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30.06.08.
Original
comic book art appreciates
Comic-book collectors like their numbers. They know that the first
issue of X-Men, which introduced Marvel's mutant superheroes, was
published in 1963 and had a cover price of 12 cents. They also know
that today a copy of that issue, in near mint condition, is worth
$16,500. (Parents, take note.)
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Durham hopes
to regain Gospels
Almost five centuries since Henry VIII's thugs looted Durham Cathedral
and stole the Lindisfarne Gospels, hopes are rising that this stunning
work of art may return to its spiritual home
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27.06.08.
Last act for
Hollywood memorabilia
A 3-million-piece collection of movie memorabilia at the Collector's
Book Store in Hollywood is moving to storage in Newbury Park before
being auctioned six months from now. The collection, housed in a
storefront on Hollywood Boulevard near the Pantages Theater, is
considered by some experts to be second in size only to that of
the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
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Thousands
of precious volumes vandalised
He's the dastardly villain from a librarian's worst nightmare, slashing
rare books with a razor and stealing priceless tomes off lenders'
shelves. Until the sleuthing skills of two American librarians helped
police nab James Lyman Brubaker, the 74-year-old Montana shyster
had stolen and vandalized thousands of irreplaceable books, including
a collection from the shelves at the University of Calgary
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Rodent urine
used to make books look 'ratted'
A prize-winning author of children's books has revealed an unsavoury
secret ingredient used to craft her latest work – rats' urine
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Rare Iraqi
Jewish books 'surface in Israel'
Some 300 rare and valuable books confiscated from Iraq's Jewish
community by Saddam Hussein's regime have been secretly spirited
into Israel, an Israeli newspaper reported on Friday
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Scottish
print history celebrated
An exhibition has been announced to celebrate five centuries of
Scottish print. Imprentit: 500 Years of the Scottish Printed Word
will be held at the National Library of Scotland. Visitors will
get the chance to view some of the library's vast and rare collection
of print
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26.06.08.
Stillwater
Booktown
I'm writing this too late: Booktown has now mostly disbanded. Gary
Goodman, who owns St. Croix Antiquarian Booksellers, pointed across
the street. "There used to be thirty-two booksellers in that building,"
he said. Now, like much of historic downtown Stillwater, it's an
antique mall. Goodman then began to count in his head the number
of tomes that used to fill the stores by the St. Croix. "I think
there used to be five-hundred-thousand books in the Stillwater area,"
he tallied
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Bond Bound:
Ian Fleming and the Art of Cover Design
Staged to mark the 100th anniversary of Fleming's birth, the exhibition
includes film posters, letters and previously unseen archive material.
However, the book covers give the greatest insight into how attitudes
to Bond – and to sex and violence – have shifted over the past half-century
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Knighthood
goes to author Rushdie
Author Salman Rushdie has been knighted by the Queen in London for
his services to literature. Muslims around the world condemned the
award when it was announced last year in the Monarch's Birthday
Honours list
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24.06.08.
New lease
of life for ancient manuscripts
Ancient Persian manuscripts that say heart disease was first recognised
in the Indian subcontinent and others are up for preservation and
a new lease of life at Jamia Millia Islamia
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Asiatic Society
to reprint rare Ogilby work
About a century before Robert Clive laid the foundation of British
rule in India a cartographer of exceptional talent was burning midnight
oil to draw detailed maps of Mughal India and Persia showing interior
roads connecting cities, towns and villages, which turned out to
be the blueprint for future conquest by the British
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There's fun
to be had exploring second-hand bookshops
(Miles Kington Remembered - first published June 6th 1994) The other
day I went into my local second-hand bookshop in the country and
found it had been hijacked. Gone were the old occupants – two scholarly
gentlemen who seemed to be boarding-school masters of a bygone age,
and who sold you books as if they were homework and you were a moderately
promising pupil – and in their place were two elegant and attractive
middle-aged ladies who were busy unpacking books
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Piranesi
on view
Until August 30th, you can see The printed works of Giovanni Battista
Piranesi (1720-1778) on display in a summer exhibition at Robert
Frew, 8 Thurloe Place, London SW7
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20.06.08.
An Interview
With AbeBooks CEO, Dr. Hannes Blum
AbeBooks.com is one of the world's leading marketplaces for new,
used, rare, and out of print books with over 13,000 vendors offering
over 110 million books. Michael Lieberman of Book Patrol recently
had a chance to interview their CEO, Dr. Hannes Blum
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We were with ABE from 1999, until they
said they proposed to charge us for processing card transactions.
I emailed to ask why they were doing this. They said it was to make
the site more secure for customers. I said they were entitled to
do as they wished with their own site, but should not expect people
like us - shopkeeping booksellers with their own card processing
facilities - to pay for this, as we already paid terminal rental,
card company commission and bank charges on these transactions.
No satisfactory response was received, so we left the site.
Last year, I bought a book for my wife
via the ABE site. When it arrived it contained a pro forma invoice
with a message along these lines - "With 100 million books on our
site, if it's not on ABE, it doesn't exist" WHAT ARROGANCE!! We
have books which are not, and will not appear on any internet website,
and wonder whether this extravagant claim of ABE's is outside the
spirit of the Trades Description Act. - Gordon Hill 21.06.08.
Outside the spirit of the law certainly,
but knowing ABE I'd be very surprised if it were outside the letter
of the law. - TBG 21.06.08.
Early phone
book fetches $170,000 at auction
An 1878 New Haven telephone book that was one of the first directories
in the country has been sold for $170,500 at Christie's auction
house in New York
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Blackwell's
to launch 'clicks and bricks' book retailing
Blackwell's is to become the first high-street bookseller in the
UK to offer print-on-demand books while customers wait. The innovation
will be delivered by an "Espresso Book Machine" (EBM), which can
print and bind any one of a million titles
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19.06.08.
Why I hate
second-hand books
Second-hand books have never been more popular. But to me the thought
of a dog-eared, mucus-smeared paperback is too much to bear
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Harry Potter
breaks 400m in sales
The sales figures for the Harry Potter series have long dwarfed
that of most other books, excepting of course the Bible, but with
news that JK Rowling's magical tales have topped 400m worldwide,
it seems possible that the boy wizard might be catching up
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Bibliotherapy
As a kindergartener I often sought refuge just outside the classroom
door. There I pressed myself against the hulking blue milk machine,
with its cool, comforting hum, thinking myself hidden from my rambunctious
classmates and gentle teacher. Were I that
child today, I would be labeled, medicated, placed in a special
classroom. But in 1971 I was fortunate, waved off as a solitary
child, a four-year-old bookworm already in glasses
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18.06.08.
Edwardian
autograph hunter's history book
An autograph book compiled by a 13-year-old from his hospital bed
in 1902, containing the signatures of the great and the good including
the cricketer WG Grace and Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the
Scout movement, and is to go up for auction tomorrow
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Science books
bring astronomical prices
A copy of astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus' masterwork, printed in
1543, went for the out-of-this-world price of $2.2 million on Tuesday
at a New York sale of about 300 books of scientific significance,
according to the Christie's auction house
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Missing comics
caper
Five supervaluable comic books — including those that introduced
Superman and Batman — vanished after being shipped with other comics
to a Blue Springs dealer, according to a lawsuit filed recently
in Jackson County Circuit Court. The dealer, however, says the comics
never existed or were stolen before he received the shipment
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17.06.08.
A mountain
of books for school children
Rotary International hopes to make the Guinness Book of World Records
this week -- not by moving a mountain, but by building one. The
organization hopes to collect a mountain of 250,000 books at the
L.A. Convention Center during its convention this week
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Hogarth's
House gets revamp
A rare manuscript written by celebrated William Hogarth, never before
on public display, will be the star attraction of the artist’s restored
Chiswick home, a Grade 1 listed building owned by Hounslow Council
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UK experts
on Indian digitization project team
ecently librarians and scholars from the University of Kentucky
and the International Dunhuang Project at The British Library visited
Imphal, the capital of the state of Manipur in northeast India,
to study the state's endangered manuscripts. The fact-finding team,
which included three UK experts, visited on behalf of a consortium
working on the DigitizeManipur project
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The web time
forgot
Historians typically trace the origins of the World Wide Web through
a lineage of Anglo-American inventors like Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart
and Ted Nelson. But more than half a century before Tim Berners-Lee
released the first Web browser in 1991, Paul Otlet (pronounced ot-LAY)
described a networked world where “anyone in his armchair would
be able to contemplate the whole of creation”
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13.06.08.
State renews
efforts to bring manuscript collection home
The State of Israel plans to renew its efforts to retrieve the world's
second-largest collection of ancient Jewish manuscripts from Russia.The
collection includes 14,000 books, 45 incunabula (books published
in the 14th century at the start of the printing era), more than
2,000 Hebrew manuscripts and 1,000 Arabic manuscripts
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Judas was
really a bad guy
Back in 2006, it was presented as a break-through document that
would change the entire Christianity. Two years later, though, most
experts agree that the so-called Gospel of Judas depicts the unfaithful
apostle as exactly that: a traitorous, selfish, and fallen human
being
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Outsider
artist's disturbing tales
The tiny, unkempt recluse spent 54 years in the most menial of hospital
jobs. In his off hours, he attended Catholic Mass — as many as five
times some Sundays — and rummaged through garbage cans. But most
of his time was spent in a tiny, cluttered apartment, where he could
be heard talking to himself in a bewildering array of voices while
pecking away at an ancient typewriter
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12.06.08.
Potter prequel
earns £25,000 for PEN and dyslexia
An 800-word prequel to the Harry Potter series, handwritten and
signed by JK Rowling, sold for £25,000 on Tuesday night at a charity
auction in central London. The card was one of 13 original A5 storycards
donated by literary luminaries including Doris Lessing and Richard
Ford to benefit English PEN and Dyslexia Action, which together
raised a total of £47,150
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Paddington
returns
Michael Bond, who has just published his first new story for more
than 30 years, had immigrants in his tales from the start. Not only
is the duffel-coat-wearing protagonist a stowaway from "Darkest
Peru", but one of his closest friends is also an incomer: Mr Gruber,
the antiques dealer who shares elevenses with the bear every morning,
is Hungarian ... more
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Keep your
Internet; we want books
75 percent of kids age 5-17 agree with the statement, “No matter
what I can do online, I’ll always want to read books printed on
paper,” and 62% of kids surveyed say they prefer to read books printed
on paper rather than on a computer or a handheld device ... more
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Should we
care about book reviews?
Reading is a personal act - so why submit to the critical tyranny
of the newspaper books pages? ... more
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World's oldest
Bible on display
The oldest existing book of the Bible is currently on display at
the Israel Museum's Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem ... more
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10.06.08.
Potter prequel
to be auctioned
Harry Potter author JK Rowling's prequel to the schoolboy wizard
saga is to be auctioned today at Waterstone's bookshop ... more
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Among scientific
treasures, a gem
One thing you can say about the copy of Nicolaus Copernicus’s book
“De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium” (“On the Revolutions of the
Celestial Spheres”), on sale next week at Christie’s auction house,
is that it looks and feels old ... more
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Austen's
very own Mr Darcy
Thomas Langlois Lefroy is thought to have inspired the Jane Austen's
best-known hero. As a portrait of him is auctioned, Ciar Byrne charts
a youthful flirtation that became immortalised on the page ... more
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Artfully
arranged books bring life to a room
Reading books can be an unrivalled pleasure. Staring at them in
piles around your home, not so much. Instead of storing those books
spine-out, in a typical rectangular bookshelf, experts and designers
recommend creative arrangements, reimagined shelves and unconventional
uses for bound volumes ... more
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09.06.08.
Oldest phone
directory for sale
It's the world's first and the only copy known to exist. A 20-page
directory of 391 names – but no numbers – of subscribers in and
around New Haven, Conn., it dates back to November 1878, only two
years after Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. The book
goes under the hammer June 17 by Christie's in New York. The auction
house expects it to sell for between $30,000 and $40,000 ... more
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Written on
the body: literary tattoos
What we seek to do when we cut literature into our flesh is to make
something metaphysical physical. We take tattooed literature into
ourselves in the most superficial of ways, inscribing rather than
imbibing its significance. Put another way, lit tats really are
only skin deep, vainglorious and shallow all at once.
And yet, and yet - some of those literary
tattoos really are fine. Would you be tempted? Have you already
bled for the lines you love? What and where? I'll show you mine
if you show me yours ... more
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Half of pre-Gutenberg
scientific manuscripts are Iranian
Iran National Library and Archives (INLA) director Ali-Akbar Ash’ari
is convinced that 90 percent of the world’s scientific manuscripts
before the advent of the publishing industry came from the Islamic
world and 50 percent of them belong to Iran ... more
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Books, tears
and blood
Saad Eskander, director of Baghdad's national library, wants to
'help Iraqis understand their past and build their future' through
education. The former Kurdish fighter tells Stuart Jeffries why
culture is the key, why the US must surrender looted papers - and
why he refuses to have a bodyguard ... more
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05.06.08.
Poster designer
for 60s counterculture, is dead
Alton Kelley, whose psychedelic concert posters for artists like
the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, and Big Brother and the Holding
Company helped define the visual style of the 1960s counterculture,
died on Sunday at his home in Petaluma, California He was 67 ...
more
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Ah Haa founder
celebrates 35 years of bookmaking
In this brave new world of technology, books, like printed magazines
and newspapers, could soon be keeping company with polar bears,
whooping cranes, and black-footed ferrets on the list of endangered
species. On the other hand, Daniel Tucker, a maverick, blows raspberries
at such trends: the fine art books he is still making involve no
fewer than 5,000 steps, 1,000 in the binding process alone... more
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Library bosses
confess
The Stourbridge Library books found dumped in a skip were thrown
away to clear the backlog resulting from a decade's worth of poor
stock management, according to library bosses ... more
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Dickens'
desk sells for almost $850,000 at auction
Christie's auction house says the writing desk and chair Charles
Dickens used to write "Great Expectations" has sold for just over
$850,000 ... more
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04.06.08.
When Hemingway
turned his hand to verse
Hemingway scribbled two poems - unpublishable at the time because
of their rudeness - in the 1925 first edition of In Our Time for
his lifelong friend and drinking buddy Jack Cowles. The volume's
current owner, Mark Hime, said: "We're not talking TS Eliot here."
Hime, who owns California-based bookseller Biblioctopus, is selling
the edition for £75,000 ... more
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New 007 book
breaks sales record
New James Bond novel Devil May Care has become book publisher Penguin's
fastest-selling hardback fiction title. The book, written by Sebastian
Faulks, sold 44,093 copies in its first four days of publication
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Age banding
'ill-conceived and damaging'
Publishers' plans to introduce age ranging guidance onto children's
books have met with fierce opposition from authors including Philip
Pullman, Anne Fine and Michael Rosen ... more
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Center helps
revitalize used-book district
Japan - Since it opened in Kanda-Jimbocho, Chiyoda Ward, in October,
an unexpectedly large number of people have visited the Book and
Town Information Center, which acts as a hub for the wide variety
of shops selling rare and secondhand books in the area. Used-book
dealers in the district hope that a photo exhibition on the town
being held at the center will attract even more visitors ... more
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The book
collection that devoured my life
Why it's so hard to let go of books in a language I can't read...
or duplicate copies of 'True Tales from the Annals of Crime and
Rascality'... or Tijuana sailors' pornography ... more
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03.06.08.
Old New York's
favorite filthy newspapers
The American Antiquarian Society has put together a book called
The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York, and those
sporting male weeklies make our modern-day tabloids and lad mags
look like they're put together by a bunch of kittens and marketed
to little girls.
They are called The Flash Press after The
Flash, a weekly founded by a drunk Bostonian named William Snelling.
He wrote a poem about how much he hated all the other poets in the
nation, then moved to New York to spend more time at brothels. Eventually
he founded that four-page weekly paper, dedicated to "Awful Developments,
Dreadful Accidents and Unexpected Exposures ... more
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Amazon kindles
hope after e-reader interest explodes
As this year's BookExpo, the US publishing industry's largest annual
trade fair, came to a close in Los Angeles, there was one word on
everyone's lips: Kindle. For the few who haven't yet heard, the
Kindle is Amazon's branded digital book reader, currently selling
on amazon.com for $359 (£178), which launched in the US last November
and is restricted to the American market ... more
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BookRabbit:
Putting the 'book' in Facebook
A new social network aimed at readers offers a modern twist on an
old-fashioned pleasure ... more
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Jan Morris
remarries wife she wed as a man
The civil partnership ceremony took place nearly 60-years after
the author married the woman, who was to become her life-long companion,
and more than 30-years after they divorced ... more
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Why do rare
books appeal to collectors?
Rare book collections rarely get the attention that, say, rare car
collections or fine art pieces garner. The world of book collecting
is a more intimate experience, you might say. But as appetites are
whetted, the collectors must have more -- it almost never fails
... more
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