Shelf:Life - what's new in the world of books and book collecting, links to the news stories that matter, and occassional comments by TheBookGuide.  Archived Stories.

28.02.05 Mystery writer deals in rare books. Everyone knows that writers love books, but mystery writer John Dunning loves them more than most. He’s a famed rare book collector who also deals in rare books - as does his fictional detective, Cliff Janeway, the hero of his latest novel, "The Sign of the Book"...more  Add a comment.

28.02.05 Spirit of 5,000-book library enlivens ghostly hamlet of 1. Elsie Eiler is mayor, barkeeper, sole inhabitant of Monowi, Nebraska. She also runs Rudy's Library, a gesture to her late husband, and traffic's OK...more  Add a comment.

28.02.05 Rare Descartes first edition auctioned in France. A first edition of French philosopher Rene Descartes' 1637 work "Discourse on Method" was sold Sunday for EUR 78,000 (USD 103,000) at auction in Evreux northwest of Paris...more  Add a comment.

28.02.05 Literary sleuths probe medieval mystery. Husband-and-wife team suggests an intriguing solution to the puzzle of The Voynich Manuscript...more  Add a comment.

28.02.05 Author Pullman fights to save 'inspirational' old Oxford boatyard. The author Philip Pullman yesterday condemned the "soulless, bland and corporate" plan that would turn a part of Oxford from which he drew inspiration into a "ditch imprisoned between brick walls"...more  Add a comment.

27.02.05 Burns missing from list of best Scottish writing. From Whisky Galore to The Wind in the Willows, it is the ultimate literary search: a quest to find the best Scottish book of all time that organisers say will take six months and will include every library and bookshop in the country...more  Add a comment.

27.02.05 A future without Booked Up. Famed American author Larry McMurtry's huge secondhand bookshop revitalised the community of Archer City. Now locals fear what will happen if it's to close...more  Add a comment.

27.02.05 Manuscripts 'treated as fossils'. A palaeontologist has come up with a novel way of studying historical manuscripts, by treating them as fossils from an extinct species...more  Add a comment.

27.02.05 Dennis the Menace lost in great museum raid. Eight thousand books worth at least £250,000 have gone missing from the British Library since it moved to new headquarters on London’s Euston Road. Everything from 16th-century tomes in Latin to the first adventures of Dennis the Menace have vanished...more  Add a comment.

26.02.05 Author hailed as Scots great dies. The world of Scottish literature is mourning the death of Robin Jenkins, a novelist often hailed as the greatest the country has produced since the Second World War. Jenkins, who died of a stroke late on Thursday at the age of 92, was the author of 30 novels, including The Cone- Gatherers...more  Add a comment.

26.02.05 Finn-Olaf Jones visits the Heritage Book Shop. Given that the career of many a great author (think Fitzgerald or Faulkner) died in Los Angeles, it seems appropriate that one of the city's finest literary institutions - the Heritage Book Shop on Melrose Avenue, with thousands of rare books and manuscripts - is housed in a former mortuary...more  Add a comment.

26.02.05 Vintage Posters Auction. Heritage Vintage Movie Posters (HVMP) will present an exceptional selection of vintage war, travel, exposition circus and other posters in their upcoming auction, to be held March 17 &18 in Dallas, Texas...more  Add a comment.

26.02.05 Warning notes from underground. James Wood on how Conrad and Dostoevsky foresaw the roots of terrorism...more  Add a comment.

26.02.05 The tomes of Timbuktu. Starting with invasion and occupation by the Moroccan army in 1591, and culminating with colonization by France in the 1880s and '90s, most of the great libraries were looted or destroyed. The centers of learning collapsed, and the majority of the evidence of Timbuktu's contributions to the world was lost -- everything, that is, except what went underground, often literally...more  Add a comment.

25.02.05 Explosive finale for Hunter S Thompson. The son of Hunter S Thompson, the writer and gonzo journalist who shot himself dead earlier this week, has said that the family is looking into the possibility of firing his father's ashes from a cannon, in accordance with his wishes...more  Add a comment.

25.02.05 Transfer to Nixon Library may be delayed. The transfer of Richard M. Nixon's papers and tapes to his presidential library in Yorba Linda, California, may be delayed until 2007 because President Bush's budget did not include money for it...more  Add a comment.

25.02.05 Black 'street' literature comes of age in U.S.. After years in the literary underground, "street lit" -- a sort of hip hop black literature that is often self published and sold on U.S. street corners -- may finally hit the big time...more  Add a comment.

25.02.05 Chabad sues Russia to recover texts. In a continuing effort to recover an archive of manuscripts and texts left behind in the former Soviet Union in the early 20th century, the Jewish Chabad organization is taking the Russian Federation to the International Court of Law...more  Add a comment.

24.02.05 Early computing book auction report. New York - Documents from the early days of computing catalogued as "The Origins of Cyberspace" brought in more than $700,000 at auction, though nearly half the items didn't find a buyer...more  Add a comment.

24.02.05 Collectors Book Market launches. "Unlike current fixed price bookselling sites and large auction venues, Collectors Book Market (CBM) is focused on providing the specific features that collectible book buyers and sellers value," said Peter Thomas, the site's originator and technical director. "These include much better search and browse options, seller accountability, and clear references for first edition and signed books offered for sale"...more  Add a comment.

24.02.05 Shelley letters saved from car boot sale. Letters written by the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, detailing his bitter opposition to Christianity have been discovered hidden in a trunk in the suburban semi-detached home of two elderly brothers...more  Add a comment.

24.02.05 Turkish Manuscripts website launched. The collection includes the history of Islamic manuscripts, their birth and development, and important Arabic collections in the Islamic world, there are also a broad range of Turkish written documents including the birth and development of Turkish writing, and information about other libraries that have manuscripts, methodology, and different types of writing techniques have also been included on the web site...more  Add a comment.

23.02.05 Hunter S. Thompson  sales soar. Sales of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and other favourites by Hunter S. Thompson have soared since the "gonzo" journalist killed himself Sunday...more  Add a comment.

23.02.05 Sorting out the treasures and the trash. This collector was both chastened and encouraged after a weekend in San Francisco that offered two contrasting views of whether anything is still worth saving. The first was WonderCon, a sprawling comics show at the Moscone Center. The second was the elegant California International Antiquarian Book Fair, a reunion of 235 rare-book dealers a mile away at the Concourse Exhibition Center...more  Add a comment.

23.02.05 Poet’s Home becomes a Welsh Hotel. A Regency villa in North Wales which was once home to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley has been transformed into a small country house hotel, opening on March 21. As well as Shelley, who lived at Plas Tan-yr-Allt from 1812-13 but fled after being shot at - the episode is an intriguing mystery to this day - the house’s hospitality attracted other literary visitors...more  Add a comment.

23.02.05 400,000 books at library sale. Friends of Oklahoma's Metropolitan Library are about to hold their 26th annual book sale, which over the past 26 years has resulted in more than $1.8 million dollars in grants for the Metropolitan Library System...more  Add a comment.

22.02.05 Exiled Cuban writer Cabrera Infante dies in London. Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who wrote about Cuba's steamy cabaret society and became a staunch critic of Cuban communism, died on Monday in London where he lived in exile for 40 years...more  Add a comment.

22.02.05  Superheroes leap into Arab comic books. Cairo - He's a mild-mannered philosophy professor who wears button-down shirts, lives in a drab, anonymous apartment and pronounces maxims such as "There is no glory without virtue" and "Free will pushes toward creativity." But beneath the meek and pedantic exterior lies a buff, masked fighter in tights who is endowed with supernatural strength and a mission to "fight evil until the end of time"...more  Add a comment.

21.02.05 New stamp on what happened to Jane Eyre. In a brave move, the Royal Mail has chosen to mark the 150th anniversary of Brontë's death by selecting an unorthodox image of the book's eponymous heroine for a special commemorative stamp issue due out on Thursday. A startling portrayal of the governess looking middle-aged and almost mannish will appear on the first-class stamp...more  Add a comment.

21.02.05 Coptic manuscripts unearthed in Egyptian tomb. Polish experts excavating in the southern Egyptian city of Luxor have discovered three ancient Coptic manuscripts in a pharaonic tomb.
    They are thought to be the single most important Coptic discovery since 1945, when a pair of Bedouins stumbled onto the Coptic codices in Nag Hammadi in Egypt's western desert...more  Add a comment.

21.02.05 Hunter S Thompson commits suicide. Hunter S Thompson, the American counterculture writer, has been found dead at his home in Colorado...more  Add a comment.

20.02.05 A brazen plot doomed to fail. Sarah Vos takes a detailed look at the Transylvania book heist and concludes that the thieves were as good as caught, the moment they walked through Christie's door...more  Add a comment.

20.02.05 Tony Bliss goes shopping at the California International Antiquarian Book Fair. Checking his mental shopping list, Tony Bliss moved swiftly from booth to booth Saturday at the California International Antiquarian Book Fair.
    As the rare-books curator at UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library, Bliss already had spent hours greasing the wheels of commerce, sitting with dealers from around the world, peeking into glass-enclosed cases for the next great addition to the Bancroft's renowned collections...more  Add a comment.

20.02.05 Campaign to preserve writer's home. Australian National Trust president Barry O'Keefe and activist Jack Mundey, Author Thomas Keneally and Kate Fitzpatrick spearheaded the push yesterday to save Patrick White's house from private sale and see it established as a centre dedicated to White's work and supporting other writers...more  Add a comment.

19.02.05 Legendary photo curator is celebrated in new book. For nearly 30 years, John Szarkowski was the pope of American photography. From 1962 to 1991, he reigned at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, where he was the curator of photography.
    His 160 exhibitions, his many books and his restrained taste -- a predilection for crisp street shots, classic landscapes and unmanipulated images -- defined the field and exerted enormous influence on aspiring photographers...more  Add a comment.

19.02.05 Happy ending for fired book shop 'blogger'. Sacked bookshop worker Joe Gordon has been headhunted by an independent bookseller attracted by the weblog entries that cost him his last job.
    Now comic book chain Forbidden Planet has headhunted him - for a managerial role dealing with the online side of the business and book and graphic novel selection...more  Add a comment.

19.02.05 Google online book plan sparks French war of words. France's national library has raised a "war cry" over plans by Google to put books from some of the world's great libraries on the Internet and wants to ensure the project does not lead a domination of American ideas...more  Add a comment.

19.02.05 Banned Korean books on display. Books banned during the Japanese colonial period are being exhibited at Samseong Museum of Publishing in Seoul...more  Add a comment.

19.02.05 Philosopher's rare 'other book' goes on sale. Proofs of children's spelling dictionary by Wittgenstein could fetch £75,000. The proofs, which are being sold by Bernard Quaritch, the London antiquarian bookshop, have been taken to the US where a director of the firm, Ian Smith, is displaying them at the San Francisco book fair...more  Add a comment.

19.02.05 Vancouver bookstore loses latest battle with Customs. A gay bookstore has lost its bid for legal costs in the latest round of a two-decade fight involving Canada Customs' seizure of books it classified as obscene.
    In a decision released Friday, Justice Allan Thackray of the B.C. Court of Appeal reversed a July 2004 ruling that would have given Little Sisters Book and Art Emporium an unspecified sum to wage its book battle against the government agency.
    Little Sisters argued it couldn't afford another court fight with Customs, which has seized several books at the United States border since 1985...more  Add a comment.

19.02.05 Britons vie to be world's No 1 author. Dame Muriel Spark, Ian McEwan and Doris Lessing are the three Britons on the shortlist for the Man Booker International Award for the world’s best living writer, it was announced yesterday...more  Add a comment.

18.02.05 The large print giveth... US publishers attempt to arrest falling readership by making books bigger. "Many people over the ripe old age of 40 are starting to have trouble reading, and reading mass market books has become very difficult," Jane Friedman, president and chief executive officer of HarperCollins told the Associated Press....more  Add a comment.

18.02.05 Guardian Hay festival turns to film. The Guardian Hay Festival this summer is to offer film events as well as the usual banquets of literature, comedy, cabaret, politics, art, music and children's entertainment...more  Add a comment.

17.02.05 P Diddy sued for £160,000 memoir he never wrote. Writer's block is not the only malaise to have struck hip-hop impresario Sean "P Diddy" Combs in the seven years since one of New York's biggest publishing houses struck a deal with him to write an autobiography. Accountant's block seems to have followed quickly...more  Add a comment.

17.02.05 Iranian manuscripts in Britain. More than 12,000 manuscripts, 30,000 volumes of printed books and 9,000 copies of different Iranian publications are kept in the British Library...more  Add a comment.

17.02.05 Illuminating Faith. A major exhibition of Middle Eastern artefacts is on show at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery until June 19 2005. Illuminating Faith is a fascinating collection of illustrated manuscripts, textiles, dress, ceramics and metalwork from the Middle East dating from the 9th to the 19th centuries...more  Add a comment.

17.02.05  Bangor librarians face internet threat. Bangor University is proposing to sack eight of its 12 librarians because students can find the information they need on the internet.     Bangor, which is part of the University of Wales, has become the focus of a national campaign to save the "Bangor eight" as unions fear the cuts could be replicated in university libraries elsewhere...more  Add a comment.

16.02.05 Rare Ian Fleming items up for auction. The highlight of the Continental and English Literature and Modern First Editions sale at Bloomsbury Auctions on 24th February 2005 is the sale of the second major group of books and letters from Ian Fleming to come onto the market in the last year...more  Add a comment.

16.02.05 The plunder of Iraq's treasures. One million books, 10 million documents and 14,000 archaeological artifacts have been lost in the US-led invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq - the biggest cultural disaster since the descendants of Genghis Khan destroyed Baghdad in 1258, Venezuelan writer Fernando Baez told Inter Press Service...more  Add a comment.

16.02.05 Pass it on by postcard. World Book Day campaign aims to capitalise on the power of word of mouth to promote reading...more  Add a comment.

16.02.05 Neighbours want to pay to move Hemingway house. Neighbours in the small town of Ketchum fear that plans to open the Hemingway house to the public will bring scores of tourists who will disrupt their peace and clog up their drives.     They want to buy the property - which could have a price tag of more than $500,000 (£265,000) - from the conservancy that owns it, and move it down the road...more  Add a comment.

16.02.05 Suspects in rare books theft released. A US federal judge ordered that four 20-year-olds accused of stealing rare books and manuscripts, including a first edition of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, be released from jail until their case goes to trial. None of the men was required to post bail...more  Add a comment.

15.02.05 Fine Books 50. Fine Books & Collections magazine has released its annual ranking of the top-selling rare books and manuscripts of 2004 at auction houses worldwide. The results: known as the "Fine Books 50," will be featured in the March/April 2005 edition of the magazine.
    The full list of 296 books and manuscripts that sold for more than $100,000 will be available on the magazine's web site on March 1, 2005...more  Add a comment.

15.02.05 Scholars examine the humorous side of the Bible. Humour and wordplay in the Bible? Theology and Christian literature scholars gathering in Turin say the Old and New Testaments are riddled with humorous references and they are holding a three-day congress aiming to set the record straight...more  Add a comment.

15.02.05 Foyles to open new London store. Foyles, Britain's most famous bookshop, is planning to open new stores in cities across the world as part of its first expansion drive since the 1930s...more  Add a comment.

15.02.05 'Book man' Harold (Hal) P. Peterson dies at 69. As the librarian at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts from 1973 until his retirement in 2001, Peterson expanded the museum's collection of art reference books from 6,000 to 60,000 volumes and installed the first computerized cataloging system for them...more  Add a comment.

15.02.05 Ancient scrolls being digitised in UAE. More than 100,000 ancient Indian manuscripts and 15 million historic documents in Urdu, Persian and Arabic and 5 million English manuscripts are being digitised by the Juma Al Majid Centre for Culture and Heritage in Dubai...more  Add a comment.

15.02.05 Bernard Stone dies aged 84. A revered figure in London literary life, the writer and publisher Bernard Stone held court for more than 30 years at his famous Turrett Bookshop. The avant-garde bookshop, which he founded in the 1960s in Kensington Church Walk, was a magnet for writers and booklovers, drawn as much by Stone’s genial hospitality as by the extraordinary range of 20th-century works he stocked...more  Add a comment.