30.06.07.
Kings of Mann manuscript is to return to the island
The Isle of Man’s
most significant medieval manuscript is to return to the island after a deal with
the British Library, which currently holds it. The Chronicles of the Kings of
Mann and the Isles will be displayed at the Manx Museum in Douglas from July 5
until December 2007 after a loan agreement was successfully reached with the library
... more Add
a comment Juilliard
launches website for manuscript collection
The Juilliard School has launched
a website containing high-resolution photographs of about 70% of the extensive
manuscript collection donated last year by board chairman Bruce Kovner. Approximately
8,000 pages of the manuscripts are now viewable on the site in striking detail
... more Add
a comment A
movable feast
From the moment I opened the book and released the first
magnificent pop-up, my fellow travellers - all adults - were transfixed. They
were astonished by the graceful action of the giant quetzalcoatlus, they applauded
the gnashing jaws of the reptile skeleton, and by the time we got to the flamboyantly
rampant sabre-toothed tiger, with its gruesome fangs, they were all shoving up
closer ... more Add
a comment Rare
gifts rain on Yale
The gift, worth $1.4 million, is one of the largest
the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library has received, putting Yale's Kipling
collection on par with those at Harvard and the University of Texas ... more Add
a comment Redevelopment
saves bookshop
Dave Robinson, owner of the G & A Book Exchange, has found
someone to take over the 43-year-old business just weeks before it was scheduled
to close for good ... more Add
a comment
28.06.07.
Czech documents added to UNESCO list
The two Czech entries are a collection
of medieval manuscripts dating from the Czech Reformation, which led to the foundation
of the Protestant church in the Czech Lands, and a collection of Russian, Ukrainian
and Belarussian émigré periodicals published between 1918 and 1945. It is described
as a unique collection of newspapers and journals published between the two world
wars by the first wave of Russian émigrés, who fled Bolshevik Russia and settled
throughout the world, including Czechoslovakia ... more Add
a comment Exhibition
of the ancient Indian epic 'The Book Of War'
Among the treasures of the
John Frederick Lewis Collection of the Free Library of Philadelphia's Rare Book
Department are twenty-five elaborately illustrated folios from a centuries-old
Mughal manuscript known as the Razmnama (literally, 'Book of War').
The
manuscript dates to around 1598-99, and was produced under the Muslim Mughal Dynasty,
which founded a kingdom in India in or during the early 16th century. Written
in Persian at the behest of the great Mughal Emperor Akbar, (reigned 1556 to 1605),
the Razmnama is an abridged translation of the Mahabharata, one of the great epics
of Hinduism.
Although the pages from the 1598-99 Razmnama
have been dispersed to collections around the world, they were once bound as a
single book whose folios numbered in the hundreds ... more Add
a comment Lost
'Good Earth' manuscript recovered
The FBI has recovered the long-lost
manuscript of Pearl S. Buck's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "The Good Earth,"
after the daughter of one of the author's former secretaries tried to put it up
for auction.
The 400-page manuscript turned up earlier
this month at the Samuel T. Freeman & Co. auction house in Philadelphia and officials
there notified investigators, federal officials said Wednesday ... more Add
a comment
27.06.07.
A rare treasure will soon be extinct
Heritage Book Shop, a West Hollywood
fixture prized by collectors of antiquarian volumes throughout the world, is closing
... more Add
a comment The
CIA has nothing on these guys
Meet the antiquarian book dealers. When
it comes to secrecy, the CIA has nothing on these guys, and with good reason.
The cutthroat race to liberate rare books, maps and other collectibles from the
cobwebbed corners of Central New York can make Valerie Plame's troubles sound
like an ice cream social ... more Add
a comment British
Library saves manuscript
The British Library has raised £635,000 to save
a rare 15th Century manuscript from being exported. The manuscript, called The
Wardington Hours, was sold to a German dealer at auction in December ... more Add
a comment Archive
reveals Britain's first domestic goddess
She was the original domestic
goddess, an elderly widow whose best-selling book on cookery, medicinal remedies
and household management defined the perfect home. Maria Rundell taught her readers
how to cook a goose, brew beer, make ink and cure baldness.
A
New System of Domestic Cookery was a publishing sensation in the early 1800s.
It sold half a million copies and conquered America, and its profits helped found
one of the Victorian era's most influential publishing empires ... more Add
a comment New
pictures of Anne Frank emerge
Anne Frank's cousin gave up custody yesterday
of thousands of letters, photographs and documents that archivists say will reveal
details about the background of the teenage diarist who became a symbol of the
Holocaust ... more Add
a comment
17.06.07.
No news today ...
My elderly mother has been taken into hospital, so no
news until I return from visiting her - hopefully towards the end of the week. Add
a comment
16.06.07.
Rushdie knighted in honours list
Salman Rushdie, who went into hiding
under threat of death after an Iranian fatwa, has been knighted by the Queen ...
more Add
a comment eBay
Exposed
eBay Exposed', a new book from a previously 'underground' eBay
auction seller provides compelling arguments to challenge just about every traditionally
accepted way of selling on eBay. The book is creating waves in the eBay community
for exposing why many eBay sellers give up, and for explaining a radical, unconventional
approach to profiting from eBay ... more Add
a comment Pages
of stolen Aurangzeb manuscript found
Police in India have recovered 19
of the 110 pages of a rare manuscript - authored by 17th century Mughal emperor
Aurangzeb and said to be worth Rs.10 million today - that was stolen from a Bihar
school library last year ... more Add
a comment The
case of the missing Gospel
If you have ever had trouble getting back a
book you have lent someone, then you will feel for William Strickland, who in
1809 thought he had lost one of the most remarkable books in the world.
This
was The Gospel of St John, which had been put in St Cuthbert's tomb after his
burial in 697. It is a beautifully written vellum manuscript, with the oldest
surviving leather binding in Europe. And in 1809 it was nowhere to be found ...
more Add
a comment
15.06.07.
Poet Dylan's former home up for auction
Fans of Dylan Thomas from across
the world are expected to show an interest when the poet’s former home goes under
the hammer next month.
Thomas and his wife, Caitlin,
moved into the Grade II listed house in Laugharne, Carmarthenshire, West Wales,
in 1938 when they were expecting their first child.
The
property, expected to fetch between £190,000 and £210,000 at auction
on July 11, was once likened to a doll’s house by the couple’s friend,
painter Augustus John, because it is so tall and thin ... more Add
a comment
14.06.07.
'Potter' mania spells losses for booksellers
"Everywhere you go there
is huge, ridiculous discounting by the chains," said Graham Marks, children's
editor at the British-based trade magazine Publishing News. "They are literally
not going to make one penny out of the book. It is stupid -- just throwing money
away. . . . The world has gone mad" ... more Add
a comment Resident
raps library bosses
Hampshire library chiefs came under fire at a county
council select committee for spending only 6p of every £1 of their budget on books.
Amanda Field, a Gosport resident and former company boss, said no business could
succeed if it spent 94 per cent of its budget on overheads and only six per cent
on stock ... more Add
a comment Kelly
gang back in the hands of police
Australia - One of the most important
documents in Victoria’s policing history has been restored and returned to the
Victoria Police Museum.
In a tribute to the police
who were killed at Stringybark Creek hunting the Kelly Gang in 1878, two slightly
different versions of a manuscript consisting of 95 pages of recollections and
personal accounts, have been repaired by museum conservators to ensure they are
preserved for many years to come ... more Add
a comment Serious
book collecting at Hay
It's a crime! blog has an interesting report of
Neil Pearson & Rick Gekoski's talk about book collecting at the Hay Festival ...
more Add
a comment
13.06.07.
So you think you've had a bad day
A Bangladeshi bookshop worker dries
books damaged by monsoon rain in Chittagong, south-east of the capital, Dhaka
... picture Add
a comment MySpace
the site of the living dead
Long-dead authors, playwrights and philosophers
have also been given the MySpace makeover. Shakespeare's current address is Elsinore
Castle, Denmark (he'd like to meet Kenneth Branagh) and Nietzsche counts Socrates
as a friend ... more Add
a comment Artwork
released for the deluxe edition Potter
Today the artwork for the jacket
was released for a limited edition Sorcerers Stone, with only 100,000 copies being
printed. This edition will be sold for $65 and will have more pages and unique
art ... more Add
a comment
12.06.07.
Rare Beatles concert poster at auction
ItsOnlyRockNRoll.com will be selling
a previously undiscovered 1966 Beatles Concert Poster from Busch Stadium in St.
Louis MO at auction July 3 in an online/in-person sale at the Las Vegas Fest for
Beatles Fans ... more Add
a comment The
sacred history
The British Library's exhibition of religious manuscripts
serves as a timely reminder of the teachings the three major faiths share ...
more Add
a comment Leonardo
da Vinci exhibition opens in Dublin
The Chester Beatty Library in Dublin
is among a handful of world museums chosen to display the Codex Leicester notebook,
written by the Italian thinker in the early 16th century. A public programme of
lectures and other education activities will accompany the exhibition ... more Add
a comment Learning
more about ABE
Following ABE's anouncement of the results of their latest
survey, Michael Lieberman suggests that a better title for their press release
might have been Research
Reveals AbeBooks Driving Booksellers Crazy ... more Add
a comment
11.06.07.
Learning more about online booksellers
A new survey reveals a little more
about the average online bookseller, at least the ones who use Abebooks.com. Out
of nearly 2,000 online booksellers in the United States who were polled by Abebooks,
79 percent are over the age of 45, and 90.7 percent had jobs in other professions
before becoming booksellers ... more Add
a comment
Get your book on shelves via the web
Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller
are among the world’s most respected authors, but for a while they had a hard
time finding a publisher. Rather than seek a mainstream outlet for racy novels
such as The Black Book and Tropic of Cancer they used the Obelisk Press, a French
publishing house started by Jack Kahane to print his own novel.
That
was the 1930s. Now, a young Henry Miller could use new Internet companies like
Blurb.com, i-Universe, Lulu.com or Xlibris to print his book and even sell it
through their online stores ... more Add
a comment Prisons
ban books over fear of radicals
Inmates at the federal prison camp in
Otisville, N.Y., were stunned by what they saw at the chapel library on Memorial
Day - hundreds of books had disappeared from the shelves.
The
removal of the books is occurring nationwide, part of a long-delayed, post-Sept.
11 federal directive intended to prevent radical religious texts, specifically
Islamic ones, from falling into the hands of violent inmates ... more Add
a comment
08.06.07.
Northumberland Bestiary unveiled in LA
An important work of English art
has gone on public display for the first time in 16 years - but anyone hoping
to see the 13th-century illuminated manuscript, which left the UK in 1990, will
have to visit the Getty Centre in Los Angeles ... more Add
a comment Centre
to help preserve monastery's collection
Archbishop Damianos of Sinai,
the Abbot of St Catherine's Monastery in Egypt, has thanked the Juma Al Majid
Centre for Culture and Heritage in Dubai for saying it will assist in taking copies
of the monastery's well-known collection of manuscripts ... more Add
a comment Hunt
resumes for vanished Jewish library
A passionate quest for the Rome Synagogue
library stolen by German troops during World War, a story which could easily become
the script for an Indiana Jones blockbuster, might at last be on the right path.
And the 7,000 books, manuscripts and rare, centuries-old documents, which formed
the second most important Jewish library in the world after the one in Jerusalem,
could be lying somewhere in the immense territory of Russia ... more Add
a comment
07.06.07.
Drif gets literary life
According to Mark Sanderson in today's Telegraph,
Iain Sinclair -- whose last book "City of Disappearances" featured a number of
pieces by and about Drif -- is to make the notorious book dealer the subject of
his next book ... more Add
a comment Bookseller
rejects offer
Shah Mohammed Rais, the real bookseller of Kabul, has turned
down a 'final' offer from bestselling author Åsne Seierstad and her publisher
Cappelens, and will now sue ... more Add
a comment Revealing
Brooke letters fail to sell
The words are full of passion and love. But,
unswayed by emotion, no buyer was willing yesterday to pay a reserve price of
about £120,000 for more than 80 letters written by the poet Rupert Brooke in the
last two years of his life ... more Add
a comment Robot
scans ancient manuscript in 3-D
After a thousand years stuck on a dusty
library shelf, the oldest copy of Homer's Iliad is about to go into digital circulation.
A team of scholars traveled to a medieval library in Venice to create an ultra-precise
3-D copy of the ancient manuscript -- complete with every wrinkle, rip and imperfection
-- using a laser scanner mounted on a robot arm ... more Add
a comment
06.06.07.
Turning public transit into a library
The London Book Project wants London
commuters to read literature. Most especially, they want London commuters to read
literature rather than those crap-filled "free" dailies that are given away in
the subway systems of most urban centers ... more Add
a comment Polish
girl's Holocaust diary unveiled after 60 years
More than 60 years after
it was written, the diary of a 14-year-old Jewish girl who is being described
as the 'Polish Anne Frank' has been unveiled by Israel's Holocaust museum ...
more Add
a comment Preserving
Library of Congress' treasures
The Library of Congress has no shortage
of reading materials with more than 134 million items in its collection. This
summer, a Florida State University chemist will use his knowledge of cellulose,
a key component of paper, to help the world’s largest library find ways of preserving
its vast treasure trove of books, manuscripts, maps, newspapers and pamphlets,
many of which are irreplaceable ... more Add
a comment Portrait
of the old man as a copyright miser
On Friday, a San Jose federal judge
awarded attorney fees to a Stanford University English professor whose suit against
the estate of James Joyce was settled recently. The awarding of fees in an out-of-court
settlement, while not typical, is not unprecedented; and since settled cases don't
establish legal precedent, this case is unlikely to become required reading at
any law schools. But Carol Loeb Shloss' suit against the Joyce estate sheds light
on an ironic, and maybe inevitable, trend in intellectual property: As copyright
becomes harder to defend, many copyright holders are becoming less realistic about
the limitations of their ownership ... more Add
a comment
05.06.07.
Israel Museum unveils rare Old Testament manuscript
A rare Old Testament
manuscript some 1,300 years old is finally on display for the first time, after
making its way from a secret room in a Cairo synagogue to the hands of an American
collector.
The manuscript, containing the "Song of
the Sea" section of the Old Testament's Book of Exodus and dating to around the
7th century A.D., comes from what scholars call the "silent era" -- a span of
600 years between the third and eighth centuries from which almost no Hebrew manuscripts
survive ... more Add
a comment Rare
Raffles collection bought by Singapore businessman
Two rare collections
of Singapore founder Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles' artifacts, including a lock
of his hair, were bought by a Singaporean businessman, according to a report Sunday
... more Add
a comment Solzhenitsyn
to receive Russian prize for humanities
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel
Prize-winning Russian author who turned the world's attention to the horrors of
the Soviet gulag system, was announced Tuesday as the recipient of one of Russia's
most esteemed government-connected honours ... more Add
a comment
04.06.07.
Victoria Bible part of prestigious auction
The Bible is believed to be
one of only 50 copies of the very valuable so-called "He" edition of the 1611
King James Bible. A typographical error appears in verse five of chapter three
of the Book of Ruth -- the word "He" is used where "She" should have been used
... more Add
a comment 1984
'is definitive book of the 20th century'
Paranoia, propaganda and a state
of perpetual war are the defining characteristics of the last century, according
to the results of a national survey announced at the Hay festival on Saturday
... more Add
a comment The
Gaul of it! Asterix too French, says watchdog
He is the moustached crusader
bravely defending the customs of ancient Gaul from stereotyped foreigners - from
Brits who drink hot water with a dash of milk to the militaristic Germans and
the short Portuguese. He has ribbed the Corsicans for being work-shy, violent
and producing explosively smelly cheese, and Normandy villagers for lathering
their food with cream. But now it seems that Asterix the Gaul is just too much
of a "Gaul" for modern, multicultural France ... more Add
a comment Rare
botanical book up for auction
PBA Galleries is offering a set of Johann
Wilhelm Weinmann's Duidelyke Vertoning, also known as the Phytanthoza Iconographia.
The four-volume set was published in Amsterdam from 1736 to 1748 and contained
some 1,025 plates of plants, many of them color mezzotints and considered the
first successful use of color printing in a botanical work ... more Add
a comment
01.06.07.
Bookseller in court
Author Åsne Seierstad and Shah Mohammed Rais, the
eponymous bookseller of Kabul, continue their disagreement in court on Thursday
... more Add
a comment Charity's
regret over dumped books
Boxes of books are being dumped by Oxfordshire
libraries without being offered to charities. Age Concern said some of the unwanted
titles could be sold in its new city bookshop and others could simply be given
away to elderly residents or old people's homes ... more Add
a comment Libraries
in the desert
Ancient and mystical as Timbuktu may be, these days it leaves
many a traveller hot and even a bit disappointed. Yet it still houses some amazing
treasures. Among them, in old family homes, is a wondrous literary past that was
in danger of disappearing but may now, with luck, be preserved ... more Add
a comment State
buys collection of war memorabilia
A major collection of War of Independence
memorabilia has been purchased by the Government. Minister for the Arts John O'Donoghue
paid €3.5 million for the Stanley Collection which will be housed in the National
Museum. The 500 items, assembled by Easter 1916 'printer' Joe Stanley will give
scholars and history buffs an unprecedented insight into Ireland's struggle for
independence ... more Add
a comment Tanner"s
New American Atlas theft arrest
Rebecca Streeter Chen was arrested today
on charges that she stole a rare book from 1823 from the Rockland County Historical
Society in April. Chen surrendered to the police about 11:30 a.m. on a charge
of second-degree grand larceny. The book is valued at more than $60,000 ... more Add
a comment | 
