30.04.05
Inflammatory behaviour. Shaun
Bythell, the 34-year-old proprietor of The Bookshop in Wigtown in Galloway, is
an affable man, who looks a little like the shambling television chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s
long-lost twin. Ordinarily, he is not the type to cause offence. Yet soon he will
risk the wrath of his neighbours in this small town on Scotland’s south-west tip,
when he holds a public bonfire of old and unread books...more
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30.04.05
Ancient manuscript discovery has 'Da Vinci Code'
touch. An ancient
document likened to something which could have been featured in best-selling novel
The Da Vinci Code was being analysed at a top auction house for its significance
today. The manuscript, believed to date from the 17th century, contains biographical
details of every person in the Bible...more
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30.04.05
Bible destined for America?
The bible of famous Rye author Henry James has turned up in the town - but it
could soon be destined for America...more
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30.04.05
Book a limited edition fortune. In
an attempt to cash in on the demand from collectors, publishers are selling deluxe
versions of new novels in mainstream bookshops. Some of these signed and numbered
hardbacks have trebled in price within months of going on sale...more
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29.04.05
Child murder novel on medal list. A
novel inspired by the murder of toddler James Bulger is among the shortlisted
books for the Carnegie Medal for children's literature. Anne Cassidy's Looking
for JJ tells the story of a 10-year-old girl jailed for killing another child,
and her subsequent release with a new identity...more
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29.04.05
Parent arrested protesting gay kids' book.
Police arrested the
father of a six year old boy after he refused to leave a Lexington, Massachusetts
school where he was protesting against a children's' book with gay characters...more
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29.04.05
Marlon Brando's personal items up for auction in
New York. Dozens
of the late US movie star Marlon Brando's personal effects will be auctioned on
June 30 in New York, Christie's said Thursday, announcing it as the most high
profile sale since Marilyn Monroe property was auctioned in 1999...more
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29.04.05
Used bookstores find their niche. Four
Iowa City used bookshops -- Haunted Bookshop, Northside Book Market, Murphy-Brookfield
Books and The Book Shop -- have a loose affiliation. The owners refer customers
to each other, share advice and promote themselves together...more
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29.04.05
Dawson's Book Shop. Los
Angeles - If you’re looking for a rare or out-of-print book - maybe something
on citrus growing from the 17th century, cowboy artists or adventures of a ‘49er
- Dawson’s Book Shop is the place to go. Located on a quiet stretch of Larchmont
Blvd., the third-generation run store opened 100 years ago last month...more
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28.04.05
Booktown's shock delay. The
launch of Atherstone Booktown, which was due to take place on May 14, has been
delayed...more
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28.04.05
Diaries of Ronald Reagan to be published. "When
Ronnie became president, he wanted to write it all down so we could remember these
special times"...more
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28.04.05
Auction sells ornate Secret History for high price.
Eighteen different versions of The Secret History of the Mongols, made by Monkhiin
Useg company, were auctioned last week last week in the State Central Library.
The most precious one had a leather cover decorated with silver, turquoise and
other precious stones. The book, with pages made of aromatic paper, color illustrations
and a case made of cedar, was sold for Tg800,000. Another ornate version of the
historic book was sold for Tg400,000...more
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28.04.05
A Short History of the Chinese Restaurant.
"Have You Eaten Yet?," the wonderful Chinese restaurants exhibit now on view at
New York's Museum of Chinese in the Americas, takes a Babel of ephemera and makes
it speak...more
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28.04.05
Hay visitors asked to donate books to African readers.
Visitors to this year's Hay on Wye festival will be asked to contribute to a giant
'Hay stack' of books for readers in Africa. The charity Book Aid International
is calling for books either by African authors or published in Africa to be left
on a pile in the main festival courtyard, which they hope will grow into a huge
visual landmark over the course of the festival. The books will be collected at
the end of the festival and sent to disadvantaged readers in Africa...more
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27.04.05
Morgan Library plans a makeover and image upgrade.
For those accustomed to the neo-Renaissance grandeur of the Pierpont Morgan Library,
the crisp new steel-and-glass-paneled building taking shape on East 37th Street
may be a bit startling. But a year from now, when the Morgan reopens after a $102
million expansion and renovation, it will not only have undergone a physical metamorphosis;
it is hoping that its public persona will have changed, too...more
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27.04.05
Books, books everywhere. Pssst - looking for
"The Arts and Architecture of German Settlements in Missouri" by Charles Van Ravenswaay?
How about the two-volume "Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant" by Ulysses S. Grant?
Maybe your heart is set on "The Drawings of George Caleb Bingham" by Maurice E.
Bloch, or - for something completely different - a first edition of J.R.R. Tolkien's
"The Two Towers"...more
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27.04.05
Books yield volumes of clues. An eBay seller
is charged with stealing 120 books, but police find 19,347 in her Gloucester home...more
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27.04.05
Reader finds wad of cash in library book. A
former employee at Armstrong Library pulled a mystery novel off a shelf and noticed
a bulge in its dust jacket. She opened the book and discovered what library officials
termed was a "substantial" sum of money...more
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26.04.05
Mailer sells papers for $2.5 million. The archives
of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Norman Mailer are heading to the Harry Ransom
Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas. Nearly 500 boxes weighing
more than 20,000 pounds are expected to arrive in June at the Ransom Center, where
they will be processed and eventually made available to scholars and the public...more
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26.04.05
Library looks to silence patrons' 'offensive' hygiene.
The Houston Public Library is asking City Council to approve a list of new rules
and regulations this week that would prohibit, among other things, "offensive
bodily hygiene that constitutes a nuisance to others"...more
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26.04.05
A 'Second Renaissance'? well, maybe a little one.
The recent press coverage of a reported discovery of new classical texts provided
proof that journalists and scholars rarely speak the same language, to the frustration
of both...more Add
a comment 26.04.05
The word illuminated. Usually the black-robed
monks chant their evening prayers alone, their voices echoing off the concrete
walls of the Abbey Church. But they were recently joined by guests not seen in
monasteries since the Middle Ages -- a group of scribes and artists who are creating
a hand-lettered and illuminated Bible...more
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25.04.05
Anne Bradstreet: America's first poet. Anne
Bradstreet was a reluctant settler in America, a Puritan who migrated from her
beloved England in the 1600s. She became America's first poet, and a new biography
details her life...more
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25.04.05
Orange prize for first-time writers boosts short
stories. A sorely endangered species, or at least the female part of it, gets
a shot in the arm today from a big-name literary prize...more
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25.04.05
Building a newspaper collection. You don’t
have to have a lot of money to invested in even the very oldest of these publications.
There a are few editions that bring large sums of money, but according to the
authorities, 98 percent of old newspapers can be had for less than $25. This includes
some that date back into the 1700s...more
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25.04.05
Photobooks come of age. Though connoisseurs
have been collecting them for decades, the market for photographic books--or photobooks--has
really taken off in recent years. While it's impossible to come up with a precise
definition, photobooks generally have much higher production values and far more
limited print runs than run-of-the-mill "coffee table" books...more
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23.04.05
Comic book superheroes hit six figures. Over
30 years, Jon Berk has amassed some 18,000 comic books and 200 pieces of related
original artwork now valued between $3 million and $4 million...more
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23.04.05
Rare manuscripts sent to US missing. India:
Some 1,500 precious talapatrams (palm leaf manuscripts) containing some of the
compositions of 15th century Telugu poet-saint Tallapaka Annamacharya have gone
missing from the Tirumala temple since they were illegally sent to the US, apparently
to have them digitised...more
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23.04.05
Shakespeare portrait 'is a fake'. The mystery
surrounding a famous portrait of William Shakespeare has been solved, say experts...more
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23.04.05
Deaths, dogs and falling frogs. The film poster
is a lost art - at least as far as blockbusters. But independent cinema has kept
the tradition alive and kicking, says collector Sam Sarowitz...more
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22.04.05
Four men plead guilty in theft of rare books.
Four men pleaded guilty in federal court Thursday to stealing rare books from
a university library and trying to sell them at a famous auction house in New
York...more Add
a comment 22.04.05
Courageous publisher honoured. Abdullah Keskin,
a publisher who has been legally persecuted in Turkey for publishing books in
Kurdish, has won the 2005 Jeri Laber International Freedom to Publish Award...more
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22.04.05
The Nobel art of Cohen. John Mullan applauds
Montréal's campaign to have its own bard, Leonard Cohen, given this year's Nobel
prize for literature...more
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22.04.05
Rare 13th century medical manuscript to be auctioned.
A unique Persian medical manuscript dating back to AD 1251 is set to attract bids
of £50,000 when it goes under the hammer. The 13th century exhibit is rare in
that it is a previously unrecorded work whose 272 entries have never been updated
or replicated for later publications...more
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21.04.05
Happy Birthday William Shakespeare...NOT!!!
As Shakespeare lovers prepare to celebrate the 441st anniversary of the Great
Bard’s birthday, author Matthew Cossolotto offers a Top Ten list of reasons to
doubt the traditional Shakespeare authorship theory...more
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21.04.05
Monroe divorce papers for auction. Some of
Marilyn Monroe's most personal possessions, including her Joe DiMaggio divorce
papers and her phone book, are to go under the hammer in June...more
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21.04.05
Let them read Quixote. The Venezuelan president
Hugo Chavez has printed one million copies of Don Quixote to mark the 400th anniversary
of the publication of Cervantes' novel. This week they are being handed out free
in public squares for the improvement of his citizens...more
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20.04.05
Community bookstores thriving online, with help
from BookFinder.com. Big chains, ecommerce giants, and rising costs are causing
problems for already-embattled independent bookstores, but some local retailers
are thriving by expanding online book sales worldwide via venues likes BookFinder.com...more
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20.04.05
How will Google scan those books? Google’s
Adam Smith said the company has created a proprietary, nondestructive technology
"that in a perfect world does no damage" to scanned books. The University of Michigan’s
John Price Wilkin confirmed that Google is acting "very effectively, very delicately,"
but was vague about how Google might actually accomplish its scanning...more
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20.04.05
Gary Snyder, eco-poet.Snyder thinks of himself
as a "holistic" poet, and blends his interest in the environment, Zen Buddhism
and nature into his work. Snyder is often described as the "laureate of deep ecology,"
and his image has even appeared on a U.S. postage stamp. "Danger on Peaks" is
a collection of 55 new poems and prose poems...more
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20.04.05
Printing The Talmud. New York - Yeshiva University
Museum Presents: Printing The Talmud: From Bomberg To Scottenstein. This remarkable
exhibit spans five centuries of Jewish history and assembles an unparalleled selection
of Talmud texts published throughout the world...more
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19.04.05
A long shelf life. Los Angeles - Michael Dawson,
third-generation owner, curator and primary book buyer of Dawson's Bookshop in
Larchmont Village, opened wide his shop's doors Sunday to about 200 well-wishers
who had come to help celebrate the store's 100th anniversary...more
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19.04.05
Is the world ready for him? A new BBC documentary
and serialisation look set to revive the profile of Patrick Hamilton, a writer
whose merciless, uncompromising view of humanity is shocking even today, more
than 40 years after his death...more
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19.04.05
The benefits of an off-the-shelf pension fund.
Clem Collier has always been a passionate reader and collector of books. But his
association with the shrewd owner of one particular rare-book business has led
him to start investing in a more business-like way. It began a couple of years
ago, when he chanced upon the Bookshop on the Heath, in Blackheath, south London...more
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(Thanks to Clive Keeble
for the link.) 19.04.05
Trust bewildered by sale of White's home. "Australian
governments obviously don't feel that Patrick White should be honoured. They don't
feel they will get political kudos out of it. The apathy and neglect we have shown
to the father of Australian literature is bewildering"...more
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19.04.05
Johnson's Dictionary. Two hundred fifty years
ago, on April 15, 1755, Samuel Johnson published the first edition of his Dictionary
of the English Language, compiled and written almost wholly by himself...more
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(Thanks to June Samaras for the link.)
18.04.05
Parents ask US schools to change books on Hinduism.
Several NRI parents have urged schools in a suburb in the US Capital to change
textbooks which stereotype Hinduism. Their lobbying has prompted school officials
to rethink on presentation of India and its culture in class, a report in The
Washington Post said...more
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18.04.05
Early poem a window into Williams' despair.
A previously unpublished poem by Tennessee Williams, described as having been
''written out of absolute, complete despair,'' has been discovered in his blue
test booklet from a college course in 1937...more
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18.04.05
Lincoln library & museum to open Tuesday. All
it took was 140 years for Honest Abe to finally get his own presidential library
and museum, which designers tout as a flashier multimedia experience than even
the new Clinton library...more
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18.04.05
Colourful lives of the Orange shortlist novelists.
One of six novels on the Orange shortlist announced last night will turn out to
be a prizewinner. But it is the authors' own lives that could arguably be said
to make more gripping reading.
The £30,000 Orange
Prize for Fiction, for women writers only, pits a tattooed former biker who was
once married to a Hell's Angel against an emigre born in a German labour camp
in 1946 and a feminist who changed her name to that of a boy at the age of 15
because she believed that men had better lives...more
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18.04.05
'Lost' classical manuscripts give up their secrets
after 9,000 years. A vast array of previously unintelligible manuscripts from
ancient Greece and Rome are being read for the first time thanks to infra-red
light, in a breakthrough hailed as the classical equivalent of finding the holy
grail.
The technique could see the number of accounted-for
ancient manuscripts increase by one fifth, and may even lead to the unveiling
of some lost Christian gospels...more
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16.04.05
Auction of KKK items is canceled for good.
USA - Gary Gray, owner of Ole Gray Nash auction house in Howell said this week
he will not attempt to reschedule an auction of Ku Klux Klan memorabilia. Instead,
he said, he will sell the items privately, including perhaps through an online
auction such as eBay...more
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16.04.05
Hans Christian Andersen books at Tehran fair.
A collection of Persian translations of books by fairytale writer Hans Christian
Andersen will be put on display at the 18th Tehran International Book Fair...more
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16.04.05
Bookstore Tourism Blog. Larry Portzline, creator
of the "Bookstore Tourism" concept and author of the book by the same name, has
launched a blog to share updates about the project, tips and ideas for booklovers,
and insights about the bookselling and publishing industries...more
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16.04.05
Library blaze heat on cops. India: Heads started
rolling in the Manipur police department two days after arsonists set fire to
the state’s oldest and largest library, triggering a blame game over lack of security
arrangements at the institution...more
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15.04.05
Book arson 'a Taleban-style' act. Officials
of a prestigious library in India's north-eastern state of Manipur say nearly
145,000 books have been destroyed in an arson attack. Officials say many of Manipur's
most ancient texts were among the books destroyed by the fire...more
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15.04.05
The Beat Goes On. Lawrence Ferlinghetti's A
Coney Island of the Mind (New Directions, 1958) and Tyrannus Nix? (New Directions,
1985) were among the first books of poetry I selected from the dusty shelves of
the much-missed Fahrenheit 451 in Laguna Beach. It was the 1980s, and an outrage
I barely comprehended was building inside my awkward, 14-year-old frame, outrage
that swelled every time I saw Ronald Reagan on TV...more
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