31.08.06.
Irish-theater
trove given to Princeton
A 1953 Princeton University graduate has donated
a rare collection of Irish theater works to his alma mater. The collection, which
was acquired by Leonard L. Milberg over the last four years, includes more than
1,000 items that chronicle the last 160 years of Irish theater ... more
Add a comment China
to repair its oldest Koran manuscript
Specialists say the book was written
in the 14th century or earlier. However, poor management and the absence of conservation
practices have placed the book in danger of rotting ... more
Add a comment German
researchers find earliest Bach manuscripts
German researchers said today
that they have discovered the oldest known handwritten manuscripts of Johann Sebastian
Bach ... more
Add a comment
30.08.06.
'Silly
Season' ...
August is traditionaly the 'Silly Season' for the press - they're
all on holiday and many of the stories are fillers. Well I'm back, and here's
a round-up of the more interesting stories from the last week. Add a comment Irelands
‘Town of Books’ Festival
The 4th Annual Graiguenamanagh ‘Town of Books’
Festival will take place in Graiguenamanagh Co Kilkenny on September 23-25. This
unusual event seems to have caught the imagination of the book-buying public and
once again is expected to bring thousands of people to Graiguenamanagh over that
weekend ... more
Add a comment Betjemania!
On
the centenary of John Betjeman's birth, Michael Horovitz rounds up the recent
collections and biographies ... more
Add a comment First
Arab Nobel laureate dies, aged 94
The Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz,
whose epic, generous depictions of life in his own beloved corner of ancient Cairo
led him to became the first Arab writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature,
died at his home today. He was 94 ... more
Add a comment Google
opens new chapter for literati
Avid readers can download and print classics
such as Dante's Divine Comedy through Google's Book Search service for free, starting
today. ... more
Add a comment `Challenged'
Books Drop to All-Time Low
The number of books threatened with removal
from US library shelves dropped last year to its lowest total on record, with
405 challenges reported to the American Library Association ... more
Add a comment Nothing
lasts for ever
The Lost Boys have grown old, Wendy is a wife and mother
and Neverland a polluted, autumnal landscape, according to a leaked version of
the officially sanctioned sequel to JM Barries's Peter Pan ... more
Add a comment Hoax
love letter fools Betjeman biographer
The telltale sign that the letter
is a joke is that the capital letters at the start of each sentence spell out
"A N Wilson is a shit" ... more
Add a comment
21.08.06.
No
news today ...
Holidays, grandparenting, and an unseasonable deluge of
books are keeping me away from TheBookGuide desk. I'm order to try and catch up
with some of the routine admin I'm going to take a break from posting news stories
until Tuesday August 29th. However, desperate news junkies can find links to 1,000's
of book related stories and articles in our archives.
17.08.06.
John
Irving defends author Guenter Grass
Nobel laureate Guenter Grass, who has
been strongly criticized for his long-belated confession that he served in the
notorious Waffen-SS during World War II, is still a "hero" in the eyes of his
friend and fellow author John Irving.
"Grass remains
a hero to me, both as a writer and as a moral compass; his courage, both as a
writer and as a citizen of Germany, is exemplary, a courage heightened, not lessened,
by his most recent revelation," Irving said Wednesday in an e-mail message sent
to The Associated Press ... more
Add a comment Physician's
diary found in bookshop
A lost diary documenting the last days of a famous
Scottish physician has been discovered in a second-hand bookshop. The diary depicts
the life of Sir James Young Simpson who discovered the anaesthetic properties
of chloroform in Edinburgh in the 19th century ... more
Add a comment Canon
fodder
It's madness to force-feed the classics to teenagers - it could
put them off reading for life ... more
Add a comment Discovering
Brecht's forgotten manuscripts
It happens rarely that 50 years after the
death of a writer, new and important manuscripts are discovered. But this is exactly
what happened in the case of the greatest dramatist of the 20th century, Bertolt
Brecht ... more
Add a comment
15.08.06.
From
one book to 100,000
At one time the building, now home to 100,000 books,
was primarily devoted to just one – the Bible. Leakey's
bookshop is one of hundreds of former churches to have been converted from
its original use to something very different ... more
Add a comment The
lost love poetry of Ted Hughes
The two love poems were written by the former
Poet Laureate in a book kept by Enid Wilkin when he used to visit her home in
the village of Patrington, East Yorkshire, where he was on national service with
the RAF in the early 1950s.
The retired social worker
decided to sell them through antiquarian bookseller Alex Alec-Smith, from Winestead,
and accepted an offer of £2,000 from Emory University, in Atlanta, Georgia, which
already holds his archive … more
Add a comment Book
Festival discussion groups will be captive audience - literally
The Edinburgh
International Book Festival is to hold an event at a young offenders institution
for the first time. Festival organisers have arranged two discussion groups for
inmates at Polmont Young Offenders Institution, near Falkirk, later this month
… more
Add a comment
14.08.06.
JK
Rowling casts her spell on rich list
JK Rowling has been named ninth in
the financial publication Forbes' latest list of top ten celebrity earners for
2005, the only non-American to make the prestigious list. According to the magazine,
the massive revenue generated by the author's Harry Potter series saw the author
earn £41 million last year … more
Add a comment SS-link
author 'must give up citizenship'
Lech Walesa, the Nobel peace laureate,
yesterday called for Guenter Grass to surrender his honorary citizenship of the
Polish city of Gdansk after the German author admitted he served in Adolf Hitler's
Waffen SS … more
Add a comment
Yesterday,
on Polish broadcasts, Lech Walesa said that there was some misunderstood with
his quote. He wanted to say that if he would be Guenter Grass, he will give up
his honor citizenship. - Pawel Podniesinski Portolan (Warsaw) Poland. 16th-century
choral manuscript to be performed
Within the pages of a rare 450-year-old
manuscript sitting in a vault at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia lie hundreds of
lines of music that haven't been performed for centuries. The choral chants, illustrated
with elaborate full-page illuminations, were written between 1554 and 1555 at
a convent in present-day Belgium … more
Add a comment
11.08.06.
Libraries
concerned more maps stolen
Just weeks after Massachusetts map dealer E.
Forbes Smiley confessed to stealing nearly 100 of the world's rarest maps, the
victimized libraries are voicing suspicions that he stole several other cartographic
treasures … more
Add a comment Vintage
menus: a feeding frenzy
Like many menus collectors, Henry didn't start
collecting in earnest until the advent of eBay in 1995. "It was eBay that began
to supply the market for something one couldn't easily find otherwise," he said
… more
Add a comment Da
Vinci Code back in court
The Da Vinci Code plagiarism case returned to
court yesterday, to decide how long the next gripping instalment of the legal
battle will last … more
Add a comment Prison
poet wins shorter sentence
A career burglar known as the "Pentonville
Poet" has been given a reduced jail sentence after he impressed a judge with his
prison verse … more
Add a comment Termites
feast on rain-drenched wisdom
The Government District Library, Dharamsala,
which not only houses priceless old books but also several rare manuscripts, is
in a shambles. Many books have either been destroyed due to heavy rain or eaten
by moths and termites. But the district administration is yet to swing into action
to save them. There are as many as 40,000 rare books in the library which was
set up way back in 1954 and of these at least 20,000 have been exposed to the
vagaries of the weather and the years … more
Add a comment
10.08.06.
The
University of California joins Google
The University of California said
Wednesday that it will join Google in its book-scanning project, giving the Mountain
View, Calif. company considerable leverage in attracting other libraries to join
the fold. At more than 100 libraries strong, the UC system will be the largest
expansion yet. However, the news was also met with criticism from the program's
detractors … more
Add a comment Rare
comic collection auctioned in Dallas
Just after Davis Crippen's death
last fall at age 75, his son dusted off each of the 11,000 comic books in his
father's collection to get them ready to be sold. Expecting to get about $50,000
from the four-month-long task, he was surprised to find that the collection his
father had amassed in the 1930s and 1940s - known as the "Golden Age" of comics
- was worth about $2.5 million … more
Add a comment Struggling
to keep up the good work
The fundraising power of a quirky second-hand
bookshop in Hampton will be cut in half unless book lovers come to the charity's
rescue. For 30 years the Book Shop at Hampton train station in Ashley Road has
sold used books for those in need of good reading material for their journey …
more
Add a comment Jewish
dealer, auction house spar over manuscript
It’s an art lover’s triangle,
pitting France and a London-based auction house against a Brooklyn art dealer
- over a Jewish manuscript created eight centuries ago. The dispute involves a
13th century Torah that is believed to have been stolen from France’s Bibliotheque
National, that nation’s biggest government-run library … more
Add a comment
05.08.06
No
News today...
TheBookGuide is away for a few days but he and the news
will return on August 10th. However, desperate news junkies can find links to
1,000's of book related stories and articles in our archives.
04.08.06.
Czechs
saving old Iraqi prints
Restorers from the National Archives spent six
weeks at a university in Kurdistan in Iraq where they helped save priceless prints
of the Iraqi national library, head of the department for records of the Czech
National Archives Michal Durovic told CTK on Thursday … more
Add a comment Domesday
Book mediaeval census goes online
Britain's oldest public record, the
920-year-old census known as the Domesday Book, was put on the Internet on Thursday,
allowing readers to browse the nation's greatest archival treasure from the comfort
of home … more
Add a comment 2006
Annual conference on book trade history
This year's annual conference
on book trade history will trace individual copies and their movement in and out
of collections and across international frontiers, exploring aspects of the history
of provenance and book ownership … more
Add a comment
03.08.06.
Hidden
treatises of Archimedes revealed
The most hidden words and diagrams of
Archimedes' greatest works now are coming to light inside a particle accelerator.
Scientists in the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory slowly are scanning
an X-ray beam half as thick as a human hair over the ancient parchment in hope
of recovering his thoughts from more than 2,000 years ago … more
Add a comment Dumbledore
'definitely' dead, says Rowling
Author JK Rowling explicitly clarified
tonight on her final appearance at Radio City Music Hall in New York City that
Dumbledore is "definitely" dead. She, along with Stephen King and John Irving,
hosted another 6,000 people as they read from their books to raise money for charity.
Rowling surprised fans with several tantalizing tidbits about the finale of her
popular Harry Potter series … more
Add a comment Cry
for help from writer jailed for a book that no one saw
Supporting marginalised
communities in their fight for social justice should not mean aligning with reactionary
forces … more
Add a comment US$4.8m
of art stolen over 30 years
Russia's latest stolen art scandal mushroomed
on Tuesday as it appeared that items missing from the State Hermitage Museum worth
at least US$4.8 million were not swiped by some masked superthief but by staff
over the years … more
Add a comment
01.08.06.
The
book burners do not speak for all of Brick Lane
Supporting marginalised
communities in their fight for social justice should not mean aligning with reactionary
forces … more
Add a comment History
without books gets a test in U.S. schools
What began as a long-shot attempt
last year by Pearson Plc to sell California educators digital materials to teach
history and politics, collectively known in U.S. schools as social studies, has
become reality in what could be the first large-scale step to eliminate books
from classrooms … more
Add a comment "Book
reading mode"
Proud owners of a new iPod will note that its expanded screen
is now half the size of a standard paperback. It is easy to speculate that, after
conquering music and video, the iPod's next stop is likely to be books … more
Add a comment Oxfam
rakes in cash with brick from break-in
The British charity Oxfam said on
Saturday that it had sold an ordinary brick used by thieves to break into one
of their bookshops for £225 on an Internet auction site … more
Add a comment
It
comes as no surprise to me that the people who support Oxfam's crap bookshops
are prepared to shell out £225 for a brick. I wandered in to the Bath Oxfam bookshop,
shortly after it opened, and was delighted to note several regular customers of
the 50p box that John and I used to have outside our shop. The stunned expression
on their faces as they realised that the bargains that we and other local booksellers
had let them have were now being valued at 9.99, 19.99, 29.99, 39.99 etc etc etc
was a joy to behold. I didn't see any of them buy anything though. Presumably
the people who think Oxfam is a source of bargain books think that £225 is pretty
good value for a housebrick.
On the subject of Oxfam
(a pet hate, in case you hadn't guessed - and yes I can supply the evidence) readers
of this splendid site who shop in the Bristol vicinity can now vastly increase
their pleasure in bookbuying due to a splendid piece of serendipity in the Cotham
Hill area. I refer to Oxfam having decided to open their bookshop next to the
established and worthwhile Higher Octave Books (Kevan Fortey-Jones, nice fellow,
good stock, pays business rates, rent, wages, blah blah). Not only can you now
decline a £5 book offered at £10 in Oxfam but you can go next door to Kevan's
place and buy a £10 book for a fiver! Another fun tip is to hang around the Oxfam
cashdesk, which is next to the 'backroom' door, and listen to the 'manager' explaining
the mysteries of secondhand bookselling to the baffled foreign students who constitute
the 'experts' of tomorrow. Come back Richard Booth, all is forgiven! - Steve Liddle. Gritty
reality of the Brontes
A new film will show how the three literary sisters
created a world of romantic passions amid the cruel ordeals of life in 19th-century
Haworth … more
Add a comment | 
