- As if they needed more bad news: the BPL has temporarily closed its rare book department for an assessment after a "significant mold outbreak."
- Megan Cottrell has a short piece in American Libraries about thwarting book thefts, featuring comments from Travis McDade.
- Nancy Scola reported for Politico that biographer Walter Isaacson "took himself out of the running" to be the next Librarian of Congress. The report includes several other names of folks supposedly under consideration, including Amy Gutmann, John Palfrey, Carla Hayden, Susan Hildreth, Deborah Jacobs, Brewster Kahle, and David Ferriero.
- There's a new Pew Research report about the importance of libraries in American society, which ought to be read by anyone with an interest.
- Roll Call's Bridget Bowman talked to new Library of Congress CIO Bernard A. Barton, Jr. about what he hopes to do at LC.
- Coming up from 12–14 November in Philadelphia, the 8th Annual Lawrence J. Schoenberg Symposium on Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age. This year's theme is "Picking up the Pieces," about fragmentation and reconstitution of manuscripts. See the event webpage for full details.
- An iconic Darwin letter about the Bible heads to auction on Monday: Rebecca Rego Barry reports for the Guardian.
- Lambeth Palace Library has purchased the Broughton Missal.
- Robert Darnton has released two of his early books as open-access texts through the Authors Alliance.
- From Past is Present, "Omeka Mania at AAS."
- The Library of Congress has acquired the personal archives of Jerry Lewis.
- WBUR reported this week on the jam-packed state of affairs at the Massachusetts Archives in Boston.
- Also going to the Library of Congress, the papers of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
- Library historian Wayne Wiegand talked to the Daily Tar Heel about his new book Part of Our Lives: A People's History of the American Public Library.
- Over on the APHA blog, Robert Oldham writes about his attempt to track all extant hand presses in the United States.
- Simon Fraser University has purchased a 1269 manuscript law volume; this is reportedly the first medieval manuscript purchased by the university. [Warning: white glove alert]
- From Heather Wolfe at The Collation, a neat find about early modern printing practices in the notebooks of John Ward, a physician and the vicar of Stratford-upon-Avon.
- An excellent example of bearing type, from the UNC Wilson Special Collections Library's Tumblr. [via John Overholt]
- Typographer Adrian Frutiger died on 10 September; his NYTimes obituary is well worth a read.
- There's a new exhibit at the Harvard Law School Library: "One Text, Sixteen Manuscripts: Magna Carta at the Harvard Law School Library." There's an online companion to the show as well.
- More on the ongoing crisis at the Papers of Abraham Lincoln Project from the Illinois Times.
- AAS Fellow Linford Fisher talked to Past is Present about his work on colonial slavery.
- Pauline Schol writes about this year's York Antiquarian Book Seminar (YABS) over at The Bookhunter on Safari.
- The Independent highlights artist Lisa Nilsson's use of "quilled" paper to create vivid anatomical cross-sections.
- Bob McCamant links to a short video on YouTube of Anthony Bourdain visiting Andrew Hoyem's Arion Press.
- The New-York Historical Society has acquired a collection of more than 300 documentary photographs of New York City, taken between 1978 and 2015 by Raymond Germann.
- Up for sale on Tuesday at Bonhams will be Franz Kafka's signed Czech passport.
- Nate Pedersen visited the Innerpeffray Library in Scotland in June, and has posted a short video he took on his trip over on the FB&C blog.
- Currently on display at the Grolier Club, "Alice in a World of Wonderlands: The Translations of Lewis Carroll's Masterpiece."
- Orson Welles' copies of the screenplay for "Citizen Kane" will be sold at a Profiles in History sale on 30 September. Up for grabs are an original first draft, a final draft, and a revised shooting script with Welles' manuscript notes.
- In the TLS, Jonathan Clark suggests that Thomas Paine was not the author of significant portions of The Rights of Man, and offers his own candidate.
Reviews
- Sasha Abramsky's The House of Twenty Thousand Books; review by Toby Lichtig in the TLS.
- Livi Michael's Succession; review by Jean Zimmerman in the NYTimes.