31.01.07.
Biblioporn
Back late, and with only time for a quick peek into the Bibliophile
Bullpen, I had to pass on J's link to The
Book Clasps and Book Furniture website. Although on reflection, perhaps more
fetishistic than pornographic. Add a comment
27.01.07.
No
News today...
TheBookGuide is away for a few days but he and the news will
return on January 31st. However, desperate news junkies can find links to 1,000's
of book related stories and articles in our archives
26.01.07.
Hollywood ephemera fetches big bucks
A contract signed by John Steinbeck
handing over movie rights to 20th Century Fox for his classic book, "The Grapes
of Wrath," sold for $24,000. It was expected to sell for $4,000 to $6,000 ...
more Add
a comment Ancient
papyrus donated to the Vatican
Benedict XVI received as a gift to the Holy
See one of the most ancient manuscripts of the Gospels, an artifact that demonstrates
Scripture's historical actuality. The Pope was given the 14-15 Bodmer Papyrus
(P75), dated between A.D. 175 and 225, on Monday by Frank Hanna and his family,
of the United States ... more Add
a comment Exhibition
traces production of manuscripts
Throughout the Middle Ages, manuscript
illumination was a major art form in France, a favorite of French kings and high-ranking
nobles. This exhibition of 25 manuscripts and leaves from the J. Paul Getty Museum's
collection, including recent acquisitions, highlights the achievement of French
painting in books from the 800s to the 1500s ... more Add
a comment Plan
to transport manuscripts worries specialists
Eleven activists of art and
science have sent an open letter to the President Robert Kocharyan with an appeal
to ban sending valued illustrated Armenian parchment manuscripts for exhibition
in France ... more Add
a comment
25.01.07.
40th California International Antiquarian Book Fair
On February 16th over
200 rare booksellers from the US and around the world will congregate in California
to participate in the country's largest rare book fair ... more Add
a comment More
U.S. schools rejecting controversial book
An autobiographical novel for
children by a Japanese-American author claiming that she witnessed wartime atrocities
committed by Koreans is now being rejected by an increasing number of schools
in the United States as Korean-Americans challenge the authenticity of her story
... more Add
a comment Beatnik
Chicks, Poets & Peyote
Take a spoonful of mysticism, a cup of assemblage,
and mix with a pinch of beat-era verse. Bake in the California sun for half a
century, and you might get the flavor of ``Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and
His Circle,'' a heady time-capsule of quaint left-coast ephemera completing a
two-year, cross-country tour at the Grey Art Gallery on New York's Washington
Square ... more Add
a comment The
world’s most dangerous bookstore
Enduring legends are borne of disbelief:
Scotland has its Loch Ness Monster, the Himalays its Abominable Snowman, and Oklahoma
City, not to be outdone, has the Bookman ... more (Thanks
to Lynn Wienck who posted the link on the BookFinder
Insider mailing list.) Add a comment
24.01.07.
'The used car lot of the book world'
The used book world is like a small
fraternity, and the Chicago Remainder Book Expo is the yearly reunion. More than
1,100 book buyers thumb through stacks that represent millions of books sitting
in warehouses. Despite the plastic name tags around their necks, there seem to
be no strangers here -- even among the international book dealers from Germany,
Australia and England, Russia and Ukraine ... more Add
a comment Cortés
map finds its way back to Yale
Even after E. Forbes Smiley III confessed
to stealing a similar Cortés map from Harvard, Yale's map failed to surface. Stubbornly,
Yale posted a picture online, and last month, a map dealer who had purchased the
map from Smiley came forward and returned it ... more Add
a comment Harry
Potter charity books stolen
Thousands of Harry Potter books written for
Comic Relief which had been due to be recycled have been stolen. Fantastic Beasts
and Quidditch Through the Ages were written by JK Rowling to raise funds for the
BBC Red Nose Day charity appeal. They were contained in red-coloured plastic satchels
which police believe may now be offered for sale ... more Add
a comment
23.01.07.
Treasure trove of old photos
The latest donation to Sunderland Antiquarian
Society provides a snapshot in time of life in 1877 ... more Add
a comment Literature
without books
As Google sets to work making vast numbers of books available
to download in their entirety, Vic Keegan considers the prospects for online books
... more Add
a comment Supreme
Court rules against bookseller
The Supreme Court of Canada ruled Friday
that the government does not have to pay the legal tab for a Vancouver bookstore’s
epic legal fight against Canada Customs for blocking gay and lesbian publications
at the border ... more Add
a comment Victorian
comic's gag book found
The discovery of a Victorian comedian's private
joke book is providing a rare insight into the gags being told to audiences 150
years ago ... more Add
a comment
22.01.07.
Could
this be the final chapter in the life of the book
The world's libraries
are heading for the internet, says Bryan Appleyard. If this means we lose touch
with real books and treat their content as 'information', civilisation is the
loser ... more Add
a comment Bookshop's
happy ending
By June, the now-bookless bookshop and its creaky floorboards
will be resurrected as a library-run, library-funded bookstore and young adult
information station ... more Add
a comment Audubon
brushes a rare discovery
The little tufts are paint brushes said to have
been used by John James Audubon, the artist and naturalist whose name has been
adopted by birdwatchers around the world and whose memory is recalled in the names
of businesses, roads, public art and in other ways in the Henderson area ... more Add
a comment £11m
lifeline for Burns Museum
Burns enthusiasts said the project was "long
overdue." Peter Westwood, editor of the official Burns Chronicle, said: "The old
Burns Cottage Museum was getting pretty rundown and needs to be replaced with
an imaginative project that links all the Burns sites together ... more Add
a comment
19.01.07.
A
house built around a tower of books
When Nader Tehrani and Monica Ponce
de Leon, partners at Office dA, an architecture firm in Boston, were asked to
renovate a five-story town house in the Back Bay neighborhood, they faced a singular
design challenge. The house belonged to Elmar Seibel, now 54, a dealer in rare
books on art and architecture, and his wife, Azita Bina-Seibel, 46, a chef and
restaurateur ... more Add
a comment Harold
Pinter receives top French honour
British playwright and Nobel laureate
Harold Pinter, whose works include The Birthday Party and The Homecoming, was
yesterday awarded the Legion d'Honneur by the French prime minister, Dominic de
Villepin ... more Add
a comment Literary
prize bows to pressure over racial discrimination
The Decibel Penguin prize,
an Arts Council initiative awarded to writers of "Asian, African and Caribbean
background," has been forced to change its entry criteria after an intervention
by the Commission for Racial Equality ... more Add
a comment Methodist
clergy oppose Bush library
A group of Methodist ministers has launched
an online petition opposing the George W. Bush presidential library being built
at Southern Methodist University. The petition on the Web site, www.protectSMU.com,
says linking Bush's presidency with a university bearing the Methodist name is
"utterly inappropriate" ... more Add
a comment
18.01.07.
Freud
sketches expected to fetch £100,000 at auction
The artworks, which were
created between 1982 and 2000, include three portrait sketches and a still-life
study, The Egyptian Book, which are expected to sell between £7000 and £18,000
each ... more Add
a comment Chazen
curator tracks down rare Japanese print
Officials the University of Wisconsin's
Elvehjem Museum of Art, now called the Chazen Museum of Art, had been asked by
curators in Japan if they could borrow some of the UW museum's 2,000 woodblock
prints by the Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) for a show of his
art work in his native Japan ... more Add
a comment Library
book thief was the literature professor
The mystery thief who pillaged
antique books from Bonn University Library and replaced them with worthless copies
turned out to be a professor of literature, a German court heard Wednesday ...
more Add
a comment The
10 most expensive books of 2006
The list for 2006 includes a surprising
number of atlases -- five, including three versions of works by Ptolemy ... more Add
a comment
17.01.07.
France
Recovers Stolen Manuscript from US
France has recovered an invaluable 13th-century
Hebrew manuscript of the Bible that was stolen from its National Library in Paris.
... more Add
a comment ‘Year
of Vonnegut’ honors iconic author
‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ author being celebrated
by Indianapolis hometown ... more Add
a comment Reclusive
author attends 'Mockingbird' play
The 80-year-old Harper Lee was invited
as a special guest to be honored by education and arts officials. Lee did not
address the crowd but later talked to students at a private reception. The author,
who rarely speaks publicly but does occasionally meet with students, has not published
a book besides 1960's "Mockingbird" ... more Add
a comment Library
visitors up despite fall in spending
Overall, there has been a 4% increase
in the total number of books added to stock, despite a 2% reduction in spending.
The Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, the government agency which oversees
libraries in the UK, said this has been achieved through more effective spending
... more Add
a comment
16.01.07.
Harry
Potter and the dwindling booksellers
A quarter of independent booksellers
say that they will not stock the final Harry Potter book when it is published
because they claim they cannot make a profit on it ... more Add
a comment Hours
lost result in books found
I had to sneeze. The dust dancing off a million
book jackets waltzed up my nostrils, tickling that magic nerve in the center of
my head, triggering a violent, head-banging sinus fit. The stack of yellowed paperbacks
cradled against my chest flew from my control, onto the hardwood floor like playing
cards passed out in a game of 52-pickup ... more Add
a comment At
last, Heaney takes poetry's biggest prize
Seamus Heaney has finally laid
claim to one of the few poetry titles thus far to elude him. It was announced
yesterday that the Nobel laureate has won the 2006 TS Eliot prize with his latest
collection, District and Circle ... more Add
a comment CIA
stole Dr Zhivago from Malta
CIA and British Intelligence agents forced
a passenger plane to land in Malta in 1957, to go on board and steal the manuscript
of the banned Russian novel ‘Dr Zhivago’, which was subsequently published and
awarded a Nobel Prize ... more Add
a comment
15.01.07.
Buyers
of rare books rare in this area
Despite the world's love affair with electronic
gadgets, rare book collecting is hanging on, according to international rare book
dealer Charles Agvent. But there could be trouble ahead, said Agvent, who lives
in Pennsylvania Dutch country ... more Add
a comment 'Illuminatus'
trilogy author dead at 74
Robert Anton Wilson, co-author of the cult classic
"The Illuminatus! Trilogy," a science-fiction series about a secret global society,
has died. He was 74 ... more Add
a comment Handwritten
Thatcher note up for auction
A handwritten note from Lady Thatcher is set
to go under the hammer, along with a signed copy of her memoirs. The note, sent
in 1993, turned up at Oxfam's Nicolson Street bookshop inside a first edition
of "The Downing Street Years" ... more Add
a comment Books
seized from public library
Police used a warrant at the Portales Public
Library to seize magic and witchcraft books that had been checked out by a woman
who is charged in the January 4th death of her 6-year-old son ... more Add
a comment
12.01.07.
William
Blake's 'Tyger' notebook on show
The British Library has put on display
the notebook in which William Blake wrote one of his most famous poems, "The Tyger,"
to mark the 250th anniversary year of the English poet and artist's birth ...
more Add
a comment 'Oldest
accurate map of Scotland' sold for £22,000
An ancient map of Scotland has
fetched more than £22,000 at an auction in Edinburgh. The 16th century "Nicolay
Rutter", which is said to be the oldest accurate chart of the country, was sold
to an unnamed London dealer, whom experts said had acquired an "exciting and important
piece of Scottish history" ... more Add
a comment Regional
archives vital to preserve diverse heritage
With the history of much of
India's diverse cultural heritage written in regional languages, experts have
emphasised the need to set up archives in different parts of the country to preserve
these records ... more Add
a comment Rare
collection from out of Africa to go under the hammer
A collection of rare
and out of print books on Africa is expected to raise £10,000 when it goes under
the hammer ... more Add
a comment
11.01.07.
Nixon
library's Elvis exhibit has fans all shook up
A photo of a cloaked and
bejeweled Elvis Presley solemnly shaking hands with a grim-faced President Nixon
remains the No. 1 requested document from the National Archives, nearly four decades
after the secret meeting took place on Dec. 21, 1970. Now, on what would be Elvis's
72nd birthday, the Richard Nixon Presidential Library & Birthplace is giving the
curious public a good, long look at the relics of the coming together of The King
and The President - and it's got Elvis fans all shook up ... more Add
a comment Beatles'
"Guitar Gently Weeps" lyric sheet for sale
The original handwritten lyrics
to Beatles classic "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" will go on sale in the United
States on Monday and are expected to fetch up to 400,000 pounds ($780,000) ...
more Add
a comment eBay
book trader facing theft accusation
The publisher HarperCollins is suing
an internet trader for £80,000, alleging he has sold thousands of books stolen
from its distribution centre. Stewart Young insists he buys goods legitimately
to sell for a profit on eBay, and he is asking a judge to throw out the damages
action against him. (Thanks to Clive Keeble for the link) ... more Add
a comment Mass
reading project tackles the legacy of slavery
More than 50,000 free copies
of Andrea Levy's novel, Small Island, will be distributed today in four British
cities in a bid to encourage reading, discussion and possibly argument ... more Add
a comment
10.01.07.
Only
in America ...
Always a pleasure to give J Godsey's idiosyncratic Bibliophile
Bullpen blog a plug. Today she has stories about a British historian arrested
for Jaywalking, and a woman suspected of stealing a book being shot at by a security
guard. Oh, and there's also the naked bookshop owner ... more Add
a comment Nostalgia
feeds fascination with culinary tomes
More than 1,000 copies of out-of-print,
second-hand and hard-to-find cookbooks, some bearing publishing dates as far back
as the early 1830s, sit on the shelves of the Ben Franklin Bookstore. ... more Add
a comment Costa
Book Awards: winners revealed
Two books that were repeatedly turned down
by publishers and a taboo-breaking children's novel about incest have won top
honours in one of Britain's most prestigious literary awards - the Costa (formerly
the Whitbread) Book Awards ... more Add
a comment A
£4,000 book for the designer coffee table
The publishing business has got
a fashion label - and its name is Gloria. The two-year-old publisher is about
as niche as they come. Its first book, a 12kg tome on the footballing icon Pele,
came out last summer and its plans are for just one title a year ... more Add
a comment
09.01.07.
Driff
... "nearly steals the book"
Driff was a book dealer -- a specialist bookfinder
and trade "runner" -- who found fame when he self-published an obsessively thorough
guide to Britain’s secondhand bookshops. It was a comic tour de force, and in
its day extremely useful, before the shops themselves began to disappear en masse.
With his loud voice and louder clothing, Driff was a hard man to miss, until the
day came when he was seen no more.
There were Lucan-style
sightings, along with rumours of Eastern Europe and India and even far-flung bits
of London, but -- particularly since he was a troubled character who had been
selling tickets to his own suicide, and collecting books on death -- many people
suspected the worst. He is, however, triumphantly alive; this book contains the
proof ... more
(Thanks
to Nigel Burwood for the link.) Add a comment Months
to go, but Harry's last outing still outsells them all
The seventh and
final instalment in the Harry Potter series may not have been published yet, but
fans are so desperate to find out what happens to the boy wizard that the book
has already outsold all the other best-sellers on Amazon's book chart put together
... more Add
a comment Sobol
Award canceled due to lack of interest
The Sobol Award, a controversial
new literary contest that offered agentless writers a $100,000 first prize and
a contract with Simon & Schuster for the top three winners, has been canceled
... more Add
a comment Emory
acquires Ted Hughes' love letters
Love letters written by Sylvia Plath's
husband to his mistress have been acquired by Emory University's Robert W. Woodruff
Library ... more Add
a comment
08.01.07.
Library
book returned after 47 years
In a tale that resembles a classic episode
of "Seinfeld," Robert Nuranen last week handed his local librarian a book he'd
checked out for a ninth-grade assignment -- along with a $171.32 check for 47
years' worth of late fees ... more Add
a comment Disgraced
author aims to defend Judas
Author Jeffrey Archer, who was cast out of
Britain's Conservative Party after being jailed on perjury charges, is coming
to the defense of another noted black sheep -- Judas Iscariot ... more Add
a comment 'On
the Road' manuscript on display in Denver
The scroll, which is typically
displayed for free at public libraries, has visited eight cities, including Rome.
It was the most well-attended attraction in the San Francisco Public Library's
history ... more Add
a comment Novel
idea to give away free books
A total of 25,000 free copies of Robert Louis
Stevenson's Kidnapped are to be distributed throughout Edinburgh next month. The
books will be handed out free to everyone from coffee shops to schools and libraries
in a bid to get as many people as possible reading the same book at the same time
... more Add
a comment
06.01.07.
Borrowing
books
One of the great social inventions of the past few centuries has
been the public lending library. Although conventional wisdom assigns this innovation
to the creative genius of Benjamin Franklin, the idea undoubtedly has much earlier
antecedents ... more Add
a comment Historic
sea map set for auction
A historic map of Scotland is to be auctioned in
Edinburgh. The Nicolay Rutter is said to be the oldest accurate chart of the country.
It was made from a voyage King James V took around Scotland in 1540 ... more Add
a comment 329-year-old
cook book discovered
A cookery book written by the country's first celebrity
chef 329 years ago is up for sale. "How to Boil a Pike in City Fashion" and "A
la Mode Ways of Dressing the Head of Any Beast" are among some of the other culinary
tips dished out by 17th century cook Robert May ... more Add
a comment
05.01.07.
Currier
& Ives - American idealists
The Museum of Fine Arts in Springfield will
present the panel discussion "Currier & Ives: Visions of America" Sunday at 2
p.m. in the museum's Davis Auditorium. The panelists will discuss how the ideals
of liberty and justice were experienced by African-Americans, women, American
Indians and the working class during the 19th century and how those experiences
compared with the American mythology reflected in Currier & Ives prints ... more Add
a comment Miss
Potter
Beatrix Potter has enchanted generations of children with the characters
she brought to life in the pages of her stories, yet she kept her own life very
much away from the public glare. The film, Miss Potter
has been coined as a light romance, but it is far deeper and more substantial
than that. It is a comment on an oppressive society, where to succeed, a woman
has to be exceptionally out of the norm ... more Add
a comment Comic
Book Collectors; Nerdy Geeks or Shrewd Investors?
When one says, yeah,
I collect comic books, what is the general public response? Oh no, a slightly
off the wall geek. Here is someone who has lost touch with reality. Or someone
that is in his or her own little world ... more Add
a comment Floating
book fair arrives in Libya
The floating book fair has 600,000 titles in
various disciplines including dictionaries, medical sciences, social sciences,
computer, children books and stories.
It aims at promoting
cultural exchanges to underline contacts among peoples and emphasize the principle
of volunteer work and work for others and develop the spirit of providence among
world youth ... more Add
a comment
04.01.07.
OED
asks for the full monty
Did you go dogging before 1993? If the answer is
yes, the Oxford English Dictionary would like to hear from you ... more Add
a comment Chapter
and verse on vegetarianism
Jim Whitten's book collection started when he
met vegetarian scholar Rynn Berry in New York ... more Add
a comment Congressman
to be sworn in with rare Quran
First Muslim elected to Congress to use
Quran once owned by Thomas Jefferson ... more Add
a comment Rare
British India documents surface
Documents and papers shown to the BBC by
a relation of the commander of British troops during the 1897 siege of Malakand
- in what is now Pakistan's North West Frontier Province - provide a fascinating
new insight into the struggle for South Asia ... more Add
a comment
03.01.07.
Timbuktu
Manuscripts
Tens of thousands of manuscripts dating back to 13th century
west Africa have been found in Timbuktu, Mali. Michael Gomez, chair of New York
University's history department, talks with Farai Chideya about efforts to gather
and preserve the artifacts ... more Add
a comment Statue
of Ukrainian poet stolen from Canadian park
The theft of a two-tonne statue
in an Oakville park marks the end of an era for Toronto's Ukrainian community.
The bronze statue of Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko was reported missing on Saturday
after serving as a prominent landmark for more than half a century ... more Add
a comment New
IOBA Standard
Always worth a read, the latest issue of the Independent
Online Booksellers Association journal is now available ... more Add
a comment King
crowned top of guilty reads
Stephen King has beaten JK Rowling to the title
of the UK's favourite literary guilty pleasure, according to a survey carried
out on behalf of the Costa Book Awards ... more Add
a comment
02.01.07.
Restoring
author Ken Kesey's bus
Dreams of getting author Ken Kesey's original psychedelic
bus, Furthur, back on the road again have hit a pothole. The Kesey family is looking
for a new sponsor to finance restoration work and a TV documentary after breaking
things off with Hollywood restaurant owner David Houston, who had hoped to raise
$100,000 to restore the bus made famous in Tom Wolfe's 1968 book, The Electric
Kool-Aid Acid Test ... more Add
a comment Christmas
came early for sports memorabilia auctioneers
Recent sports memorabilia
auction results are proving baseball cards are far from dead. Several major auction
houses held events just before the holiday shopping season and brought in millions
of dollars for some rare and high grade cards, game-used equipment and other collectibles
... more Add
a comment Child
labourers bound in despair
Ten-year old Tara Mia arrived in Dhaka from
Nagarpur in Tangail 15 days ago to work as a trainee in one of the bookbinding
shops in Banglabazar. He starts work at 7 in the morning and continues until 10:00pm.
Apart from three meal breaks he has no time to spare. Tara Mia has never been
to school ... more Add
a comment 2.5m
digital books on one £25,000 machine
A machine that electronically stores
2.5 million books that can then be printed and bound in less than seven minutes
is about to be launched. It prints in any language and has an upper limit of 550
pages. The 'Espresso' will be launched first in several US libraries. The company
behind the project - On Demand Books - predicts that, within five years, it will
be able to reproduce every book ever published ... more Add
a comment
01.01.07.
UK
mail service readies extra trucks for Potter book
Britain's mail service
is conferring with retailers and renting out hundreds of extra trucks in anticipation
of the launch of the seventh -- and final -- installment of J.K. Rowling's Harry
Potter series ... more Add
a comment Auction
sites flooded with Ford memorabilia
While Grand Rapids and the American
nation prepares for a solemn, dignified remembrance of former President Gerald
R. Ford over the next few days, on the Internet auction sites, it's anything goes
... more Add
a comment Second
act for books
Altering books -- taking a used book and turning it into
a piece of art by cutting, slicing, stamping and painting -- has a growing following
in the craft and art worlds. Craft enthusiasts looking for a new challenge, and
professional artists looking to experiment with mixed media, are recycling old
and unwanted books into new art ... more Add
a comment No
telling what might pop out of these books
Today, you can find pop-up books
on everything from the alphabet to Alfred Hitchcock, from Bible stories to bondage,
from Kwanzaa to Kama Sutra, from Smurfs to Stonehenge ... more Add
a comment Ancient
chess strategy guide found
A study of the game of chess by Renaissance
mathematician Luca Pacioli has been discovered in northern Italy after it was
feared lost ... more Add
a comment 300
year old book shows way to new medicine
A few years ago, Eric Buenz came
across a 17th-century book on herbal medicine. And he wondered if its ancient
folk wisdom could withstand a little scientific scrutiny. So Buenz, then a graduate
student at the Mayo Clinic, and a colleague decided to test a tree extract that
the book claimed could cure diarrhea. What they found was that the potion, made
from the nuts of the atun tree, works a lot like an antibiotic, killing various
types of bacteria ... more Add
a comment On
the trail of pilfered history
With the market in stolen historical documents
hotter than ever, federal investigators launch an operation to retrieve what belongs
to the US government ... more Add
a comment | 
