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28.02.08.
Library look, revised
In a city derided for its cerebral shortcomings, the home library
-- once merely a quaint signature of old money -- is asserting itself
as a showcase for personal taste, designers say. Los Angeles houses
may balloon with gadget-laden spa baths, elaborate outdoor kitchens
and high-tech media lounges, but it's the humble bookcase-lined
reading room that's becoming a symbol of respite and refinement
... more
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Wharton's
house of worth
Wealth and social position were major themes of Edith Wharton's
famous novel "The House of Mirth." So it's a cruel irony that the
Mount, the gracious home in Lenox where Wharton wrote the book,
faces foreclosure ... more
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Quebec literary
giant threatens to burn his books
A surge of bilingualism in Quebec has one of the province's most
popular writers threatening to burn his entire body of work if something
isn't done to stop it. Victor-Levy Beaulieu, the author of some
70 works of fiction, non-fiction, drama and poetry, is giving the
province two months to correct its errant linguistic ways, or the
books will burn ... more
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Nielsen's
Book Standard shuts
Fissures in the U.S. book publishing industry grew wider last week
as a key media company, Reed Elsevier, announced it is shifting
away from book industry news coverage, and Nielsen shut down The
Book Standard. Reed Elsevier told its investors last week that it
is divesting Reed Business Information "to reduce exposure to advertising
markets and cyclicality." The sell off will include Publishers Weekly,
Library Journal, and School Library Journal ... more
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26.02.08.
The tale of the ghostly bookseller
Over at UFO Digest, a site dedicated to the paranormal, extraterrestrial,
and the hypermundane (oh wait – that last one’s our beat), there
is a first-person account of a woman and her mother being helped
out by an “old man” in an occult book store. The man spoke with
them, showed them books, and was, in all, a model bookseller. Sounds
great; the only problem is, the old man didn’t exist ... more
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The
Cold War-era assault on comic book culture, revisited
David Hajdu retells
the tale in his new book, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and
How It Changed America. By the late '40s, kids were buying 100 million comic books
every month with titles like Pay-Off: True Crime Cases, It Rhymes With Lust, and
The Crypt of Terror. "For the first time, a whole generation felt like, Here's
something created by other young people for me,'" Hajdu says. But McCarthyite
politicians in search of new enemies, foreign and domestic, zeroed in on the corrupting
influence of this cheap, unregulated entertainment ... more
Add a comment Burnt
diary yields horror of Warsaw ghetto
We will probably never know who Debora
was, why she decided to record her family's horrific treatment at the hands of
the Nazis, and why her friend, the Holocaust survivor Lusia Schwarzwald Hornstein,
did not reveal the existence of the charred diary for more than 50 years. But
thanks to meticulous work by curators at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, her
painful account of life in the Warsaw Jewish ghetto now stands as a moving testament
to a dark time. That work, which transformed the blackened fragments into a readable
document, was presented to scientists at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences
... more
Add a comment The
Last Supper - now how about a nice game of chess?
For centuries, it lay
unnoticed in one dusty private library after the next. Then just over a year ago
it was revealed to be a fabled volume - the only surviving copy of De Ludo Schacorum
by Luca Pacioli, the Franciscan friar and mathematician. Yesterday, a new claim
was put forward for the priceless, leather-bound manuscript: that its innovative
and idiosyncratic illustrations are by Leonardo Da Vinci ... more
Add a comment Bookseller
killed by falling books
Law Chi Wah, owner of the "Green Text Book Store"
in Hong Kong was killed when a shelf of approximately 20 boxes of books collapsed
on top of him. The tragic accident occurred at a small wharehouse. He was found
two weeks later buried under the fallen books ... more
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25.02.08.
AbeBooks Latest: Rare Books $10 and up
"We have added a feature to the
Rare Book Room search that automatically pre-selects the price range to show only
books priced at $10.00 and over." Now their same loose definition of 'bookseller'
is being applied to 'rare' ... more
Add a comment Children's
book bans challenged
Out of Reach - the forbidden bookshelf is a new event
organised by Wellington City Libraries and the Wellington Branch of the New Zealand
Society of Authors (NZSA). A week-long series of readings, displays and a celebrity
debate at Wellington libraries will focus on the theme of banned, restricted or
sanitised children's books ... more
Add a comment Online
auction listings down 13% in boycott of eBay
The biggest boycott by eBay
sellers concludes Monday, capping a week of acrimony after the online-auction
site raised fees and changed its feedback policy. Auction listings on eBay.com
dropped some 13% since the strike started Feb. 18 to about 13 million items, according
to third-party tracking sites such as dealscart.com and medved.net ... more
Add a comment Booksellers
flee Paris to create city of books
Paris is one of Europe's priciest cities,
which is why many of its booksellers fled south in search of affordable locations.
They found it in a picturesque village on the Loire River, now known as the "city
of books" ... more
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This
article is total bullshit. The guys who own the shops in La Charite have been
trying to lure dealers down there for years, without success. A dealer friend
considered it, but found the prospect of winter in that damp valley too much to
bear. In summer, it comes to life, briefly, but most of the year it's desolate,
with all the shops closed, and the others back in Paris - which is where the buyers
are. John Baxter. Paris 26.02.08. Indecipherable
ancient books found in Chongqing
The Tujia have been known as an ethnic
minority with its own spoken language but without a written language. Yet a succession
of ancient books in the same written language have been found in the Youyang Tujia
habitation straddling the borders of Hunan, Hubei, Guizhou Province, and Chongqing
City. For the past two years none have been able to read the ancient books ...
more
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23.02.08.
Narnia triumphs over Harry Potter
The Harry Potter series has been comprehensively
beaten in a poll of the best children's books of all time by a host of traditional
classics. The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, Winnie the Pooh and the Famous
Five all finished above the only Harry Potter book to make the top 50 ... more
Add a comment Shortlist
announced for the year's oddest book titles
Sick of seeing the same books
cropping up again and again on literary prize shortlists? Look no further than
the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year. The six-strong 2008 shortlist,
announced yesterday by the Bookseller magazine, features such esoteric gems as
Cheese Problems Solved, How to Write a How to Write Book and Are Women Human?
And Other International Dialogues (the curious will be disappointed to learn that
the author fails to provide a definitive answer) ... more
Add a comment Stolen
love letter author traced
A love letter to a World War II soldier stolen
by a burglar has been returned to its 98-year-old author. The letter posted 68
years ago was found dumped in the garden of an empty house in Potters Bar, Hertfordshire
... more
Add a comment Location
of Margaret Mitchell papers remain a mystery
A legal battle over prized
documents purportedly belonging to "Gone With the Wind" author Margaret Mitchell
has blown over, but the final resting place of the disputed papers is still a
secret. The legal sparring involving the cache — apparently discovered in a file
cabinet decades after they were written — was settled in January, but no one will
say where the trove of documents is now ... more
Add a comment Besotted
by books
If anyone in the United States is truly a book person, surely
it is Nicholas A. Basbanes. For two decades, the literary critic and columnist
has cast a fond, even loving eye, on the culture of books, their substance, their
wider meaning in society and the people who -- in ways similar and markedly different
-- share his passion. His intense engagement with all things bookish shines from
every page of his new collection of journalistic pieces, each one sparkling with
insights born of total immersion in his beloved subject ... more
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21.02.08.
Stolen map alert from the British Library
"I very much regret to report
that we have discovered the theft of 74 maps from ‘Description de l’Univers, contenant
les differentes systeÌmes du monde, les cartes ... de la geìographie ancienne
et moderne ... et les mœurs ... de chaque nation’ by MANESSON MALLET, Alain. (Paris,
1683). This is now the subject of a police investigation with the Arts and Antiques
Unit. We do not yet know when the maps were stolen, and as soon as I have more
information I will be in touch again." The crime number is 230 4414/08. Any information,
please, to: Judith Barnes, Collection Security Co-ordinator, 020 7412 7821 email.
Add a comment Doubts
over Blarney Stone talked down
The custodians of the Blarney Stone yesterday
disputed claims that pilgrims have been romancing the wrong stone ... more
Add a comment Book
lust
Every now and then, someone who is brilliant says something stupid
— often the result of spending too much time riding a jet stream of high praise.
Steve Jobs, the co-founder and chief executive of Apple Inc., did such a thing
last month when he all but declared the death of reading ... more
Add a comment David's
Books owner charged in theft probe
Prosecutors charged the owner of a
long-time Michigan used-book store and three other individuals in a book-selling
scheme that involved hundreds of stolen textbooks from a nearby store. Police
said in court Tuesday that the owner of David's Books requested a "shopping list"
of books from the three other suspects, and they stole the items for cash to feed
a heroin habit ... more
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20.02.08.
Supreme Court in Japan upholds Mapplethorpe
The Supreme Court of Japan
on Tuesday overruled a 2003 Tokyo High Court decision and decided that “Mapplethorpe,”
a book of erotic photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-89), shown at right
in a self-portrait, did not violate obscenity laws, The Associated Press reported
... more
Add a comment Queen's
death warrant copy saved
A copy of the warrant for the execution of Mary
Queen of Scots has been saved for the UK. The document has been acquired by the
library of the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth Palace for £72,485, with the
help of heritage bodies' donations ... more
Add a comment Seduced
by the power of historic books
There is nothing to match the smell of
old books. "Musty" is the cliché that comes to mind but there is something more
attractive, more refined about the perfume of ancient volumes. It's the same kind
of smell you find in Anglo-Saxon churches, the smell of wood pulp, of trees ...
more
Add a comment Former
archivist in USA faces 20 years for theft
The former chief archivist for
The Mariners' Museum made his first appearance in federal court Tuesday on charges
that he stole $160,000 worth of museum property and sold it on eBay. Lester Weber
worked at the museum from 2000 to 2006, rising from archivist to head of archives,
where he oversaw a variety of nautical materials. He was dismissed after museum
officials accused him of stealing museum pieces and selling them online. The museum
filed a $1.35 million civil suit against him in April 2007 ... more
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19.02.08.
Castro map of failed attack to be auctioned
Bernardo Viera Trejo still
remembers that sweltering summer day in 1955, when he and his then-friend Fidel
Castro met up shortly after the would-be revolutionary's release from prison.
Castro had attempted to overthrow the island's dictator, Fulgencio Batista, with
an assault on the Moncada military barracks in southeastern Cuba. He had failed
and spent the last two years behind bars. As the two chatted, Viera says Castro
drew a map of the doomed attack and signed it for his friend with a flourish ...
more
Add a comment Fragments
of world’s oldest Christian manuscript found
Fragments of the earliest
dated Christian literary manuscript have been found at Deir al-Surian, an ancient
monastery in the Egyptian desert. Dating from 411 AD, these were discovered under
a collapsed floor of a ninth-century tower. The fragments are from the final page
of a codex written in Syriac (an Eastern Aramaic language) which was acquired
by the British Museum library in the 19th century ... more
Add a comment Curious
JFK-related manuscript discovered in Dallas
A curious transcript purportedly
about President John F. Kennedy’s assassination has been discovered among boxes
of memorabilia that were long forgotten in an old safe at the Dallas County district
attorney’s office ... more
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18.02.08.
Potter fan sells off 553 first editions
An avid Harry Potter fan is putting
his collection of 553 first edition volumes in 63 languages up for auction. Tim
Toone, 33, began his bid to collect every Harry Potter book ever published in
October 2002, knowing it would be a sound investment ... more
Add a comment Top
authors to go digital with ebooks
The two biggest publishers in Britain
are to offer dozens of likely bestsellers to read on a hand-held screen this autumn
in a sign that, after many false dawns, the electronic “ebook” may finally have
arrived ... more
Add a comment 15th-century
manuscript on display
A 15th-century manuscript known as the “Book of
Enoch” is now on display at The Remnant Trust in downtown Jeffersonville, Indiana
... more
Add a comment Washington
museum exhibits imperial Mughal albums
The Mughal Empire ruled India from
the 16th through the 19th centuries, during which time remarkable paintings and
calligraphy were commissioned by Emperors Jahangir (1605-1627) and Shah Jahan
(1627-1658) for display in lavish imperial albums. A window into the world of
the emperors, these albums (called muraqqa' in Persian) illustrate the relaxed
private life of the imperial family, as well as Sufi saints and mystics, allies
and courtiers, and natural history subjects ... more
Add a comment Secrets
of Cambridge 'porn' library revealed
For decades generations of Cambridge
undergraduates have fantasised about a secret stash of Victorian pornography in
the university's library tower ... more
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15.02.08.
Massive unpublished Reagan archive to be auctioned
With letters affectionately
signed “Ronald Reagan,” “Ron” or “Dutch,” the lot features over 100 signed handwritten
missives and 35 signed typed letters written from various places including Los
Angeles, Sacramento, and Washington, D.C. Each was written to Zelda Multz, the
correspondence filed in many cases with its original transmittal envelopes, many
with hand annotations. The archive is expected to bring $100,000 - $150,000 on
Feb. 17 ... more
Add a comment The
creator of Howard the Duck dies
Steve Gerber, a cutting-edge comic-book
writer and creator best-known for Howard the Duck, the ill-tempered, cigar-smoking
Marvel Comics character whose adventures satirized American life in the 1970s,
has died. He was 60 ... more
Add a comment Collecting
autographs is signature move
The late author, Kurt Vonnegut, was responsible
for getting me started. He gave me the first autographed item in my collection.
On the title page of “Breakfast of Champions,” he inscribed “Peace and plenty
to my pal Jimmy.” Then he signed his name and added the date, Jan. 3, 1975 ...
more
Add a comment E-books
will never be our friends
The death of the traditional book has been predicted,
wrongly, from the very start of the digital revolution. This week, as British
publishers announced the further digitisation of their lists, the demise of the
book was announced yet again. The electronic book would replace the paper variety,
many of us believed, as surely as the grey squirrel has driven out the red. Yet
this has not happened: the printed book is the same object, in essence, that it
always was ... more
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14.02.08.
One Dealer’s Extraordinary Collection of Judaica
Judaica, a broader category
encompassing writings in varied languages, represents only about 5% of Bauman’s
business, but according to Erik DuRon, manager of the firm’s stately Madison Avenue
flagship, “We probably offer the largest selection of any retail bookseller.”
Indeed, on any given day, you can walk into Bauman’s New York shop and find several
hundred books and documents representing the spectrum of the Jewish experience
... more Add
a comment The
burning question
It is one of the most heated debates in contemporary
literature: should Vladimir Nabokov’s final and incomplete novel be destroyed,
as the author explicitly requested? ... more
Add a comment Rare
book draws pretty penny at local auction
As a collector of rare books
and first editions, defense attorney Bob Van Norman's tastes run more to mysteries,
legal works and infamous killings, but once bitten, the lure of a rare book is
hard to resist. So taunting, in fact, that Van Norman paid $4,250 for a flimsy,
soft-covered book at the Black Hills Stock Show Foundation's Old West Collectibles
Auction on Saturday, February 2nd ... more
Add a comment Mein
Kampf in pride of place on bookshop shelves
Hitler's notorious diary ‘Mein
Kampf' was translated into Indonesian in 2007. An immediate bestseller, it became
one of the top five favourites in the country. An employee from Narasi, the publishing
house that translated the text, explains why ... more
Add a comment Ginsberg
first recording found
"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed
by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets
at dawn," wrote Allen Ginsberg more then 50 years ago in what was to become the
epic poem of the Beat generation. Now what is believed to be the first ever recording
of the late poet reading Howl has been discovered in Oregon ... more
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12.02.08.
'Intimate' Queen Victoria letters head to auction
A Canadian antiquarian
is set to auction a remarkable set of letters written by Queen Victoria in which
the grief-stricken monarch confides her deep sorrow over the death of John Brown,
the Scottish royal aide whose close relationship with the widowed Queen sparked
rumours of a romance in the 19th century and inspired the hit film Mrs. Brown
in the 1990s ... more
Add a comment Novel
'returned' 47 years later
A Nottinghamshire man is presenting a library
with a new edition of a book he borrowed 47 years ago and loved too much to return
... more
Add a comment Publisher
experiments with free online books
Two competing visions of the future
went head-to-head online yesterday as HarperCollins and Random House launched
contrasting new experiments in book distribution on the same day ... more
Add a comment Upset
eBay users threaten boycott
Momentum is growing against eBay's changes
to the fees it charges to sellers and the way it handles feedback, with word of
a "strike" against the San Jose online auction company gaining traction ... more
Add a comment Tolkien
heirs sue Lord of the Rings studio for $150m
JRR Tolkien's estate is suing
the studio behind the Lord of the Rings trilogy and threatening to block production
on the planned prequel, The Hobbit over claims it has not been paid its share
of profits from the massively successful fantasy series ... more
Add a comment
11.02.08.
Zadie Smith sinks teeth into book awards
Zadie Smith, who has won awards
for her novels White Teeth and On Beauty, has launched a stinging attack on literary
prizes. “Most literary prizes are only nominally about literature,” reads a blog
signed by her. “They are really about brand consolidation for beer companies,
phone companies, coffee companies and even frozen food companies” ... more
Add a comment Domesday
Book conquered by the internet
It has taken 922 years, but the Domesday
Book has finally gone online. Most have heard of it but few have had the chance
to explore this treasure trove of feudal facts and figures ... more
Add a comment Leading
Indians campaign for exiled writer
Leading figures from Indian literature,
academia and the law announced a campaign last night to stop an exiled Bangladeshi
author, Taslima Nasrin, who has been accused of insulting Islam, from being expelled
from India ... more
Add a comment
08.02.08.
Mold hits Rare Book Library
The gem of the University of Illinois'
world-renowned library -- its Rare Book & Manuscript Library -- is infested with
mold and will be closed down for several months. About 15,000 books in the collection
have mold, library officials said. But the number could be higher, because that
includes only what's visible ... more
Add a comment US
author is UK library favourite
US thriller writer James Patterson has
become the UK's most borrowed author, with his books taken out of libraries 1.5
million times in 12 months ... more
Add a comment
Library’s acquisition reunites two manuscripts
After a century-long
separation, a 14th-century manuscript of the French love poem "Le Roman de la
Rose" was reunited with its mate at the University of Chicago Library ... more
Add a comment
07.02.08.
Blackwell links with Alibris
Academic bookseller Blackwell has signed
an agreement with used and second-hand online bookseller Alibris to offer consumers
a catalogue of more than 75 million books online ... more
Add a comment Titanic
ephemera at Bonhams & Butterfields
Within the Fine Books & Manuscripts
auction at Bonhams & Butterfields on Sunday, February 17, 2008 are five lots of
ephemera related to the infamous British luxury passenger liner RMS Titanic. Crowned
jewel of the White Star Liner at the time, the vessel sunk during its maiden voyage
in the early hours of April 15, 1912. Nearly 96-years later, the Titanic disaster,
mythology and items surrounding the tragic event have continued to fascinate millions
... more
Add a comment 'Anti-Semitic'
children's book faces ban
The German government is considering whether
to ban a children's book in which Jews are portrayed in a way likened to anti-Semitic
caricatures from the Nazi era ... more
Add a comment Book
thieves deserve more time
Four men currently serving 87-month sentences
for stealing rare books and manuscripts from the Transylvania University library
could receive additional prison time ... more
Add a comment
05.02.08.
48 hours in literary London
Got 48 hours to explore the literary haunts
of London? The British capital is a treasure trove of pubs, museums and hotels
steeped in booklore. Reuters correspondents with a mix of local knowledge give
tips on how to spend a short stay ... more
Add a comment Boy
A tops World Book Day poll
Jonathan Trigell's novel Boy A, about a young
man's struggle to adapt to life after prison, has topped a shortlist of Britain's
most discussion-worthy books ... more
Add a comment Spain
gets back stolen 15th century map
A stolen 15th century map dating to
the dawn of modern printing, a decade before Christopher Columbus sailed to America,
was returned to Spain on Monday. The map was discovered missing from Spain's National
Library in August, cut out of a 1482 edition of Claudius Ptolemy's "Cosmographia."
Fifteen other irreplaceable documents also disappeared. A Uruguayan-born researcher,
Cesar Gomez Rivero, was charged in the thefts ... more
Add a comment $150,000
for Hiroshima Bomber's Flight Logs?
A World War II file folder recording
the flights of Paul Tibbets, the U.S. pilot who led the atom- bomb raid on Hiroshima,
will be offered this month by Bonhams auction house in Los Angeles for as much
as $150,000 ... more
Add a comment Pieces
of history up for sale
When a Torah scroll is so faded or damaged that
it can no longer be used, Jewish law states that, like the dearly departed, it
is to be buried. But Spiritual Artifacts, a California-based company, hopes to
bring new life to presumed-dead Torahs by putting them on display for all to see
and offering them up for sale ... more
Add a comment
01.02.08.
Danish library to exhibit Mohammed cartoons
Denmark's Royal Library
is risking the wrath of Muslims with plans to display controversial cartoons of
the Prophet Mohammed that sparked violent protest throughout the Islamic world
two years ago. The 12 caricatures of Islam's founder were published in Danish
newspapers in September 2005 triggering riots and violence which claimed the lives
of over 50 people ... more
Add a comment The
Works collapses with debts of more than £20 million
Around 1,600 jobs
are at risk after The Works, the bargain bookseller, fell into administration
and became the latest high street victim of the credit crunch ... more
Add a comment German
children taught graphic truth about Nazis
German students were yesterday
given a colourful insight into the darkest chapter in 20th-century history, in
the form of a comic book on the Holocaust ... more
Add a comment Arts
Council pulls literature funding
In the face of appeals and threats of
legal action, Arts Council England has this morning confirmed it is to cut funding
from the independent publisher Dedalus Books and the east London literature centre,
Centerprise ... more
Add a comment Author
was 'murdered for wealth'
A reclusive millionaire author was murdered
by a man who stole his identity in order to plunder his wealth, the Old Bailey
has heard ... more
Add a comment | 
