31.05.05
Galileo
volume for sale at £500,000.
One of the world's rarest books - a belligerent 42-page rant written, published
and signed by Galileo in 1607 - is likely to be the star of the Antiquarian Book
Fair at Olympia in London. The book fair runs from June 9-12...more Add
a comment 31.05.05
Curricula
turn book lovers into book haters.
Standardized testing and other education demands in US schools, choke fun out
of school reading, some experts say...more Add
a comment 31.05.05
Hunt begins
for a home for Hunter S.Thompson's archives.
Thompson's family and executors hope to place the archives, now in temporary storage
at a secret site in Aspen, with a university in a city or state with some connection
to the author. Obvious candidates include Kentucky, Thompson's birthplace; Colorado,
where he lived for nearly 40 years; and literary-rich New York, where he once
worked...more Add
a comment 31.05.05
Old postcards
offer priceless window on Viet Nam’s past.
More than a hundred old postcards now being displayed at the exhibit Viet Nam’s
Past in Old Postcards, at L’Espace, the French culture centre in Ha Noi, are only
a small portion of Viet Nam’s enormous photographic heritage, but the show has
brought viewers a much-needed glimpse into the country’s history...more Add
a comment 28.05.05
One of the
rarest maps to be sold.
This autumn, Sotheby's in London will auction the first half of a collection of
about 700 atlases containing 60,000 maps from the 15th through 20th centuries,
valued at £5 million. The collection, which was formed over 50 years by Lord Wardington
of Oxfordshire, England, includes atlases produced by the most venerated mapmakers,
including Ortelius, de Jode, Blaeu, Janssonius, Speed and others...more Add
a comment 28.05.05
Spoils of
war. The state of
Germany believes that Capt. Doty, a German language interpreter for the 63rd Infantry
Division, took books from a castle in Waldenburg where museum officials had stashed
them. Waldenburg, a medieval town, was leveled in fighting at the war’s end...more Add
a comment 28.05.05
Festival
fever. Aida Edemariam
goes behind the scenes to discover how a small market town on the border of England
and Wales copes with the annual influx of 100,000 readers, writers and artists
at the Guardian Hay Festival, which opens today...more Add
a comment 28.05.05
Minus an encore, bookstore’s
curtain call. On
Saturday, July 30, 2005, the monster sale ends and the applause stops. As of that
date, New York's Applause Books, in the words of the man who founded it and run
it for 25 years, is history. Kaput. Gone away. Closed...more Add
a comment 27.05.05
'This book
will shake the world'.
Her novel Wild Swans smashed best-selling records worldwide. So what made Jung
Chang then devote 10 years of her life to researching a hefty political biography
of Chairman Mao? Lisa Allardice reports...more Add
a comment 27.05.05
Americans
return priceless books to Germany.
In a formal yet joyous ceremony, Germany regained possession of four priceless
old books that had been missing for 60 years...more Add
a comment 27.05.05
China protects
old books, manuscripts of ethnic groups.
China has rescued and repaired about 300,000 old books and manuscripts from minority
ethnic groups and published more than 5,000 of these during the past two decades,
according to the State Ethnic Affairs Commission (SEAC)...more Add
a comment 27.05.05
Bookseller hit with token
fine. A much-loved Crouch End street stallholder has been brought to book
for trading without a licence for a second time in two months. Gerry Ingram, 56,
was given a token fine on Tuesday for setting up his stall outside Highgate tube
station..more Add
a comment 26.05.05
Google's
books online under fire.
A US publishing organisation has accused Google of breaching copyright rules through
a plan to put university libraries online...more Add
a comment 26.05.05
Sibelius
manuscript too pricey for Finns.
An orchestral score for the work Night Ride and Sunrise dating from 1908 and handwritten
by Finnish composer Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) was sold at auction for GBP 42,000
at Sotheby's in London on Friday. In stark comparison with Sotheby's own estimate
of GBP 10,000 to 15,000, the final price - including all taxes and costs - was
estimated to be as high as EUR 85,000...more Add
a comment 26.05.05
Saudi poet
jailed for his views.
Seven years after Ali al-Dimeeni penned his novel "A Gray Cloud," the Saudi poet
and author is living out his protagonist's predicament -- a dissident jailed for
years in a desert nation prison where many others have done time for their political
views...more Add
a comment 25.05.05
Rare book dealer the protagonist in new novel. Umberto Eco's latest novel,
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, is about a rare-book dealer who loses his
'autobiographical' memory - he doesn't know his own name or recognise his wife
- but still has his 'semantic' memory and so is able to quote from every book
he has ever read...more Add
a comment 25.05.05
Houdini's 'Thank You' gift
to rescuers goes on sale. A book which escapologist Harry Houdini gave to
a shopkeeper and his wife after they helped him avoid being mobbed by fans is
up for sale, it was revealed today...more Add
a comment 25.05.05
Ancient book returned to
Rome's Jewish community. A 17th-century book was returned to Rome's Jewish
community on Monday, one of thousands Jewish volumes seized by the Nazis in 1943...more Add
a comment 25.05.05
Cheapened
by the checkout.
The mountain of discounted books at supermarkets isn't democratising publishing
but dumbing it down...more Add
a comment 23.05.05
Reclusive
'Mockingbird' author Harper Lee honored.
"To Kill a Mockingbird" author Harper Lee has made a rare step into the limelight
to be honored at the Los Angeles Public Library's 10th annual awards dinner...more Add
a comment 23.05.05
Fan-tastic.
In the annals of amateur fanaticism there is nothing quite like the English literary
society. The keepers of the flame, cherishing the afterlives of great writers,
are both the high priests and train spotters of a quasi-religious fraternity who
occasionally break cover in programmes such as Mastermind...more Add
a comment 23.05.05
Auctioning
memories in a town haunted by the Klan.
The black satin Klan robes fetched a total of $6,000, and the letter to Mr. Miles
from Governor Wallace brought in $160. The auction also included some of Mr. Miles's
extensive book collection, whose disparate items included "Mein Kampf," "The City
and the Pillar" by Gore Vidal and a collection of Ansel Adams photos...more Add
a comment 23.05.05
Wanted dead
or alive: Scotland’s literary heroes.
The Scots psyche may not be the most perfectly formed element in humankind's make-up,
but it does have its good points. The grizzled, misshapen part of the Caledonian
brain that is so adept at nursing grievances, never forgetting a debt owed or
a slight received, is also the part that makes sure we don't neglect the heroes
and lodestars of our past...more Add
a comment 23.05.05
Race row
may spoil Penguin's birthday.
Publisher 'shunning black writers' for its 70th anniversary celebration ...more Add
a comment
21.05.05
Denmark
hopes to retrieve ancient Bible.
Denmark hopes that the Norwegian buyer of a 300-year-old Bible will return the
valuable book that was stolen from the Danish Royal Library, reports said on Thursday.
The Bible was believed to have been one of the 3 000 books stolen by a former
librarian between 1967 and 1978...more Add
a comment 21.05.05
Brigham
Young's last will and testament for sale.
The Alderfer Auction Company plans to sell it on June eighth, with a starting
price of 25 thousand dollars, but some archivists fear the manuscript might be
a clerical copy...more Add
a comment 21.05.05
More library
users, but borrowing declines.
Good news is starting to be increasingly mixed among the bad for Britain's 4,000
free public libraries. Book borrowing fell by a further 5% last year, maintaining
a disturbing 20-year trend, official figures showed yesterday. But for the first
time in their long decline there was hard evidence that libraries are winning
back popularity with the public. An extra 4% of people walked through their doors
in 2003-04, giving them a total of 337 million visits...more Add
a comment 21.05.05
'Lost' Kerouac
play resurfaces after 50 years.
Beat Generation, written in the autumn of 1957, the same year as the publication
of Kerouac's breakthrough work On the Road, was unearthed in a New Jersey warehouse
six months ago. An excerpt will appear in the July issue of Best Life magazine...more Add
a comment 21.05.05
Librarians
toss dozens of urine-stained books.
Librarians in the United States have had to admit that they are baffled by the
case of the urine-stained library books. Hundreds of books at two libraries, just
13km apart in Cleveland, have had to be thrown out...more Add
a comment 21.05.05
Thomas the
Tank Engine is still on track after 60 years.
To celebrate Thomas' 60th anniversary, Random House will release a new edition
of "The Thomas the Tank Engine Story Collection," a compendium of all 26 books,
as well as the individual storybook "Thomas the Tank Engine," in which the world
first met the "fussy little engine" with "six small wheels, a short stumpy funnel,
a short stumpy boiler, and a short stumpy dome"...more Add
a comment 19.05.05
Koran ordered
online contains hate slogans.
A Culver City woman said Wednesday that a secondhand Koran she ordered through
a book dealer working with Amazon.com contained anti-Islamic hate messages, including
profanity and "Death to all Muslims!" ...more Add
a comment 19.05.05
X-rays illuminate
ancient writings.
An early transcription of Archimedes' mathematical theories has been brought to
light through the probing of high-intensity X-rays. The text contains part of
the Method of Mechanical Theorems, one of Archimedes' most important works, which
was probably copied out by a scribe in the tenth century...more Add
a comment 19.05.05
National
Library for fhe Blind's fundraising auction now live.
The Library is teaming up with top authors in an exciting charity fundraising
auction which will offer book lovers the chance to bid for an opportunity to have
tea with their favourite author...more Add
a comment 18.05.05
Elvis fans
queue for book signing.
Elvis fans are heading down to Waterstone's book store in London to catch a glimpse
of the King's former wife as she launches a book on the rock and roll legend...more Add
a comment 18.05.05
Bookshop's read all about
it plan. A scheme in which cast-off books are randomly scattered around Bath
for new readers to discover has been introduced by a city bookshop...more Add
a comment 17.05.05
Publishers
putting out too many books.
The US publishing industry continues to put out more books than the public is
prepared to buy, according to a report issued Monday by the Book Industry Study
Group. The number of books sold dropped by nearly 44 million between 2003 and
2004, even as the annual number of books published approaches 175,000...more Add
a comment 17.05.05
Cheerful
ode to lemons of literature.
Celebrating clunky sentences and mixed metaphors, self-indulgent prose and just
plain old bad writing, Lit Lite, a weekly New York literary series, invites performers
to select and read from their favorite bad books...more Add
a comment 17.05.05
300 million
ancient Chinese books in nead of conservation.
The total amount of ancient documents in various libraries and museums across
the country stands at 300 million, most of which are serious damaged, demanding
immediate and effective reparation. However, the special personnel qualified for
the reparation of ancient documents in National Library of China are less than
10 and less than 100 nationwide...more Add
a comment 16.05.05
Publishers
swap taste for marketing tricks.
Macmillan's New Writing initiative reveals the terrible state of British publishing,
says Robert McCrum...more Add
a comment 16.05.05
"The Bookstore Tourism Travel
Journal for Book Addicts on the Go". Larry Portzline, creator of the "Bookstore
Tourism" concept and author of the highly-praised book by the same name, will
release a follow-up on June 1st...more Add
a comment 16.05.05
Ambrose
Bierce: The devil's editor.
19th-century writer Ambrose Bierce is, I believe, the most underappreciated American
author. He is credited--among many other things--with the sardonic comment, 'War
is God's way of teaching Americans geography'...more Add
a comment 16.05.05
World's
largest book: It's not light reading.
What it isn't is a book you'd read in bed or at the beach or carry in a backpack.
You wouldn't try to check it out of the library because you'd need a forklift,
and you wouldn't drop it on the floor to kill a spider. A rat, maybe. A really
big rat...more Add
a comment 14.05.05
Major charity
book fair opens in Edinburgh.
One of the world's biggest charity book fairs opens today Edinburgh on Saturday,
with more than 100 Scottish authors donating signed copies of their works to help
the charity Christian Aid...more Add
a comment 14.05.05
Bookstores
are quids in with latest Potter story.
High street bookstores
are poised to make a small fortune from the latest Harry Potter novel and a considerable
amount of it will come from deposits on books which are not bought...more Add
a comment 14.05.05
Newsweek sparks global riots
with one paragraph on Koran.
At least nine people
were killed yesterday as a wave of anti-American demonstrations swept the Islamic
world from the Gaza Strip to the Java Sea, sparked by a single paragraph in a
magazine alleging that US military interrogators had desecrated the Koran...more Add
a comment 14.05.05
Bombay's
pavement booksellers.
Rare books, filter coffee and throwaway prices... booklovers can't ask for more,
but for how much longer?...more Add
a comment 13.05.05
Wigtown's
the books. An
unlikely business partnership forged between The Book Bag Company in Wigtown,
Scotland’s National Book Town and disabled workers in Bangladesh, may revolutionise
how we carry home our purchases...more Add
a comment 13.05.05
Blaenafon
Booktown - Now We Are Two.
I so want to be pleasantly surprised; hoping
that Blaenavon’s Booktown has worked some sort of magic, opening up like a spring
flower in the grey soil: confounding its critics...more
Add a comment 12.05.05
Kids' book on evolution
stirs censorship debate in Minnesota. With its lavish illustrations of colorful,
cuddly critters, "Our Family Tree" looks like the kind of book kids keep by their
bedside to read again and again. But when its author, Lisa Westberg Peters, planned
to talk about the book in classroom appearances today and Friday at a Minnesota
elementary school, educators got cold feet...more
Add a comment 12.05.05
Honolulu artisan gets call
to save rare books in Cuba. Sitting in cardboard boxes in a library of historic
books in Havana are 1,200 decaying volumes with insect-eaten, moldy pages, rotting
bindings and missing covers. The damaged books were placed in the boxes beginning
early in the 1900s by long-gone librarians who knew that something had to be done
to save them but did not know how...more
Add a comment 12.05.05
Suicide bombers mingle with
Mr. Tickle at Teheran book fair. Scooby Doo, where are you? If you’re at Tehran’s
book fair and looking for something for the kids, you’ll find the stand right
next to Islamic Jihad’s and around the corner from those other surprising pillars
of the publishing world, Hezbollah and Hamas...more
Add a comment 12.05.05
The bullshit guy. Twenty
years ago a Yale philosopher gave a little-noticed lecture on the improbable subject
of bullshit. Now, republished as a 67-page pamphlet, it has become a publishing
sensation and its author is being feted as a guru. How did that happen? Gary Younge
finds out...more Add
a comment 11.05.05
Oklahoma passes gay book
ban. The Oklahoma House of Representatives has passed a resolution that would
ban books on gay families from the children's sections of public libraries...more
Add a comment 11.05.05
The Beltane book burning.
Aaaaaah, book burning. If you really want to outrage people these days, but you
haven't got it in you to fiddle wiv da kids, we sincerely recommend that get hold
of a big bunch of books and set fire to them.
Liberals
hate that. Drives them potty. And although to some that may be reason enough to
do it, it really isn't. There has to be more to it than that. So, curious to know
if a pestilence of Nazis had broken out on Wigtown, we spoke to Shaun Bythell,
the organiser of the book burning and owner of Scotland's largest second-hand
bookshop, which incidentally, snappily enough, is called The Bookshop...more
Add a comment 11.05.05
Fabulous photographic ephemera.
Photographers make photographs. They also make a lot of other stuff - press releases,
brochures, business cards - things that aren't meant to last. But if they do survive,
they can become quite interesting...more
Add a comment 11.05.05
Dancer in the dark.
Murder, mutilation, psychological torture, child abuse, starvation, abandonment
... if Hans Christian Andersen had turned his ideas into films instead of fairy
stories, no child would have been allowed near them...more
Add a comment 07.05.05
TheBookGuide is away for a
few days but he and the news will return on Wednesday 11.05.05. 07.05.05
WG Grace's 'Cricket Bibles'
for Sale. Rare Books and Berry of Porlock in Somerset, are offering a set
of Wisden Almanacks that belonged to the legendary cricketer WG Grace, for £150,000...more
Add a comment 06.05.05
Newly discovered interview
reveals poet's cantankerous character. He's considered one of America's greatest
men of verse, but he had simple advice for aspiring scribes: Don't become a poet.
It's but one of the tidbits Walt Whitman left in an 1888 interview with the student
newspaper at the institution that is now The College of New Jersey...more
Add a comment 06.05.05
Comics for everybody.
Victor Salguero of Cape Coral has bought comic books since boyhood. His favorites
were the classics such as Superman and Batman. Now he’s 18 and in college, but
his reading habits haven’t changed. Salguero makes regular trips to the comic
store for the latest superhero tales - proof that comics aren’t only for kids...more
Add a comment 06.05.05
Smithsonian shows manuscripts
from times of Tamerlane. A calligrapher in Tamerlane's court, Omar Aqta, copied
the whole text of Islam's Qur'an - hundreds of pages - in a manuscript small enough
to fit inside a signet ring...more
Add a comment 06.05.05
British Library announces
increase in readers. The British Library is currently seeing a mark ed increase
in the number of people using the Library's reading rooms. Latest figures up to
March 2005 show that we are seeing double the number of people applying for reader
passes at the British Library and the number of collection items consulted is
up by 20%...more Add
a comment 05.05.05
Sedbergh Book Town opens
first phase. May Day bank holiday weekend marked the opening of the first
phase of the project to make Sedbergh England’s first Book Town...more
Add a comment 05.05.05
Fringe benefits for Hay festival. "What's a
festival without a fringe?" is the plaintive cry coming from the Hay-on-Wye Poetry
Bookshop owner, Melanie Prince...more
Add a comment
05.05.05
Where do all those leftover books go? All 15,000
library sale rejects from Lancaster County’s largest used-book sale have been
sold to Baltimore’s Pro Quo Books for 4 cents apiece...more
Add a comment
04.05.05
Dust off those computer books. Bauman Rare
Books in New York has acquired as many titles as possible during the past two
years. Many of them were not printed in mass quantity, some were microfilmed,
and others were discarded...more
Add a comment
04.05.05
Delicious collection for readers or eaters.
For anyone intrigued by the history of food in the USA, it is a collection of
staggering richness and diversity: well over 20,000 items, from books to magazines
to menus to advertisements, from the first American cookbook, "American Cookery,"
by Amelia Simmons, published in Hartford, Conn., in 1796, to a century of advertisements
for Pillsbury flour, to a copy of every issue of Good Housekeeping...more
Add a comment
04.05.05
Support for EU 'digital library'. A plan to
create a vast digital library to preserve Europe's cultural heritage has received
strong backing from European Union (EU) culture ministers...more
Add a comment
04.05.05
Police search for missing magazine. University
police are continuing to investigate the theft of a 1965 copy of Electronics Magazine
from the Grainger Engineering Library on April 12 - one day after electronics
giant Intel offered to pay $10,000 to anyone with a copy, University police officials
said Monday...more
Add a comment
03.05.05
Jack the Ripper 'may have killed abroad'. That
is the intriguing theory raised in a new book on the Whitechapel murders by Trevor
Marriott, a former Bedfordshire police detective. Using modern police procedural
techniques, Marriott has spent two years poring over the Ripper killings, re-examining
the evidence given by police doctors and pathologists at the time...more
Add a comment
03.05.05
Man pays $2,190 library fine. A man who borrowed
a book in 1981 from his hometown library in suburban Buffalo has returned it,
along with $2,190...more
Add a comment
03.05.05
Behind the scenes. He was the greatest film
actor of all time - and the most reclusive. Now, a year after his death, the auction
of his estate offers a unique insight into Marlon Brando's true character. Anthony
Haden-Guest muses on an actor's lot...more
Add a comment
03.05.05
The bookless future. In the past few years
the world of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences has been astonishingly
transformed by the new information technology. Above all, it has been transformed
by the amount of source material now available online--some of it by paid subscription,
but much of it there for the taking by anyone with an Internet connection...more
Add a comment
01.05.05
TheBookGuide is away for a
few days but he and the news will return on Tuesday 03.05.05. | 
