, told Reuters.

Rare sixteenth century book finds new home at John Rylands Library
The John Rylands University Library has acquired a priceless collection of books, some of which date back 500 years. St Mary's Church in Nantwich housed the library, however its location, which could only be reached via a narrow spiral staircase, meant that it was all but inaccessible. The council of St Mary's Church were concerned about the deterioration of the books and took the decision to gift them to the John Rylands University Library to enable them to be stored safely and made available for viewing.

Harry Potter book to raise thousands
It was sitting neglected at a second-hand bookshop, but now a rare first edition Harry Potter book is expected to conjure up thousands of pounds when it casts a spell on eager bidders at an auction in Norwich. The auction, being held at St Andrews Hall from 9am tomorrow , is expected to attract scores of fans who are eager to bag the copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Auctioneer Gary Barnes said that the client, a book collector who did not want to be named, was browsing a second-hand book sale in Dereham when he spotted the book on sale for just 99p.

Rare antique, collectible books on sale at Spring Hill library
A special section with rare, antique, autographed, and collectible books adds a new twist to the Friends of the Spring Hill Library's book sale 9 a.m.– 3 p.m. Saturday at 144 Kedron Pkwy. The quarterly sales already include a wide selection of adult and children's books, videos, DVD's and books on tape for $1 per item or 50 cents per paperback book, which help raise about $4,000 over the year for the library. This time around, the sale also includes about 200 more valuable books for sale that go up in price from $5 to $100 per title. "They were just collecting dust," head librarian Gail Adkins said. "We thought 'why not use them to raise money for the library?'"

Rare Books in the News: July 21, 2009

Shopping for Rare Space Stuff on the Lunar-Landing Anniversary
Why not honor the 40th birthday of walking on the moon by spending lots of money on space memorabilia? Buzz Aldrin’s bright orange training suit used to prepare for his Gemini 12 flight in 1966 and for the big one, the Apollo 11 mission nearly three years later. “An exceptional and unique item in fine condition. Price is $40,000 from a Bauman Rare Books catalogue. Also available from the Bauman space catalogue: a photograph taken on the moon during Apollo11 signed by all 12 astronauts who walked on the moon. Only about two dozen of such photos are said to exist, says Bauman. Fine condition, $29,500.

Purdue exhibit to celebrate 40th anniversary of lunar landing
Mementos, artifacts and personal papers from Neil Armstrong, Eugene Cernan and other Purdue astronaut alumni will be on display July 20 to Oct. 30 as the university celebrates its rich space heritage and the 40th anniversary of the historic first walk on the moon. Purdue Libraries’ Archives and Special Collections will present the exhibit “Purdue’s Place in Space: From the Midwest to the Moon.” The exhibit, which is free and open to the public, will be on display in the new Virginia Kelly Karnes Archives & Special Collections Research Center on the fourth floor of the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Education Library in Stewart Center.

How to Find a Missing Masterpiece
Discoveries of unknown works by classical masters seem commonplace these days, with manuscripts by the likes of Bach, Vivaldi, Mozart and Beethoven popping up in library files and private collections with surprising frequency. Often though, amid all the excitement and bankable headlines, the artistic payoffs turn out to be minimal, or the claims greatly exaggerated: Witness the overblown and specious claims made about a spate of so-called Mendelssohn “world premieres” in New York recently. But a new release on Naxos of a forgotten work, “Song of the Stars” by the esteemed Spanish composer Enrique Granados, is real cause for celebration.

Codex Sinaiticus, the world's oldest Bible, unified online for the first time in over a century
The surviving sections of the world’s oldest Bible have been pieced together and unified online Monday, creating a unique opportunity for scholars to learn more about the centuries-old manuscript. As part of a four-year joint project, the Codex Sinaiticus, has been digitized for the first time, reuniting sections held by the British Library in London, the Monastery of St. Catherine in Sinai, Egypt, the National Library of Russia and Leipzig University Library in Germany, according to Reuters.

Getty displays medieval manuscripts focusing on King David
So large loomed his legend that throughout the Middle Ages David was credited with being the author of the 150 Psalms, the deeply affecting "songs of praise" initially composed in Hebrew, that were incorporated into the Hebrew Bible and later the Christian Bible. The Psalms played a vital role in medieval devotion from about 500 to the 1500s, and David's image appears in lavishly illustrated Psalters, volumes containing the Book of Psalms, and choir books of the period. Many of these manuscripts, painted in brilliant hues and decorated with gold leaf, are on view through Aug. 16 in the Getty Museum's North Pavilion.

EU seeks opinions on Google Books
European Union regulators want publishers and authors to weigh in on copyright issues with Google's book scanning and book search project, according to the Associated Press. European Commission officials will meet with copyright holders on September 7 to discuss the search giant's $125 million proposed settlement with U.S. publishers and authors granting Google the right to digitize and publish books that are out of print but still protected by copyright law. The court overseeing the settlement has given authors a September 4 deadline to opt out individually if they don't not wish to participate. Google has negotiated many deals with some publishers for current works and is also digitizing public-domain works.

Inking a tattoo -- and a writing career
The Sea Tramp has a reference library. It's in the back, not far from the banner for the High Rollers, the roller derby team Johnson's wife skates for as Candy Warhole. Most shops have books on hand to research designs and make sure, for example, the state flag a Marine wants on his bicep is from Texas and not Tennessee. Johnson says he doesn't know a daffodil from a lilac but loves art and is a serious book collector. He pulls out a French book about aquariums and another on the language of flowers. A friend, rare book dealer Charles Seluzicki, helped him build his collection and helped him on his path toward becoming a writer by suggesting he turn his stories into what became "Tattoo Machine." "That book was born in our house one Christmas night," Seluzicki says. "Jeff started telling stories and had everyone in stitches."

Bloomsbury Sets Loose the Dogs of Deflation
In a recent column, I discussed deflation coming to the rare book world, with particular emphasis on the auction houses. In my mailbox this morning comes news that Bloomsbury, the auction house that has been leading the market to realistic reserves, has now made it official with their first No Reserve Bibliophile Sale. The sale features property from Heritage Book Shop, Colonial Williamsburg and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and will occur this Tuesday, June 30, at 2PM in New York. Here's their blow-out the competition deal: Minimum bid is [drumroll] $25. Twenty-five dollars. This is major. While Bloomsbury is clearly trying to move the goods, the goods ain't bad.

Rare manuscripts remain locked for want of key
Though the old records of erstwhile Bettiah Raj have been acquired by the government yet no document has been transferred to it so far. At Bettiah, besides old Raj records, more than 1,000 rare books and reports regarding census and linguistic survey of India are stored. No official is posted there to look after the old archival records at Darbhanga and Bhagalpur regional centres. The situation in record rooms in six other districts is more or less the same, the director said. No financial auditing has been done at the state headquarters of the 55-year-old state archives for the last 14 years. It is essential to conduct financial auditing of the state archives without any delay for which a separate letter has been sent to the finance department by Kumar.

Academy of Natural Sciences part of huge digital imaging project
It's not every day that an 18-year-old art student has the opportunity to work with some of the rarest and most beautiful images ever created. Yet here at the Academy of Natural Sciences is Stephanie Zuppo, a Moore College of Art sophomore, affixed to a tall stool, at her feet an enormous volume bathed in brilliant light. She focuses on a flower - a rose, possibly the first rendering of that particular variation of flora - and carefully adjusts her scanner. An image originally created at around 1800 by Pierre Joseph Redouté, the great Belgian painter and botanist, is about to enter the universe of digital electronics, invisibly passing into machinery and onto gold compact discs, eventually into various databases and then out to the virtual world, available to anyone.

Preserving the past: WPI pursues time through archives
Worcester Polytechnic Institute will get help in preserving its oldest artifacts from aging and decay. The George C. Gordon Library has recently received books and online resources from the Institute of Museum and Library Services through its program, Connecting to Collections: A Call to Action. Called The Bookshelf, the resources include information on caring for old collections. “The Bookshelf is for supporting the preservation work for our collections. We have so much diverse material — from old football films, photographs, sculptures, drawings and even old computer games,” said Kathleen Markees, conservation librarian at WPI.

Author Geraldine Brooks sheds light on 'People'
The clues were all there -- accidents of history -- hiding inside the ancient book: an insect wing, wine stains, salt crystals, a white hair. Geraldine Brooks, author of "People of the Book," served them up for her heroine Hanna Heath to discover. They, in turn, revealed bit by bit the 600-year journey of a rare manuscript so beloved that people risked their safety for its survival. The clues and Hanna Heath are Brooks' creations. What Brooks didn't imagine was the book itself, a medieval Hebrew text called the Sarajevo Haggadah, renowned for its "illuminated" artwork.

The Angel’s Game
But while Martín might be sarcastic about writing as a career, Zafón is nothing short of reverent about books. “The Angel’s Game” is bursting with homages to Dickens, Defoe, and Dumas, and is the kind of novel where librarians are witty sirens and the good guys are an antiquarian book dealer and a crusty newspaper editor “who did not suffer fools and who subscribed to the theory that the liberal use of adverbs and adjectives was the mark of a pervert or someone with a vitamin deficiency.”

Rare Books in the News: July 18, 2009

Nation Building
Many book collectors and curators would give all their first editions for Mark Dimunation’s job. Since 1998, Dimunation has served as chief of the Library of Congress’s Rare Books and Special Collections Division. It is the largest rare book collection in North America, housed in the largest library in the world, a “huge theme park of materials,” as he describes it. The division contains some 850,000 items—including Charles Dickens’ walking stick, the contents of Abraham Lincoln’s pockets on the night he was assassinated, and The Bay Psalm Book, published in 1640, the first book printed in what became the United States.

Google Books or Great Books?
In 2006 Kevin Kelley of Wired wrote in the New York Times that very soon “all the books in the world” will “become a single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas”. Counter-arguments were not slow in coming. One of the best-informed, most thorough, and most truly passionate came, not surprisingly, from Anthony Grafton: first in the pages of the New Yorker, then – expanded and documented – as a pamphlet, Codex in Crisis, published last year by the Crumpled Press; and now as the culminating essay in Worlds Made by Words, a collection of mostly recent essays dealing with aspects of the Republic of Letters (once a real, if virtual, humanist society) from the Renaissance to the present day.

Rare 1502 hymnal given to UK university library
A church is donating a rare 1502 hymnal to a Manchester University library, where church members say it can receive better care. The Latin hymnal was published in London by Wynken de Worde, who was among the first to popularize printed works. The hymnal will be stored at The John Rylands University Library along with a trove of other books that have been kept in a church tower in the town of Nantwich since about 1695. The library at St. Mary's Church, one of many set up in parish churches around England, apparently was well used for about a century before falling into neglect. "We have long worried that the books were deteriorating. The staff at The University of Manchester will be able to conserve them and store them in the correct conditions," said Rick Appleton, a church member.

NEWS: AIGA Announces Best In Communication Design And Book Design
All 2008 selections will be featured in upcoming traveling exhibitions beginning at the AIGA National Design Center this fall, publication in the thirtieth edition of the AIGA design annual 365: AIGA Year in Design, and included in the AIGA Design Archives both online and at the Denver Art Museum. With a history stretching back 85 years, the "AIGA 50 Books/50 Covers Competition" has long been the source of identifying the best work in book design. All works selected for the competition this year will be added to the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University, in addition to being documented in the AIGA annual and included in the AIGA Design Archives.

Limited Edition of Ted Kennedy’s Memoirs Will Cost $1,000
At a time when publishers are scrambling to keep customers willing to pay $26 for a hardcover book instead of $9.99 for an electronic version, the publisher of Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s forthcoming memoir is going in the opposite direction - issuing a limited edition it plans to sell for $1,000 a copy. Twelve, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing, is planning to issue 1,000 copies of a leather-bound, electronically signed edition of “True Compass” and sell the books through the Web site of the Hachette Book Group, the parent company of Grand Central.

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: