30.03.07.
Beatrix Potter letter on display
The Beatrix Potter Gallery in Hawkshead
has put on display a recently-acquired letter which the children’s author sent
to an American friend to tell her about furniture which she acquired for her Lakeland
home ... more Add
a comment James
Bond author's handgun fetches £12,000
A revolver presented to 007 author
Ian Fleming has been sold for £12,000 at auction. The Colt Python .357 Magnum
was made for the creator of James Bond, who lived at St Margaret’s at Cliffe,
by gunmaker the Colt Company and given to him in 1964 ... more Add
a comment Book
inscribed by Scott fetches £6,000
A rare first edition given to a pub landlord
to settle a "substantial" drink bill made £6,000 at a London auction
... more Add
a comment Rare
book sold by mistake?
Librarians at Rocky Mountain College librarians think
someone may have purchased the book, one of three volumes published in Ireland
in 1719, at their book sale last spring for a buck. The complete set is worth
a few thousands dollars ... more Add
a comment
29.03.07.
Pulp pleasures
For the past 19 years New York promoter Sanford Smith and
his cadre of "paper art" dealers have watched Works On Paper evolve from a show
that raised but a few eyebrows during its infancy ... more Add
a comment Galileo's
forgotten celestial sketches
Long-lost illustrations by Galileo of the
moon's surface as he saw it through his telescope have come to light after four
centuries ... more Add
a comment ‘Lost’
Rachmaninov symphony on display
The original manuscript of Rachmaninov's
Second Symphony, presumed lost since its first performance in 1908, will be displayed
for the first time in the British Library Treasures gallery from Wednesday 21
March ... more Add
a comment
27.03.07.
Mystery poem names alleged killer
Detectives investigating the murder of
a father of two appealed today for contact from the author of a poem that supposedly
names the killer ... more Add
a comment Tolkien
Jr completes Lord of Rings
The last, unfinished book by the 'Lord of the
Rings' author has been completed by his son. Can a film version be far behind?
... more Add
a comment In
chains: major booksellers in a bind
Stuck between the individual appeal
of the independents, and the pile 'em high power of Tesco and Amazon, Borders
and Waterstone's face unique problems ... more Add
a comment India
to help restore key manuscripts
India is to send experts to Bahrain to
help the country in preserving and restoring its historical manuscripts and documents
... more Add
a comment
26.03.07.
Crippen book sale
A prayer book that belonged to murderer Dr Crippen, who
poisoned his wife and fled to Canada with his mistress, is to be sold at auction
in Ludlow, Shropshire. It bears an inscription by Crippen ... more Add
a comment Book
that helped save Welsh language on show
A rare copy of the book credited
with helping to save the Welsh language has been found in an historic private
library opened to the public for the first time ... more Add
a comment The
papers chase
Manhattan rare-book dealer Glenn Horowitz, has come to dominate
the rarefied market in literary archives. Like the art and real estate markets,
the archive market has gone through the roof, and Horowitz, with his wealthy clients
and a belief that books will gain increasingly fetishistic status in the digital
age, has helped bolster it ... more Add
a comment Dr.
Martin Luther King papers to be sold
An unassuming Pendaflex file folder,
still green but weathered with age and frayed around the edges, holds a treasure
trove of about 25 previously unknown documents pertaining to slain civil rights
leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The papers will be offered up as one lot in
a sale slated for April 15 by Gallery 63, the consignment arm of auction powerhouse
Red Baron ... more Add
a comment
24.03.07.
Authors campaign to save Britain's only gay bookshop
Gay's The Word, which
has been selling books in Bloomsbury, central London, since 1979, is hoping to
secure its future by raising £20,000 to pay the rent, building a strong internet
presence and beefing up community activities ... more Add
a comment Are
we seeing death of the book shop?
If giant retailers like Borders and HMV,
who turned bookselling into a leisure experience are struggling to compete, are
we witnessing the slow death of the bookshop? ... more Add
a comment The
Museum of Garden History
A perennial pleasure of London is the Museum of
Garden History in and around the church of St Mary-at-Lambeth - that ancient little
architectural gem beside the main gateway to Lambeth Palace which, despite its
location at the heart of Anglicanism, was in peril of religious redundancy and
abandonment only a few decades ago ... more Add
a comment
The complete guide to Book Towns
It all started at Hay-on-Wye, and now
literary festivals are putting little towns in pretty settings on the map, luring
bibliophiles and browsers alike, writes Hilary Macaskill ... more Add
a comment
23.03.07.
Austen 'too ugly' for book cover
Novelist Jane Austen has been given a
makeover for the cover of a book about her life after publishers decided an original
image of her was unattractive ... more Add
a comment
Slave
ship log book sells at auction
The log book, from the slave schooner Juverna,
was bought by The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London, for £5,520. It
had been expected fetch nearer £2,500 when it was offered for sale by Bonhams
at a London auction ... more Add
a comment Book
of Mormon sells for $180,000
Some person or organization in Salt Lake City
purchased a rare LDS hymnal at auction on Thursday for $180,000 -- several times
the expected price, and the same price was paid by another buyer in the northeastern
United States for a first edition Book of Mormon at a rare documents auction in
New York City ... more Add
a comment Artists'
ephemera is a load of old rubbish
It is not surprising - only a little
dispiriting - that a pile of junk Francis Bacon chucked out 30 years ago could
earn the man who salvaged it from a skip half a million pounds ... more Add
a comment
22.03.07.
Book giant in threat to quit UK
Borders Bookshop today warned it may pull
out of Britain. The shock news, which threatens 2000 jobs across the UK, could
see the sale of one of the most prestigious locations in Glasgow city centre ...
more Add
a comment
Charts found in bookshop cast doubt on Australia's discoverer
When James
Cook thought he had discovered Australia and claimed it for the crown in the 18th
century, he was late to the party. Another English explorer had been decades ahead
in sighting the great southern land, while Dutch explorers had been charting the
continent even earlier ... more Add
a comment Insurance
company buys rare Czech manuscript
The Uniqa insurance company of Austria
has bought a rare illuminated and gilded manuscript from 1585 with a Latin text
of the Legend about St Wenceslas, the Czech holy patron, which is an important
piece of Czech literary history, Martina Vaculinova, head of the National Museum's
department of manuscripts and old prints, has told CTK ... more Add
a comment
20.03.07.
Rare finds make stacks of cash for book scouts
Carefully and lovingly displayed
in the Rare Book Room at Powell's Books in Portland is an original edition of
the Lewis and Clark journals. At $285,000, it's the crown jewel in a room full
of gems. Many other used bookstores around the country have similar treasures.
But where do they come from and who finds them? ... more Add
a comment The
secret horror story of Stephen King Jnr
For 10 years, Joe Hill was just
another struggling, unpublished writer coming up with one book project after another
only to have them rejected. Now, though, he has a bestseller on his hands - an
efficient horror thriller entitled Heart Shaped Box - and a secret to reveal.
He is, in fact, the son of Stephen King, the master of American popular horror
fiction ... more Add
a comment Slave
ship log book up for auction
Slave ship log book up for auction International
auction house Bonhams is timing the sale of a slave ship log to mark the 200th
anniversary of legislation banning the then British Empire's participation in
the slave trade with Africa. But critics say its Wednesday auction of the rare
19th century journal from a British slave ship is enabling its owners to profit
from slavery ... more Add
a comment
19.03.07.
Eating through the ages
Boiled cow's udder, anyone? Or a ragout of pig's
ear? Norman Miller leafs through chef Anton Mosimann's extraordinary library of
antiquarian cookbooks ... more Add
a comment
Mrs
Beeton
Kathryn Hughes reveals the home truths about the first domestic
goddess ... more Add
a comment Stolen
Hebrew manuscript returned
A 13th century Bible, referred to as Hébreu
23, had been stolen from the Bibliotheque nationale de France's collection in
2000, allegedly by a former curator, Michel Garel ... more Add
a comment Centenary
celebrations at library
The National Library of Wales is celebrating its
centenary by staging its largest-ever exhibition of its collections ... more Add
a comment
16.03.07.
Intern Sold Civil War Items on eBay
An intern with the National Archives
stole about 165 Civil War documents - including the War Department's announcement
of President Lincoln's death - and sold most of them on eBay, prosecutors charged
Thursday ... more Add
a comment South
Korean publisher pulls comic book
A South Korean publisher agreed Thursday
to withdraw a best-selling children's book from stores after meeting with an anti-Semitism
watchdog group that accused the author of spreading messages echoing Nazi propaganda
... more Add
a comment Librarian
implicated in $1m book heist
New Zealand's Massey University has been ripped
off by one of its librarians who has been implicated in the activities of a national
group believed to have netted more than $1 million from stolen rare books ...
more Add
a comment Boston
exhibition looks at the roots of the novel
Stories of criminals, ghosts,
shipwrecks and pirates swirled through the busy streets of 18th-century London.
Competing writers spun outlandish stories and selling the tales was part of the
street commerce, like hawking a criminal's last confession before execution.
A
new exhibit at the Boston Public Library gives a glimpse of that lively world,
where the modern novel had its roots ... more Add
a comment
15.03.07.
Stacking books
Remember talk of the paperless world? Such memories must
ring hollow at the Bodleian. Just when communications are going ever more online,
the place is now so full of paper that tens of thousands of books are being sent
off to Cheshire and Wiltshire in a bid to avoid blocking the passages to stacks
in Oxford ... more Add
a comment Life
& death of a bookseller
A car bomb detonated last week on Mutanabi Street,
leaving a scene that has grown familiar in Baghdad, a collage of chaotic images,
disturbing in their brutality, grotesque in their repetition. At least 26 people
were killed. Hayawi the bookseller was one of them ... more Add
a comment Lost
voices of Victorian working class
Labourers expressed fight for social
justice in thousands of lines of verse ... more Add
a comment Rare
manuscripts found in al-Jaami’a al-Kabeer
A Yemeni-Italian team doing
archaeological and historical research in Yemen found more than 150 ancient rare
manuscripts beneath a minaret of al-Jaami’a al-Kabeer, the Grand Mosque, on March
10 ... more Add
a comment
13.03.07.
Gay bookshop in crisis
After 28 years of trading, Gay’s The Word bookshop
is facing possible closure in the next few months. A combination of pressures
including the Internet, rising rents, and the availability of some LGBT books
in mainstream bookshops have all played their part ... more Add
a comment Snap-happy
Shanghai students skimp on book costs
Bookshop owners in Shanghai are snapping
at an influx of camera-wielding pirates taking photos of pages to avoid paying
for pricey books, local media reported on Monday ... more Add
a comment Wife's
diaries shed light on Darwin
The diaries of Charles Darwin's wife have
been published online, giving an unparalleled insight into the day-to-day life
of the world's greatest naturalist ... more Add
a comment
East St. Louis library books are abandoned again
Library officials admit
that they erred in leaving the materials behind when they moved to a new site
in January 2001. The library board hired a consulting firm to determine what books
would go into the new library but made no plans to find a home for those they
did not want, which included city directories and other records that help track
the city's history from the late 19th and early 20th centuries ... more Add
a comment
12.03.07.
Drawing out artist R. Crumb
Robert Crumb isn't a cartoonist. He's an escape
artist. "Wait a minute," says Crumb in his New York hotel room before the first
question of this telephone interview is even asked. "I think I hear people having
sex in the room next door" ... more Add
a comment slave's
tale surfaces
A previously unknown black slave narrative has been acquired
by the University of Virginia Library, adding to its hefty collection of autobiographical
accounts of slave life ... more Add
a comment Gabriel
Garcia Marquez mediates peace effort
Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel
Garcia Marquez is mediating efforts to reach a peace agreement with leftist rebels
of the National Liberation Army (ELN), Colombian President Alvaro Uribe said Monday
... more Add
a comment Harry
Potter book 'often unread'
The fourth Harry Potter novel and David Beckham's
autobiography are among the books least likely to be finished by Britons, according
to a survey ... more Add
a comment History,
Digitized (and Abridged)
As more museums and archives become digital domains,
and as electronic resources become the main tool for gathering information, items
left behind in nondigital form, scholars and archivists say, are in danger of
disappearing from the collective cultural memory, potentially leaving our historical
fabric riddled with holes ... more Add
a comment
10.03.07.
Green Nazis is favorite for odd book prize
How Green Were the Nazis? and
The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America are just two of the titles competing
for an unusual book prize ... more Add
a comment Public
outcry forces Hamas to rescind book ban
The Hamas-run Palestinian Education
Ministry on Saturday rescinded a controversial decision to pull an anthology of
Palestinian folk tales from school libraries and destroy copies, reportedly over
mild sexual innuendo, following a widespread public outcry ... more Add
a comment David
Masson
David Masson, who has died aged 91, will be most remembered for
his collection of brilliant and influential science-fiction short stories, The
Caltraps of Time (1968). They had been first published individually in the British
SF magazine New Worlds, which during the 1960s had a radical policy of rethinking
science fiction's standard generic material ... more Add
a comment Stolen
Civil War documents returned
Two rare Civil War documents stolen from a
public library exhibit last summer were anonymously returned Friday. Shelia Bumgarner,
the librarian who curated the exhibit, said they were in her mailbox Friday, and
they aren't damaged ... more Add
a comment
09.03.07.
Teacher accused of stealing and selling school books
Jodi Kress, 31, of
Colchester, was charged with first-degree larceny when she turned herself in last
Friday, police said. Kress is accused of stealing more than 600 books from Hanmer
and Charles Wright elementary schools where she worked as a special education
teacher ... more Add
a comment Confessions
of a Book Abuser
While the ideas expressed in even the vilest of books
are worthy of protection, I find it difficult to respect books as objects, and
see no harm whatsoever in abusing them ... more
Via Bibliophile
Bullpen Add a comment Old
religious text goes missing from library
Police in the United States are
investigating the loss of a valuable ancient manuscript which is a small piece
in a huge historical puzzle. Despite being worth almost $1 million, the religious
text was held by a small library in Ohio. But no one noticed it was missing until
an Australian expert, Dr Don Barker, asked to see it, as Brendan Trembath reports
... more Add
a comment
08.03.07.
Library to sell rare Bible
A rare first edition King James Bible that languished
for decades in a small storage room on the second floor of the downtown library
is now at Sotheby's in Manhattan, where it just might fetch hundreds of thousands
of dollars at auction in June ... more Add
a comment Wham!
bang! Marvel kills off Captain America
As a symbol of waning imperial power,
it is unmistakeable. Captain America, the stars-and-stripes wearing, blond and
blue-eyed "pinnacle of human physical perfection", is dead. The Marvel comics
superhero, aka Steve Rogers, is gunned down by a sniper in the latest instalment
of the comic ... more Add
a comment Major
European library backs Google Book Search
Google's controversial book scanning
project has received a major boost, with the announcement that the largely German-language
Bavarian State Library will participate in the Google Book Search project to scan
and digitally capture the world's greatest literary works ... more Add
a comment Microsoft
vs. Google: More at Stake Than Books
Microsoft attorney Thomas Rubin on
Tuesday accused Google of taking a "cavalier approach to copyright" and of using
its Book Search project to make money off other people's copyrighted creations.
His comments have stirred up a debate over the importance of free-market competition
versus what is ethical when accessing information ... more Add
a comment
06.03.07.
Historic books saved from dump
Antiquarian book dealer Jim Swindall has
turned the pages of literature back 100 years - to bring a rare three-volume set
about the O'Neills of Ulster, destined for the rubbish tip, back home to Ireland
... more Add
a comment Ride
your pony
Bookride,
Nigel Burwood's blog has changed it's URL to http://www.bookride.com/. His daily
examination of truly scarce books, both well known and extremely obscure, is one
of the few book related blogs I read with any regularity. However, I must confess
to an occasional twinge in the wallet when I read about books that, in my ignorance,
I have sold for just a few pounds ... :) Add a comment Bomber
targets book mart
For ages, the Mutanabi book mart was a feeding ground
for Iraq's intellectuals, serving up a rich menu of history and philosophy texts,
novels and biographies, atlases and manuscripts to the Middle East's most voracious
readers. Somehow it survived the war, but Monday it proved yet another rich target
for a suicide bomber, who left 30 dead and 60 wounded ... more Add
a comment Hamas
orders book pulled from schools
The Hamas-run Education Ministry has ordered
an anthology of Palestinian folk tales pulled from school libraries and destroyed
because of sexually explicit language, officials said yesterday, in what critics
charged was the most direct attempt by the Islamic militants to impose their beliefs
on Palestinian society ... more Add
a comment
05.03.07.
Hats off to a 50-year-old Cat
Dr Seuss's anarchic cat revolutionised children's
books - and his widow, Audrey Geisel, remains a stern guardian of his legacy ...
more Add
a comment Bethlehem's
261 year old bookshop
''How to be a Samurai Warrior,'' ''Judaism for Dummies,''
''Things You Can Do While You're Naked'': Bishop Augustus Spangenberg, who helped
create the Moravian Book Shop in 1745, would have been scandalized to see the
titles on display at the store 261 years later ... more Add
a comment Independent
bookstore owner tells secrets of survival
One of the headliners at the
educational sessions being presented in conjunction with the Spring Book Show
at Atlanta’s World Congress Center on March 23-25 is the co-owner of an independent
bookstore that’s been in business for more than 30 years. While many independent
bookstore operators have been driven out of business by competition from bookstore
chains and big-box discount stores moving into their market, her store has prospered
and grown ... more Add
a comment Largest
library closure in U.S. looms
Federal funding dries up, leaving 15 branches
in Oregon county on brink ... more Add
a comment
03.03.07.
Bookshop director orders removal anti-Semitic book
The director of a bookshop
chain in Belgium has given instructions to remove a new version of the anti-Semitic
"Protocols of Zion" from the shelves ... more Add
a comment
Literary legend learning to type at 92
In a rare public appearance, the
revered travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor has revealed that he is only now -
aged 92 - learning to type, in order to finish the trilogy that has been at the
centre of his writing life for more than 30 years ... more Add
a comment
Saudi book fair under religious attack
Saudi Arabia's semi-official Al
Watan daily said Thursday the religious police tried to remove exhibited books
on love and different religions at the Riyadh International Book Fair that opened
Tuesday ... more Add
a comment
Rare books under the hammer
The sale at Duke's of Dorchester is thought
to be the largest book auction outside of London for many years and features the
sale of two major collections ... more Add
a comment
02.03.07.
Pride and Prejudice is top read
Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice has been
voted the book the nation can't live without. A survey to mark World Book Day
puts Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien in second place, followed by Charlotte Bronte's
Jane Eyre ... more Add
a comment MI5
suspected Auden of aiding Cambridge spies' escape
The poet WH Auden repeatedly
evaded British intelligence's attempts to find out whether he was involved in
the dramatic disappearance of the Cambridge spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean
in 1951, according to secret files made public today ... more Add
a comment Dublin
Anarchist Book Fair
Saturday, March 3rd will see Dublin’s Second Anarchist
Book Fair, a free, public event packed to the brim with radical bookstalls, meetings
and social events. Last year, the event was held in the Meath Street Area and
proved a great success. This year, due to the increased demand for stalls and
meetings, we’ve moved to a larger venue, in the Teachers Club, 36 Parnell Square,
in Dublin’s North Inner City ... more Add
a comment Leading
woman novelist condemned for ‘insulting Islam’
Barely a week after an Egyptian
blogger was sentenced to four years for inciting hatred towards Islam, the distinguished
novelist Nawal El Saadawi faces similar threats from the country’s religious establishment
... more Add
a comment
01.03.07.
Publishers try to stave off Google and Amazon
Two major publishers have
launched services that let non-Amazonians "search inside the book." Random House
and HarperCollins Publishers have both launched similar Web services that make
it easy for bookstores, blogs, and social networking sites to display book snippets,
hoping that the move will build buzz for new titles ... more Add
a comment First
edition book of Mormon up for auction
A very rare first edition copy of
the Book of Mormon is up for auction. It's signed by early LDS apostle Orson Pratt,
and is still encased in its original binding ... more Add
a comment Divisive
books reviewed
Livingston County Prosecutor David Morse expects to decide
by next week whether three challenged books used in Howell High School classrooms
meet the legal definition of obscenity ... more Add
a comment Books
as art
Consider this: Space Other is currently displaying books by Martin
Kippenberger, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol. Visitors can walk in,
put on some gloves and touch, carefully, pieces of art by some of the 20th Century’s
most influential and important artists. How many art fans — other than significant
gallery owners, big-money collectors and major museum curators — get to experience
the objects of their desire in such an up-close and personal way? ... more Add
a comment London
Magazine risks retirement
The London Magazine, one of the oldest publications
in the world, is threatened with closure amid claims that the Arts Council of
England is to withdraw its funding ... more Add
a comment
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