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.

14.12.04  Wolfe scoops Bad Sex award. As predicted in the Observer's review of the book last month, Tom Wolfe's latest novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons (Jonathan Cape), has picked up this year's Literary Review Bad Sex award...more  Add a comment.

14.12.04  Rare books may come to Google. Google Inc. is trying to establish an online reading room for five major libraries by scanning stacks of hard-to-find books into its widely used Internet search engine...more  Add a comment.

13.12.04  English Civil War books on suface. A small strongroom in the basement of the Home Office has yielded a treasure trove of documents about the turbulent events of the English Civil War. Historians will soon be able to study the 1,700 pamphlets for the first time, after the department officially gives them to the British Library today...more  Add a comment.

13.12.04  'Perfect mystery' of Conan Doyle biographer's death plot. He devoted his life to the murder mysteries of super sleuth Sherlock Holmes. But his death earlier this year was to become an unsolved riddle that could have come straight from the pen of his fictional hero's creator...more  Add a comment.

13.12.04  Dickens, Hardy and Maugham are homeless in Kashmir. India, Srinagar - When an old bookshop closed down some months ago for want of customers, cynics said the Valley's umbilical cord with reading as a pleasure pursuit had been snapped...more  Add a comment.

12.12.04  Amazing discovery. In 1886, Lucy Bigelow Mann donated a printer's copy of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter" with its pages covered by curious scribblings to the organization that became the Natick Historical Society.
    The gift remained in a drawer at the society's offices for 118 years until trustee Roger Casavant recognized it as the earliest existing copy of Hawthorne's dark masterpiece.
    Now, what scholars call a "unique literary treasure" could bring the Natick Historical Society more than $250,000 in an auction next week...more  Add a comment.

12.12.04  Hollywood's sale of the century. A unique collection of memorabilia from Chaplin’s films and life form part of a remarkable auction of treasures encompassing almost 100 years of cinema, television and radio taking place at Christie’s in London on 14 December...more  Add a comment.

12.12.04  Real Bridget Jones's Diary to Be Published.  A Bridget Jones-style pocket diary detailing the highs and lows of a young woman in the roaring 1920s is to be published, it emerged today. The leather-bound diary, written in pencil, was kept by 17-year-old Ilene Powell in 1925 and was discovered among donations to a Bristol charity shop...more  Add a comment.

11.12.04  Largest sale of entertainment memorabilia ever?  Part of the collection is a letter Kurt Cobain wrote to Courtney Love in 1991 while he was hallucinating on acid. Christie's said it could go for an estimated $12,000 to $14,000...more  Add a comment.

11.12.04  Art Nouveau beauties. New York - The images are fanciful, from cherubs pouring champagne to dancing ladies with swirling skirts and fluttering fans. Collectors may very well want to stop by Swann Auction Galleries for a look at these scenes featured in an exhibition that opens Saturday in advance of the Dec. 16 sale of Rare & Important Art Nouveau Posters...more  Add a comment.

11.12.04  Joyce's buns come to a sticky end. Bewley's - once described by the Irish poet Brendan Kennelly as "the heart and hearth of Dublin" - has closed, another victim of rising rents and changing tastes in the Irish capital.
    Goodbye to romantic memories of sitting in front of the fire and gazing dreamily out into an eiderdown of fog. Goodbye to the ghost of James Joyce, licking his fingers over sticky buns and drinking the only cup of coffee in the country that didn't taste like heated-up bog water...more  Add a comment.

10.12.04  British Library's Online Page Turner Takes Top Award. Ground breaking British Library technology has taken a top prize at The International Information Industry Awards in London. Loyd Grossman presented the Best User Experience award to the Library for its Turning the Pages (TTP) system, which enables users to digitally turn the pages of priceless rare books online...more  Add a comment.

09.12.04  Is this the book that changed your life?  Monica Ali explains why Pride and Prejudice deserved to top a Woman's Hour poll as the book that has most changed the way women see themselves. But Jenny Colgan is horrified by the result...more  Add a comment.

09.12.04  Adam and Eve tops the Shelley Sale. "It will never happen again," said auctioneer Ronald Pook as he concluded the sale of the collection of fraktur and related works on paper assembled by Dr. and Mrs. Donald A. Shelley at Pook & Pook auction company on Friday evening, October 8, 2004. This was the largest specialized sale of fraktur and related works on paper since the Garbisch sales at Sotheby Parke Bernet in January and May of 1974...more  Add a comment.

09.12.04  Zapatista rebel leader writes crime story. Mexico city (AP) - Only two weeks ago, a Mexican novelist got a clandestine message from Zapatista rebel leader Subcomandante Marcos. The proposal: Let's write a crime story togetherv...more  Add a comment.

09.12.04  Relatives want poet to rest in peace. Granada, Spain - Federico Garcia Lorca, Spain's greatest 20th century poet, was dragged from a home here in the dead of an August night in 1936, and shot dead by Fascist forces loyal to Gen. Francisco Franco. The bodies of Garcia Lorca and three other men killed with him - two bullfighters and a teacher with a limp - were heaved into a low ditch, in a valley near an olive grove north of Granada, and left there...more  Add a comment.

08.12.04  Battle for Rachmaninov manuscript. An original Sergey Rachmaninov manuscript was withdrawn from auction on Tuesday after a late ownership claim from the Russian composer's estate. The annotated manuscript of his famous Second Symphony was due to be sold at Sotheby's in London, with an estimated price of £300,000-£500,000...more  Add a comment.

08.12.04  Book scheme lists 'forgotten' 20. A list of 20 Welsh literary classics in English has been drawn up under a scheme aimed at promoting Wales' writing tradition...more  Add a comment.

08.12.04  Photographs casts light on Dahl's dark imagination. Fresh details of Dahl's life and times which provide clues to the inspiration behind some of his imaginings have been found in a stash of photographs, most taken by him...more  Add a comment.

08.12.04  British Library Publish 'The Books Of Henry VIII And His Wives'. Henry VIII is celebrated throughout history for his magnificence, his daring to defy papal authority and his many wives. However, he was also one of the most educated and well read monarchs of the Renaissance, and his books, and those acquired by his wives, reveal much more of their story than historians have previously thought...more  Add a comment.

07.12.04  Executed writer led fight for environment. Port Harcourt, Nigeria - The anger and activism swirling in the Niger Delta's oil fields were unleashed in the homeland of the Ogoni people, largely led by a writer named Ken Saro-Wiwa...more  Add a comment.

07.12.04  The Book of Kings at Williams College Museum of Art. Williamstown, MA.- The Williams College Museum of Art will open a new exhibition entitled "The Book of Kings: Art, War, and the Morgan Library’s Medieval Picture Bible" on January 29, 2005. The exhibition features an exquisite facsimile of one of the most visually stunning illuminated manuscripts produced in the Middle Ages, known as the Morgan Picture Bible...more  Add a comment.

06.12.04  Priceless book on display. John James Audubon's famous Birds of America will finally go on display at Liverpool's Central Library tomorrow. The book, comprising four volumes, is hailed by the library as the greatest natural history book ever produced, and will take centre stage at an exhibition showcasing the hidden cultural gems held deep within the vaults...more  Add a comment.

06.12.04  Alamo letters brings six figures at auction. Two documents, one penned behind the walls of the besieged Alamo, have brought hundreds of thousands of dollars at a New York auction, and a new book about the Texas revolution reveals a stern adherence to the Alamo's iconic status...more  Add a comment.

06.12.04  Mystery of Jane Eyre attic solved. A cramped secret staircase winding up to a lonely garret has been rediscovered in the manor house which is credited with launching the literary genre of the "madwoman in the attic"...more  Add a comment.

05.12.04  Sale of Rockwells helps bail out Library. Two Norman Rockwell paintings formerly part of the Wagnalls Memorial collection sold for more than $800,000 Thursday at Christie's Galleries and Auctions in New York City...more  Add a comment.

04.12.04  No buyer for famed Xmas poem. New York - A rare autographed copy of the poem known as 'Twas the night before Christmas, which was estimated to fetch at least $200,000 failed to find a buyer at an auction today, Sotheby's said...more  Add a comment.

04.12.04  Marginalia is written by da Vinci, couple contends. The book, also known as the Alberti Manuscript, is said to have been in da Vinci’s personal library. In its margins are jotted notes, sketches and a signature, purportedly by da Vinci himself....more  Add a comment.

03.12.04  Leonardo da Vinci doodles in Indiana? An Evansville couple says the scribbles in the margins of 15th Century book they own were made by Leonardo da Vinci and they're suing an art dealer who says it's a forgery. The case will be heard in Vanderburgh County next summer...more  Add a comment.

02.12.04  Mutant study wins Guardian book prize. A study of the curious and touching forms into which the human body is sometimes cast, which argues, "There are no monsters, and nature is one", won the £10,000 Guardian First Book award last night...more  Add a comment.

02.12.04  Entrepreneurs tap virtual success on eBay. While eBay is sometimes referred to as the world's biggest garage sale, it's also proving to be a way for small businesses to expand beyond their local customer base. In the past two years, Mr. Strang's on-line business has grown from selling books he picks up second hand or at dollar stores, to purchasing remainders by the skid load from publishers and jobbers. He pays 10 per cent to 20 per cent of list price and sells his books for about 40 per cent off list price. He sells more than 1,000 books a month; in August, he shipped a record 2,000 books...more  Add a comment.

02.12.04  Unpublished Conan Doyle novel goes on show. The manuscript of Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s unpublished debut novel will go on display for the first time tomorrow at the British Library, after resurfacing unexpectedly...more  Add a comment.

02.12.04  Restored Plath Manuscript Gets Reading. The marathon and historic reading celebrated the new collection, which reinstates Plath's original selection and arrangement of the poems. In editing the book for the 1965 British and 1966 U.S. versions, Ted Hughes had removed more than 10 of Plath's poems and replaced them with some of the last poems Plath wrote before her death...more  Add a comment.

01.12.04  Pierre Berton dead at 84. As recently as October, Berton appeared on the CBC satire show, Rick Mercer's Monday Report, offering tips on how to roll a marijuana joint, recommending his book The National Dream as an excellent "rolling surface" and warning about the perils of a loose joint. He said a less-than-firmly rolled spliff could leave unsightly toke burns on one's bow tie...more  Add a comment.

01.12.04  Diary details life of 1925'S Bridget Jones. A Bridget Jones-style pocket diary detailing the highs and lows of a young woman in the roaring 1920s has been discovered among donations to a charity shop, it emerged today...more  Add a comment.

01.12.04  Novel held clue to writer's illness. Iris Murdoch's last novel, Jackson's Dilemma, was about a mysterious disappearance. But it tells another story, according to neuroscientists today. It subtly reveals the onset of Alzheimer's disease before the author herself could have known...more  Add a comment.