|
24.12.08.
No news today ...
A happy Christmas and peaceful New Year to all our readers,
contributors and friends -- I will be back on January 2nd.
23.12.08.
Website to showcase author's work
Thanks to Hollywood,
Robert Louis Stevenson is reduced to three works - Treasure Island,
Kidnapped and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.Yet he was so much more, with
a back catalogue in a career, tragically cut short by illness, which
included poetry, children's books, travel writing, historical novels
and literary essays ... more
Add
a comment
New European
online library re-opens
The European
Union's new Europeana digital library reopened on Tuesday after
crashing within hours of its launch last month due to surging interest.
European Commission spokesman Martin Selmayr said the website was
working after its server capacity had been quadrupled and it had
been stress-tested to deal with user interest ... more
Add
a comment
US to mount
Khayyam exhibition
The Persian Sensation:
The 'Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in the West will display 200 items
related to Khayyam's rubaiyat, a collection of quatrains (four-line
poems) ... more
Add
a comment
You never
know what you’ll find in a book
We may never
fully understand what prompts people to leave unusual objects inside
books. I speak of the slice of fried bacon that the novelist Reynolds
Price once found nestled within the pages of a volume in the Duke
University library ... more
Add
a comment
22.12.08.
Christmas: A Dickens of a time
Cheer and churchgoing,
feasting and dancing, drinking and kissing, bonhomie and benevolence.
If these are the things we think of when we think of Christmas,
then we've got the Victorian era's greatest novelist to thank, argues
John Walsh ... more
Add
a comment
Rare Sylvia
Plath book found in charity shop
A rare book of
Sylvia Plath poems was discovered in a box of books handed into
a charity shop in Glasgow. Eddy Steel, manager of the Oxfam shop,
spotted the the first edition of "Ariel" as he sorted through an
anonymous donation of books ... more
Add
a comment
Poet Adrian
Mitchell dies at 76
Poet, playwright
and children's author Adrian Mitchell has died at the age of 76,
it has been announced ... more
Add
a comment
Rare book
of holy land pictures unearthed
A complete version
of The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt And Nubia by David
Roberts was found by volunteers at the Yorkshire Museum.The six
volume body of work was made into three books and the set is one
of only 400 copies of the first edition ever made - with other copies
having been owned by Queen Victoria and the Tsar of Russia ... more
Add
a comment
19.12.08.
French court OKs "Les Miserables" sequels
A French appeals
court has ruled that two modern-day sequels to Victor Hugo's classic
"Les Miserables" do not constitute a threat to the integrity of
the novel or the moral rights of its 19th century author ... more
Add
a comment
Your local
library needs you
In what may be
one of his last good deeds as poet laureate, Andrew Motion has fired
off a warning shot against the possibility of library closures ...
more
Add
a comment
Stolen Spanish
manuscripts recovered – 70 years on
Guardia Civil
officers have recovered hundreds of manuscripts and documents by
a 1930s writer about the Revolution of Asturias that have, as yet,
never come to light ... more
Add
a comment
18.12.08.
MPs accuse courts of allowing libel tourism
Lawyers and judges
were accused by MPs yesterday of using “Soviet-style” English libel
laws to help the rich and powerful to hide their secrets ... more
Add
a comment
Book sale
'delight' for Rowling
Harry Potter
author JK Rowling has said she is "delighted" her latest book has
made £4m for charity ... more
Add
a comment
Father wins
apology over daughter's book
A father yesterday
accepted a public apology and donations to charity from the publisher
of a book in which his daughter accused him of "monstrous behaviour"
during her childhood ... more
Add
a comment
Vatican approves
iTunes prayer book
The Vatican has
approved a computerised prayerbook for a new generation of gadget-loving
Roman Catholic priests. It has sanctioned the sale of the "iBreviary"
– the book of prayers, readings and services used by priests every
day ... more
Add
a comment
Blake retrospective:
Tate stages 1809 show
Even by today's
sometimes vicious standards, the visionary artist William Blake
received a critical bludgeoning for his first and only one-man show
... more
Add
a comment
16.12.08.
Stoker's signature work could fetch toothsome £20,000
A rare first
edition signed copy of the classic horror novel Dracula, presented
to one of Cambridge's greatest scientists, is expected to fetch
up to £20,000 at an auction tomorrow ... more
Add
a comment
Bettie Page,
dead since 1957
What might be
remembered of the life of a woman who was long ago replaced by her
own representation? ... more
Add
a comment
"The Wind
in the Willows" at 100
Mole, Rat, Toad
and Badger kept me up late reading as a kid. Now I love Kenneth
Grahame's classic even more ... more
Add
a comment
15.12.08.
Final chapter for book reviews?
In America, the
decline of the literary pages has been lamented for some years.
The National Book Critics Circle, launching "a campaign to save
book reviews", reported that they had been "cut back or slashed
altogether, moved, winnowed, filled with more wire copy, or generally
treated as expendable". The New Republic magazine has called it
"a kind of betrayal" from inside the print industry.
A former editor of the Boston Review, Gail
Pool, has written a whole book about it (widely reviewed, as it
happens), suggesting that, in its effects on literary habitats,
the decline of good book reviewing - and its replacement by popular
opinion on blogs - is comparable to the effects of pesticides on
wildlife ... more
Add
a comment
New Burns
poems discovered alongside 'rude' letters
His love might
have been like a red red rose, but it turns out that Robert Burns
may also have been suffering from a rather nasty STD, according
to a collection of explicit writing apparently by Scotland's national
bard, due to go on sale in January 2009 ... more
Add
a comment
Libraries
close to crisis, says UNISON
The largest public
sector union UNISON will today (15th December) launch a "Defend
the Public Library Service" campaign, saying that the service is
"nearing a crisis point". The union said its report, "Taking Stock:
The Future of Our Public Library Service", demonstrated a "dramatic"
change to the service in recent years through library closures,
cuts to funding and de-skilling of the librarian's role ... more
Add
a comment
12.12.08.
Signs of dispute on Moscow's Solzhenitsyn Street
Locals opposed
to renaming of road in writer's memory tear down signs and demand
old communist name back ... more
Add
a comment
Long-lost
Larkin readings to be released in January
After gathering
dust on a shelf for more than 20 years, recordings of Philip Larkin
reading from his poetry are to be published for the first time next
month by Faber & Faber ... more
Add
a comment
Christian
group's poetry protest
Around 250 Christian
activists have protested outside the Welsh assembly building about
a poetry reading ... more
Add
a comment
11.12.08.
Google book search now features magazines
Google Book Search,
the online service that allows users to freely browse and read many
uncopirighted books, recently added to its databases a vast array
of magazines that is now free to browse and adds some interesting
additional features, such as the ability to subscribe to future
issues of the magazine ... more
Add
a comment
Many lie
over books 'to impress'
Nearly half of
all men and one-third of women have lied about what they have read
to try to impress friends or potential partners, a survey suggests
... more
Add
a comment
Africa expressed
Photographs of
the continent taken over the last 150 years make for fascinating
- if often uncomfortable - viewing ... more
Add
a comment
Bye-bye RARE?
On Monday Ian
Kahn reported on his blog
that the RARE
Book Review magazine had folded. Despite the latest news on the
website being dated December 11th (women bares all at Bernard J
Shapero’s gallery) the magazine subscription link doesn't work and
the phones are constantly engaged. As a longtime subscriber, I was
wondering why I hadn't received the December 2008/January 2009 issue
... Add
a comment
Book &
Magazine Collector changes hands
A note in subscribers copies of the Christmas issue of B&MC
introduced them to the magazine's new publisher, Warner
Group Publications, where the magazine will become part of the
Collecters
Club of Great Britain stable of titles.
10.12.08.
Rowling's book flies off shelves
JK Rowling's
The Tale of Beedle the Bard is on course to become the fastest-selling
book of 2008 in the UK. The Harry Potter author's collection of
fairytales has shifted close to 370,000 copies in its first week
on sale ... more
Add
a comment
High street
book sales fall sharply
High street book
sales are plummeting as discounting, the growth of internet operators
such as Amazon and dwindling consumer spending hits retailers from
Waterstones to WH Smith ... more
Add
a comment
The British
Library improves security
Electronic key
management specialist Traka has provided the British Library with
a key control system for some of its important historical collections
... more
Add
a comment
09.12.08.
Random US offers books for free on iPhone
Random House
titles are now available to download and read on the Apple iPhone
for free. Through Lexcycle's Stanza – the electronic book reader
for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch – users can select from a variety
of e-books published by Random House and Ballantine ... more
Add
a comment
Belafonte to auction Martin Luther King documents
A handwritten
outline of Martin Luther King Jr.'s first speech condemning the
Vietnam War, a war he described as depriving the U.S. of "moral
principle," is to go on the auction block in New York this week
... more
Add
a comment
Matchbox
museum opens
A Thai boy’s
fascination with collecting the tiny art on matchboxes grew into
a 70-year passion now open to the public ... more
Add
a comment
And for his
next trick ...
The house is
a four-bedroom Victorian semi with no beds. Only books. They teeter
in piles, bend bookcases, bury any surface and are boxed up in the
loft. Grey filing cabinets proliferate, while the sweeping curves
of at least six double basses appear conspicuous among all the right
angles.
The house's owner, Gordon Bruce, sleeps
on a mattress in the second bedroom, being now unable to make his
way into the main bedroom because it is so crammed full.
There are coffee tables that have never
seen a cup of coffee, only piles of yet more books. The kitchen
is in disarray and the other day Bruce found a fox sitting in one
of the rooms, near the window. How it got there is anyone's guess.
"It's chaos," he says, with a rueful shake of his head ... more
Add
a comment
08.12.08.
Jan Tschichold: a titan of typography
The man who perfected
Penguin's classic paperback deserves to be remembered as one of
the great designers of the 20th century ... more
Add
a comment
Botanical
atrocities
So once again,
the Massachusetts Horticultural Society is teetering on the brink
and has turned to selling off rare books to make ends meet (or more
accurately, pay their **creditors** 30 cents on the dollar) ...
more
Add
a comment
Shakespeare
and Dickens brought to life on Nintendo
Computer games
players will soon be able to enjoy the work of literary greats such
as Shakespeare and Dickens on portable games consoles ... more
Add
a comment
Memorabilia
of boxing champion up for sale
Heavyweight boxing
champion Gene Tunney was famous for twice defeating rival Jack Dempsey.
What isn't well known is that he loved Shakespeare and counted such
literary giants as Ernest Hemingway and George Bernard Shaw among
his friends. Tunney's unusual life of boxing and books will be on
display on Thursday in an auction of his memorabilia by Sotheby's
in New York ... more
Add
a comment
Stolen Newton
first edition gravitates back home
A Swedish university
has been reunited with a first edition copy of Isaac Newton's Philosophiæ
Naturalis Principia Mathematica some forty years after the book
was stolen from from its collection ... more
Add
a comment
Wilde's earliest
letter to Bosie found after 50 years
A collection
of letters and manuscripts by Oscar Wilde, seemingly lost for more
than 50 years have been rediscovered by academics ... more
Add
a comment
05.12.08.
First edition of Anne of Green Gables sells
A first edition
of Anne of Green Gables sold at a Christie's auction in New York
for $8,125 US on Friday morning. The sale price was at the lower
end of the $8,000 US to $12,000 US Christie's expected to get for
the 1908 novel by Canadian author L. M. Montgomery ... more
Add
a comment
Publishers
angry at plans to hit criminals' memoirs
The books world
is up in arms over the government's decision to go ahead with legislation
to prevent criminals from making money from the stories of their
crimes, calling it an attack on freedom of expression that would
be unworkable to implement ... more
Add
a comment
Morgan Library
& Museum rare bookbindings
Protecting the
Word: Bookbindings of the Morgan, on view from December 5, 2008,
through March 29, 2009, presents a selection of outstanding works
from the collection. Highlights include a bejeweled eighth-century
binding used on the famous Lindau Gospels, a magnificent seventh-to-eighth–century
Coptic work, and a seventeenth-century English Bible and prayer
book in stump work embroidery. Together, these and approximately
50 additional works in the exhibition, demonstrate the skill and
artistry of bookbinding at its finest ... more
Add
a comment
A book made
for 100,000 Euros
A day after the
official declaration of a national recession, visitors journeyed
to the New York Public Library from Atlanta, Palm Beach, Fla., White
Plains and Queens to see a $126,000 coffee-table book that is actually
the size of a coffee table ... more
Add
a comment
Renowned
book collector dies
Helmut Friedlaender,
a book-loving lawyer and financial adviser whose quietly assembled
collection of early printed books and illuminated manuscripts caused
a stir in bibliophilic circles when it went to auction, died on
Tuesday in Yarmouth, Maine. He was 95 and lived in Manhattan ...
more
Add
a comment
04.12.08.
Atlases, Maps Stolen in London
PhiloBiblos has
posted a list of atlases and maps reported stolen from the offices
of one of Bernard Shapero's clients on November 27th ... more
Add
a comment
"Collect
books by writers you love"
I went through
a short period about two years ago of being obsessed with first
editions. I come from a collecting background: my dad collects Dinky
Toys and my mum throughout her life has collected, first, children
books, then golfing memorabilia (please don't ask) ... more
Add
a comment
Publisher
demands return of free books
A leading publisher
is demanding the return of free children's books after a school
announced it was closing its library in favour of "virtual learning"
... more
Add
a comment
On the roll:
Kerouac manuscript exhibited
The original
manuscript of one of the most important American novels of the last
century, Jack Kerouac's On the Road, went on display in the UK for
the first time yesterday. Kerouac wrote it in just three weeks,
furiously tapping away on his typewriter on 3.6-metre (12ft) reels
of paper ... more
Add
a comment
02.12.08.
Who's ever heard Virginia Woolf?
Hearing the voice
of a long-dead writer adds another dimension to a reader's connection
with an author's work, not profound, but intimate ... more
Add
a comment
Bond book
could make £50,000
A unique copy
of a classic James Bond book with a message from author Ian Fleming
to "the real James Bond" written inside is expected to fetch £50,000
in an auction ... more
Add
a comment
Documentary
to lay bare 'Narnia Code'
CS Lewis included
a secret code in the Chronicles of Narnia linking each story to
a planet, according to a BBC documentary to be aired next Easter
... more
Add
a comment
Surviving
the depression as a rare bookseller
A little something
to cheer up an iron cold day - via Lux Mentis ... more
Add
a comment
01.12.08.
Christmas books: photography
This has been
a good year for photography books about America. Helen Levitt's
images of the working-class neighbourhoods of New York and Chicago
stretch back to the Thirties. I have never seen work with such an
eye for gesture and form. Some of her subjects seem to dance past
each other on the street. Others are so engrossed in their activities
- hunching over a newspaper, scrabbling under a car - that they
seem to have crumpled into deformity ... more
Add
a comment
Struggling
booksellers fall into the tourist trap
They salvaged
books from raids on aristocrats' libraries during the French revolution
and hid resistance material during the Nazi occupation. Paris's
bouquinistes - the hundreds of booksellers whose open-air stalls
along the river Seine carry Unesco world heritage status - have
survived four centuries of censorship, floods and political upheaval.
But now they are under threat from a new enemy: cheap, plastic Eiffel
towers ... more
Add
a comment
Literary
treasure peeks into revolutionary era
It has survived
wars, pestilence, religious reformation and the scribbled notes
of unknown priests. Yet, the five-century-old Breviarium Ratisponense
remains remarkably intact on the 12th floor of the University of
Calgary's MacKimmie Library ... more
Add
a comment
The treasures
of the York Minster Library
It is the smell
that hits you first. Musty, rich, the smell of ages. The smell of
old books, thousands of them. Antonio Jimenez smiles delightedly
at the expression on our faces ... more
Add
a comment
| 
