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31.03.09.
Hidden treasures in antique books
In a cramped
bookstore in Istanbul, ragged bindings and haggard leather spines
line the shelves. If it is not apparent from the condition of these
books, it is clear from the delicate manner in which these books
are handled that they are historical artifacts. The Ottoman Empire,
long gone, still persists with a presence in Istanbul’s antique
bookshops and in the eyes of enthusiasts ... more
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Heritage
grant set to restore Scott's home
Reading is the
best way to relax and even six minutes can be enough to reduce the
stress levels by more than two thirds, according to new research.
And it works better and faster than other methods to calm frazzled
nerves such as listening to music, going for a walk or settling
down with a cup of tea, research found ... more
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The written
history of horology
If collectors
of antique horological books are a rare breed, specialist auctions
of historical books on the art of measuring time are even rarer.
But on May 26 and 27, the Parisian auctioneer and horology expert
Hervé Chayette will disperse the vast working library of the Milanese
horological historian Giuseppe Brusa at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris,
proving again that Drouot remains a treasure trove for the most
esoteric finds ... more
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30.03.09.
Reading 'can help reduce stress'
Reading is the
best way to relax and even six minutes can be enough to reduce the
stress levels by more than two thirds, according to new research.
And it works better and faster than other methods to calm frazzled
nerves such as listening to music, going for a walk or settling
down with a cup of tea, research found ... more
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Google makes
a grab for e-books
Google has joined
forces with Sony to take on the staid world of book publishing.
The internet giant aims to make up to 7m books that it has scanned
from the world’s libraries available for customers to download onto
an electronic reading device, known as an e-reader ... more
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TS Eliot's
damning verdict on Animal Farm
It is regularly
voted one of the best books of all time, a timeless piece of satire
which has never gone out of print in the 64 years since it was first
published. But when George Orwell sent Animal Farm to TS Eliot for
consideration, the poet - then a director of Faber and Faber - rejected
it as "unconvincing" ... more
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27.03.09.
Oddest Book Title prize goes to treatise on fromage frais
He has written
more than 200,000 - yes, 200,000 - books to date, but today marked
a first for Professor Philip M Parker, who picked up the Diagram
prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year for his enticing The
2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-Milligram Containers of Fromage Frais
... more
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Top team
brings old books back to life
Rare and historic
books currently being conserved by an international team of specialists
at the University of Ulster’s Magee campus give a fascinating insight
into life in the North-West hundreds of years ago. he books are
part of the Church of Ireland Derry and Raphoe Diocesan Collection,
which dates back to the 15th century ... more
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Erica Wagner
boxes up her well-loved books
How hard it is
to part a book-lover from her books. If you came to my house - or
even my office - I doubt that you would be surprised to find that
nearly every available flat surface was crowded with the things.
Well, fair's fair - reading's my job, after all. But even if it
weren't, I promise you'd see no difference. Because once you love
a book, you want to keep it with you for ever. Its mere presence
on a shelf can inspire you ... more
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26.03.09.
The Big Sleep: Raymond Chandler, 50 Years Dead
Raymond Chandler
died 50 years ago this week. On March 26, 1959, at 3:50 in the afternoon,
he took his last breath in the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, having
drunk himself to death, though the official cause of his demise
was listed as pneumonia. He was 71 years old, an unhappy and lonely
man who’d finally run out on his luck ... more
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Rare Burns
book found at museum
A rare book which
belonged to Robert Burns has been discovered at a museum in South
Ayrshire. The copy of "A Select Collection of Original Scottish
Airs", which was co-edited by the poet, was found at the Burns Birthplace
Museum in Alloway ... more
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25.03.09.
$600,000 stolen book to be returned
A New York court
ordered a book collector to return a 16th-century volume valued
at $600,000 to a museum in Stuttgart, more than six decades after
it was stolen by a U.S. army captain at the end of World War II
... more
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Mark Twain
rises again
The centenary
of his death takes place next year but he is in the news again with
the publication of a "new" short story, The Undertaker's Tale in
The Strand magazine ... more
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Gospels to
return to North East
The Lindisfarne
Gospels are to be returned to the north-east of England for a limited
period, the British Library has confirmed ... more
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23.03.09.
Darwin as student
Charles Darwin
scholars know a little more about the scientist's days as a student
due to the recent discovery of some dusty old books in a storage
room at the University of Cambridge ... more
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Stalker who
loved Dickens
Charles Dickens
was greeted like a modern-day rock star when he toured the United
States in 1867-8: not only did he perform his work to excitable
crowds and earn a fortune in the process, but according to a contemporary
diarist he was also stalked by an obsessive fan ... more
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Women more
avid readers
A study of reading
habits showed almost half of women are 'page turners' who finish
a book soon after starting it compared to only 26 per cent of men
... more
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Sylvia Plath's
son kills himself
The son of poets
Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath has killed himself, 46 years after his
mother gassed herself while he slept, according to a report today
... more
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19.03.09.
World's third largest Quran sells
The manuscript
which is 80cm by 120cm was displayed in the Antiquarian Book Fair
which is being hosted for the first time at the event. The Quran,
which was produced in 1890 in Indonesia, came about as a result
of a request from wealthy people in Arabia. Indonesian calligraphers
were known at that time for their high quality artwork, Ebergard
B. Talke, a German antiquarian who was selling the Quran told Gulf
News ... more
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£57m library
will showcase mediaeval manuscripts
The north-east’s
oldest and most valuable books will be given a secure home in a
custom-built conservation studio, thanks to a multimillion-pound
gift. Aberdeen University’s new £57million library, due to open
to students and the public in 2011, will include a specialist centre
to safeguard and showcase mediaeval books and manuscripts ... more
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Islamic manuscripts
online
Princeton University
has placed a new digital library of 200 Islamic manuscripts online
for scholars to consult and study ... more
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18.03.09.
British Library mislays 9,000 books
More than 9,000
books are missing from the British Library, including Renaissance
treatises on theology and alchemy, a medieval text on astronomy,
first editions of 19th- and 20th-century novels, and a luxury edition
of Mein Kampf produced in 1939 to celebrate Hitler's 50th birthday.
The library believes almost all have not been stolen but rather
mislaid among its 650km of shelves and 150m items – although some
have not been seen in well over half a century ... more
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The Bodleian's
books get a new home
Millions of books
from Oxford's Bodleian Library, one of the largest and most famous
in the world, will soon be on the move – from the dreaming spires
of Oxford to the rather more pragmatic surroundings of an industrial
estate on the outskirts of Swindon ... more
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Academic
'discovers' six works by William Shakespeare
Dr John Casson
claims to have unearthed Shakespeare's first published poem, the
Phaeton sonnet, his first comedy, Mucedorus, and his first tragedies,
Locrine and Arden of Faversham ... more
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1st Superman
comic book sells for $317,200
A rare copy of
the first comic book featuring Superman has sold for $317,200 in
an Internet auction. The previous owner had bought it for less than
a buck ... more
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Arbus photos
suit is settled
Bayo Ogunsanya,
a collector and private dealer of African-Americana and other items,
said that on February 17 his lawsuit against Robert C. "Bob" Langmuir
of Pennsylvania reached an out-of-court settlement. Ogunsanya filed
the suit in April 2008 in federal district court in Brooklyn, New
York, where he lives. He did so after learning that photos he had
sold to Langmuir for $3500 in 2003 were works by Diane Arbus. The
Arbus material was part of a much larger group of photos, notebooks,
pamphlets, handbills, and other ephemera that Ogunsanya had bought
the previous year at a sale of unclaimed items from a Bronx storage
facility ... more
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13.03.09.
Classic gags discovered in ancient Roman joke book
Celebrated classics
professor Mary Beard has brought to light a volume more than 1,600
years old, which she says shows the Romans not to be the "pompous,
bridge-building toga wearers" they're often seen as, but rather
a race ready to laugh at themselves ... more
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Paper chase
at Papermania Plus
Once you get
used to the idea that you would never, in one mere weekend, have
time to peruse even 10% of all the amazing items tucked into the
boxes, bins, piles, albums, loose-leaf notebooks, folders, and other
containers of the approximately 160 dealers who do this show every
January and August—let alone examine every item they have selected
for display in glass cases or on pegboards—you can start to relax
a little, if you try ... more
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11.03.09.
Priceless 15th-century scrolls unveiled
Priceless scrolls
that are believed to date back to the 15th century were unveiled
in Aberdeen yesterday in celebration of a Jewish festival ... more
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Tributes
pour in for popular 'Book Lady'
She raised some
£34,000 by selling secondhand books for as little as 10p each during
some 17 years. Her presence at car boot sales starting at the former
Bognor Regis bus station site, at the Arun Leisure Centre in Felpham,
Chichester railway station car park and, until last March, at Ford,
will be fondly remembered by many visitors ... more
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10.03.09.
America turns to prophet of self-interest as crash hits
Sales of Ayn
Rand's 1957 book Atlas Shrugged - a hymn in praise of radical individualism,
extreme self-interest and laissez-faire capitalism - are surging
as the crisis deepens, according to TitleZ, a service that tracks
sales trends on Amazon ... more
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Rare manuscript
books go on show in Norwich
For a century
they have been kept in private but now, for the first time, the
Norfolk public has the chance to see an exhibition of rare manuscripts
books - put together by an industrialist who never received any
formal schooling ... more
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NLS damaged
by water again
The National
Library of Scotland on George IV Bridge was forced to close temporarily
on 26 February after flooding threatened the building and its collections
... more
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What drives
people to steal precious books
Every so often
a high-profile example of book theft makes the news. The crime in
question does not concern hard-up students helping themselves to
textbooks in Foyles. Rather it details cases of premeditated, often
audacious, theft of beautiful and rare books ... more
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NY arrest
in Dead Sea Scrolls row
The son of an
expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls has been arrested in New York, accused
of trying to discredit one of his father's academic rivals ... more
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09.03.09.
Can Bonham Carter bring Blyton back from the dead?
Here we go again
- another famous dead person, another BBC4 drama biopic. Will the
corporation's new film about Enid Blyton, starring Helena Bonham
Carter, do the business or have you had enough of the BBC rummaging
in the dirty linen of yet another celebrated, badly impersonated
British personality? ... more
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History book
is pulped amid great mystery
"I am afraid
I have agreed not to say a word about it," the amiable television
presenter tells Mandrake. Pan Macmillan has issued an "urgent" stock
recall notice in which it said that shops needed to return all unsold
copies immediately for unspecified "legal reasons" ... more
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Down and
out in Paris
For half a century,
a crowded bookshop on the Left Bank has offered food and a bed to
penniless authors - the only rule is that they read a book a day.
Jeanette Winterson revisits Shakespeare and Company ... more
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New evidence
of Poe's mint julep shame
Rare book dealer
David Grayling says investors are turning to the bookshelves for
security during the economic crisis ... more
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06.03.09.
Invest in books to keep your money safe
Rare book dealer
David Grayling says investors are turning to the bookshelves for
security during the economic crisis ... more
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Long-lost
manuscript available to historians
A historic manuscript
that had been missing for more than 100 years is now on show to
the public after being donated to the Derbyshire records office.
The survey of manors in the county dates back to the 16th century
and disappeared when it was loaned to a historian from Wirksworth
in 1905 ... more
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Royal pages
go on display at Bodleian
Books once owned
by four medieval and Tudor queens went on display at the Bodleian
Library in Oxford to celebrate World Book Day ... more
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05.03.09.
Trashy book amnesty
We like to pretend
to have read great literature to sound clever. But what about those
well-thumbed novels we HAVE read, but are less keen to mention?
Time to 'fess up ... more
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Book sale
is halted
Books, sketches
and watercolours from the historic Le Marchant Library were shipped
to the UK to be auctioned at Gorringes’ Lewes auction house ...
more
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The city
without a memory
The German city
of Cologne woke up yesterday without a memory. As police used tracker
dogs to try to unearth suvivors beneath the collapsed archives building,
engineers were trying to work out how the 1971 institution – once
regarded as a state-of-the-art documentation centre, copied across
the world – could have simply collapsed, as if hit by a missile
... more
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04.03.09.
Bawdy Burns poem published again
A bawdy poem
by Robert Burns is to be reprinted to raise money for charity and
mark the year of Homecoming. The Fornicator's Court, which was probably
written in 1786, was found in Sir Walter Scott's private library
at Abbotsford in the Scottish Borders ... more
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GRI launches
new online cataloging initiative
The Getty Research
Institute (GRI) announces the launch of Uncovering Archives and
Rare Photographs: Two Models for Creating Accession-level Finding
Aids Using Archivists’ Toolkit, a cataloging project that will allow
scholars across disciplines to access GRI archives and rare photographs
previously out of reach ... more
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03.03.09.
Author's home draws 'green' crowd
Nearly 1,000
people visited the home of novelist Agatha Christie, which was opened
to the public for the first time on Saturday ... more
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Artist gives
away vast library of sex, drugs and classics
One of the world’s
most dedicated bibliophiles is planning to give away a multi-million-dollar
collection of 20th-century literary treasures, many of which have
never been displayed in public ... more
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Books disappearing
from schools
Schools are "tearing
up" books to teach children about literature using basic worksheets,
according to leading author, Michael Rosen ... more
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Self portrait
discovered hidden in manuscript
Italian researchers
believe they have unearthed a previously unknown self-portrait by
Leonardo da Vinci drawn when the artist was a young man ... more
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Book lending
falls by half as libraries 'dumb down'
Book borrowing
from libraries has dropped by half in less than 15 years, it was
revealed yesterday. Records show increasing numbers of people are
going to their local library to surf the net or send e-mails ...
more
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Sotheby's
in 'Da Vinci code' storm
In a saga that
could have come from the pages of The Da Vinci Code, it involves
the Roman Catholic Church and claims that two Sotheby's staff helped
illegally to export three mediaeval documents which had been stolen
in Italy and brought to London some 30 years ago ... more
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