Shelf:Life - what's new in the world of books and book collecting, links to the news stories that matter, and occassional comments by TheBookGuide.  Archived Stories.

30.06.06.
Aghhhhhhhhhhh!
Recurrent computer problems have kept us occupied for most of this week but the news should return tomorrow.

26.06.06.
'Century of Science Fiction' exhibition
The University of Delaware Library has more than 25,000 items in its science fiction collection, including the recently acquired extensive collection of Roland Bounds, a well-known Delaware collector. The Bounds Collection contains many vintage paperbacks (pre-1965) and pulp magazines (pre-1953), as well as hardcover trade fiction from the 1970s to the 1990s, including many first editions, plus a collection of science-fiction ephemera, movie memorabilia and reference materials. The exhibit runs from August 22nd - December 15th … more   Add a comment

Collectors looking for the right words
Print and manuscript enthusiasts arriving in Los Angeles for an auction are seeking out items that 'tell a story,' which raises their value … more   Add a comment

Paper savior
Peppi White erases the marks of time on fragile pieces of history. If Peppi White's work ever gets noticed, it will be because she did something wrong. Her ambition is to leave no mark in this world. A clean slate, in the strictest sense. An invisible career … more   Add a comment

Huge secondhand book store for Torronto
Toronto's biggest used bookstore is taking shape in a three-storey building that was for decades considered the black hole of the Annex - a mysterious, rotting former restaurant and bakery where time stood still and the flooded basement was full of dead racoons … more   Add a comment

24.06.06.
Dealer who stole rare maps faces jail and £1m fines
The tools of his trade were a sharp razor blade and a brass neck. Now the antiques expert who stole some of the world's rarest and most ancient maps from the British Library and many leading American institutions faces 10 years in jail and the wrath of the world of cartographers … more   Add a comment

Marilyn Monroe's personal address book fetches $31,200
Monroe's enduring iconic status was underlined by the sale of one of her fur coats, a white ermine, that collected the second highest bid of the day at $50,400 … more   Add a comment

Schools ban dictionary of slang
The author of what has been described as the definitive dictionary of slang is gobsmacked, gutted, throwing up bunches, honked, hipped, and jacked like a cock-maggot in a sink-hole. A North Carolina school district has banned the dictionary under pressure from one of a growing number of conservative Christian groups using the internet to encourage school book bans across the US … more   Add a comment

Rare books by the hundreds
A rare book appeals to the eye with the beauty of its printing, illustration or binding, or to the intellect with the significance of its content. The magnificent bejeweled, heavily tooled and lavishly illustrated books collected by Cornelius J. Hauck (1893-1967), an heir to a Cincinnati brewery fortune, appeal to all senses … more   Add a comment

22.06.06.
Biologist discovers new way to date books
Antique book collectors might want to read up on genetic mutations before determining the age of an undated find. A Penn State biology professor with a passion for old prints and maps says he has found a new way to date centuries-old books by using a technique similar to what scientists use to study mutations … more   Add a comment

Sale that could help save Scott's house
It's a somewhat motley collection, ranging from ten striking neoclassical portraits in elegant gilt frames to an exotic - if rather aged - ceremonial hat from Arunachal Pradesh, surmounted by a hornbill skull. Only one item, a delicately wrought cork model of the Scott Monument, hints at the provenance of these engagingly assorted items being auctioned at Lyon & Turnbull in Edinburgh next Wednesday.
    It is described as a "house sale", but the house is Abbotsford, the extravagant Borders home built by the great writer Sir Walter Scott in the 1820s and now facing an uncertain future … more   Add a comment

French literary treasures go under the hammer
One of France's greatest private collections of manuscripts and rare editions from the giants of French literature went under the hammer late on Tuesday in the most closely watched literary auction of its type in years … more   Add a comment

Mayor hints of King papers deal, as scholars caution on copyright issue
Two Pulitzer Prize-winning scholars are asserting that the collection of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.'s papers, going on exhibit tomorrow at Sotheby's and being auctioned on June 30, is not worth any research institution's investment of between $15 million and $30 million, given the conditions of the sale, under which the King estate retains copyright control … more   Add a comment

20.06.06.
Murdered author may have lain dead for weeks
The battered body of an elderly eccentric may have lain beneath a mountain of debris in his ramshackle mansion for weeks before being discovered by police, it emerged yesterday … more   Add a comment

Book festival selling out
Events featuring the Nobel Prize winners Harold Pinter and Seamus Heaney and the Scottish authors Ian Rankin and Alexander McCall Smith sold out at the weekend … more   Add a comment

The "Richard and Judy effect" is worth £50m
It is known as "the Richard and Judy effect"... and has created a revolution in the nation's reading habits. Now another six lucky authors are going to find out what a recommendation from TV's golden couple can do for their careers … more   Add a comment

Scott's will to be put on display
A draft of Sir Walter Scott's last will and testament is to go on public display for the first time in 174 years after being bought at auction. Banking group HBOS recently secured the document by the famous Borders writer at Christie's for about £6,000 … more   Add a comment

19.06.06.
Warhol auction splits relatives
Warhol nephew James Warhola says most of the items to be sold Thursday at Christie's Auction House in New York were wrongly taken from Warhol's Manhattan townhouse and studio after the artist died in 1987 at age 58. Warhola says the items belong to The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and has demanded that Christie's withdraw them … more   Add a comment

World Cup autograph book to be auctioned for charity
In a first for the FIFA World Cup, an exclusive autograph book, containing the signatures of all 736 players and head coaches of the 32 finalist teams, is about to be auctioned with the proceeds going to the official charity campaign, "6 Villages for 2006". The auction will be conducted on the www.sos-childrensvillages.org website. Bids can be made online until 23.59h on 9 July 2006 … more   Add a comment

Berkeley agonizes over bookstore's closing
Depending on whom you ask, the reason Cody's Books is going out of business is either because of the city of Berkeley, the homeless, the University of California, the war in Iraq, Ronald Reagan, the Internet or the lack of short-term parking … more   Add a comment

The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop
When I walk into a bookstore, any bookstore, first thing in the morning, I'm flooded with a sense of hushed excitement. I shouldn't feel this way. I've spent most of my adult life working in bookstores, either as a bookseller or a publisher's sales rep, and even though I no longer work in the business, as an incurable reader I find myself in a bookstore at least five times a week … more   Add a comment

16.06.06.
Map dealer due in court
An antique-maps dealer accused of stealing several vintage maps from Yale University's landmark rare books library is expected to admit to those crimes and a broader series of map thefts from prominent institutions across the Northeast in federal and state courts later this month … more   Add a comment

Miami school board bans Cuba book
Educational authorities in the US city of Miami have voted in favour of removing a controversial book about Cuba from the city's school libraries … more   Add a comment

"The Smyth Report" sells for $27,600
The book, "Atomic Energy for Military Purposes," was among a stack of dusty books bought in Los Alamos two years ago by Ed Grothus for $25 … more   Add a comment

Ibn Sina’s ancient manuscript preserved in Azerbaijan
Three old manuscripts preserved at the Azerbaijan National Academy of Science Institute of Manuscripts have been included into the UNESCO’s world memory of the world’s most precious and rare written monuments … more   Add a comment

Darwin letter goes on sale
A rare, "striking" and detailed letter in which Charles Darwin defends his theory of natural selection will go for auction next month at Sotheby's in London. The six pages are a response to doubts about his theory expressed by the campaigning Victorian clergyman the Rev William Denton. The letter is new to scholars and no other letter from Darwin to Denton is known to exist … more   Add a comment

15.06.06.
Einstein articles net $42,000 at auction
A set of 94 scholarly articles by Albert Einstein sold for $42,000 US at auction yesterday, with the proceeds going to benefit the left-leaning Working Families Party. Einstein saved copies of the articles, published from 1901 to 1925, and gave them to his son, Albert Hans Einstein, according to Christie's auction house, which sold the papers as one lot … more   Add a comment

Historic book town pub to be auctioned
A 400-year-old pub in Powys which was badly damaged in a fire in 2005 is to go under the hammer at auction. The Grade II listed Three Tuns, in the literary town of Hay-on-Wye, has been in landlady Lucy Powell's family for 85 years. Auctioneer Ryan Williams said the pub had a guide price of £150,000. It will be auctioned in Hay-on-Wye on 22 June … more   Add a comment

Signed "Smyth Report" up for auction
"Atomic Energy For Military Purposes" - commonly called "The Smyth Report" - is Henry DeWolf Smyth's official government report on the development of the atomic bomb, 1940-1945; Princeton University Press, 1945. The particular copy being sold at Sotheby's has the signatures of physicists and others who were instrumental in development of the first atomic bombs including J. Robert Oppenheimer, Hans A. Bethe, Richard Feynman, Otto Robert Frisch, Emil John Konopinski, Nicholas Constantine Metropolis, Philip Morrison, Louis Slotin, Edward Teller and Stanislaw Marcin Ulam … more   Add a comment

Fire started in library's gay books section
Chicago Police are investigating a suspicious fire that burned about 100 books from the gay and lesbian selection at a North Side Chicago Public Library branch. … more   Add a comment

After 68 years, Steinbeck's family wins back the rights to his greatest works
An American judge intervening in a long-simmering feud has ruled that the rights to John Steinbeck's most famous novels - including The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men - should be seized from his publisher and handed to his descendants … more   Add a comment

11.06.06
No News today...
TheBookGuide is away for a few days but he and the news will return on June 15th. However, desperate news junkies can find links to 1,000's of book related stories and articles in our archives.

10.06.06.
Evolution of ultimate Darwin collection
To the untrained eye, it could be just another fusty, ageing book. Bound in fading, pale green cloth and gold embossed, it does not stand out from its neighbouring volumes on the library bookcase. However this book is anything but ordinary. It is the first edition presentation copy of On the Origin of Species that Charles Darwin sent to W B Tegetmeier, the poultry expert, pigeon fancier and naturalist … more   Add a comment

Spike 'wrote world's best joke'
Comedian Spike Milligan was the author of the world's funniest joke, a psychology professor has claimed … more   Add a comment

Restoration of Jack London's home gives insight about author
You've heard of Jack London, celebrated author of Call of the Wild and White Fang. You also may know him as an intrepid world traveler and socialist crusader. But chances are you don't know Jack London the sustainable farmer who pioneered environmentally friendly practices on his sprawling ranch in the Northern California wine country … more   Add a comment

09.06.06.
Preservation's crumbling future
Shrinking budgets have led to backlogs in library preservation departments at Hopkins and across the USA. Conservators are left wondering: If we don't preserve it, who will? … more   Add a comment

Google in European row over book search
La Martiniere is suing Google for counterfeiting and breach of rights by scanning about 100 books into its Google Book Search. Other European publishers are also threatening to sue … more   Add a comment

Start collecting rare books
Bernard J Shapero, a well-known rare book trader in London has started putting together small starter packs of rare collectible books. These collections present a package of books that follow a particular theme and are selected with the new collector in mind. PDF catalogues of the items in each collection are currently available on their website at http://www.shapero.com … more   Add a comment

Martin Luther King’s estate seeks a buyer for his archive
The estate of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr will auction the civil rights leader’s entire collection of more than 10,000 documents, including the text of his famous 1963 "I have a dream" speech, as a single lot this month. "This collection is without question the most important American archive of the 20th century in private hands," said David Redden, the vice-chairman of Sotheby’s, the auctioneer that will conduct the sale on June 30 … more   Add a comment

Museum buys rare Darwin archive
The world's largest Charles Darwin book collection has been bought by the Natural History Museum for nearly £1m … more   Add a comment

08.06.06.
Rare library books turn up on eBay
A library worker is being investigated by police after thousands of pounds worth of rare books and documents vanished from Manchester's Central Library. The losses came to light after someone approached Manchester council - which runs the library - to say some of the books had been advertised on the eBay auction website … more   Add a comment

Entrepreneur heads back to the bookstore
Cathy Waters, who founded the on-line book giant that changed the way used books are sold, returns to the hands-on approach … more   Add a comment

Rowling is top
Author J K Rowling has been named the greatest living British writer, according to a new survey. Rowling received nearly three times as many votes as the second-placed author in the list, fantasy writer Terry Pratchett … more   Add a comment

Hauck collection for sale
In the middle of the 1920s, a newly married Cornelius J. Hauck began to collect books. At first, he and his wife, Harriet Wesche, looked only for botanical subjects: trees, plants and flowers. In the next 40 years, the hobby blossomed into a passionate love affair with everything rare and glorious in the realm of the written word. The scion of a prominent Cincinnati brewery and banking family, Hauck bought books printed on paper, chiseled in stone, carved into jade, wrapped in leather and silver and jewels … more   Add a comment

Larkin's lost notebook of love poems to go on sale
A notebook containing drafts of love poems by Philip Larkin is due to go on sale at a book fair for £20,000. Ed Maggs, the book dealer who is planning to sell it at the Antiquarian Book Fair in London - which opens tomorrow - said: "I think it's probably worth £20,000. There are no other Larkin manuscripts on the market or likely to come on the market." … more   Add a comment

Books will disappear. Print is where words go to die
We need to kill the book to save books. Now relax. I'm not suggesting burning books, nor replacing them with electronic gizmos in some paperless future of fable and fantasy. Instead, I'm merely arguing that the book is an outdated means of communicating information. And thanks to the searchable, connected internet, books could be so much more … more   Add a comment

04.06.06
No News today...
TheBookGuide is away for a few days but he and the news will return on June 8th. However, desperate news junkies can find links to 1,000's of book related stories and articles in our archives.

03.06.06.
"The break-up could and should have been avoided"
The mysterious investor who sold the William Blake watercolour set "Designs for Blair’s Grave" at Sotheby’s New York on 2 May has probably only broken even on the controversial sale. After any post-auction acquisitions are taken into account, the Blakes may realise around $10m, roughly what they must have cost. Meanwhile, the dispersal of a set which has been kept together for two centuries has saddened and angered the art world … more   Add a comment

Author's wife at his side after 130 years
The American literary giant Nathaniel Hawthorne, the author of The Scarlet Letter, is to be reunited with his wife after more than 130 years, after the excavation of her remains. From an unkempt and crumbling plot in Kensal Green cemetery, northwest London, just after dawn yesterday, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne and the couple’s daughter, Una, were exhumed, sealed inside a zinc-lined coffin and sent on their way to America, where they will be reburied next to the 19th-century author in a ceremony on June 26 … more   Add a comment

France sues Brooklyn dealer over manuscript
France's national library has filed suit against a Brooklyn artifact dealer, demanding the return of a centuries-old book that was stolen before he purchased it at a New York auction, a library official said … more   Add a comment

Rules of the game published
A manuscript which set out the rules of football devised on Parker's Piece in Cambridge has gone on show … more   Add a comment

02.06.06.
Barristers blamed for book thefts
Barristers have been warned that if they do not stop stealing books from the Law Library they will have to pay increased membership fees. About 1,239 items have gone missing, including one volume worth 333 Euros, that turned up in a second-hand bookshop in Limerick with its Law Library stamp removed … more   Add a comment

Japan to return S.Korea's ancient records
Korean historical records dating from the 14th century, stolen during Japan's rule of the Korean peninsula, will be returned to Seoul, Tokyo University said. The 47 volumes of "The Annals of the Choson Dynasty," taken to Tokyo University Library in 1912 by a Japanese scholar, will be returned in mid-July, the Asahi Shimbun reported Thursday … more   Add a comment

Probing the secrets of Europe's oldest book
Athens -- A collection of charred scraps kept in a Greek museum's storerooms are all that remains of what archeologists say is Europe's oldest surviving book, and which may hold a key to understanding early monotheistic beliefs … more   Add a comment

Mrs Beeton couldn't cook but she could copy
If Mrs Beeton had been alive today she would be in trouble for plagiarism on a shocking scale, the Guardian Hay festival heard yesterday. The image of the original domestic goddess and author of the definitive book on cookery and household management has been tainted. The real Mrs Beeton was in fact a strip of a girl who could not cook … more   Add a comment

01.06.06.
Columbus's first excited letter home goes on sale
One of the world's earliest printed documents, Christopher Columbus's account of his first voyage to discover the New World, will come up for sale in London this month with a price tag of £500,000. The Columbus Letter, or Epistola Christofori Colom, is the explorer's remarkably humane description of his first encounters with the natives of Hispaniola and other Caribbean islands early in 1493 … more   Add a comment

Duke of Edinburgh celebrated in book of gaffes
For half a century, the Queen's the blunt spoken husband has turned political incorrectness into an art form, peppering royal tours with ethnic slurs about slitty eyes, pot bellies and booze. Now, to celebrate the 85th birthday of the Duke of Edinburgh, two reporters have compiled "Duke of Hazard: The Wit and Wisdom of Prince Philip". Phil Dampier and Ashley Walton had no shortage of material … more   Add a comment

Ancient books transferred to Iran from Netherlands
A collection of ancient books including 2000 lithography books and 100 manuscripts brought from private collection owners has been transferred to Iran from the Netherlands after four months of negotiations between the experts of Iran’s National Library and the owners of the collection … more   Add a comment

Boat owners evicted from yard celebrated by Pullman
The Oxford boatyard which helped to inspire one of Britain's most celebrated works of modern fiction was yesterday cleared of protesters and their canal boats by bailiffs who brought in a mobile crane to lift seven barges back into the water … more   Add a comment