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29.05.09.
No news today ...
I'm out of the office until 11.06.09, so no news or updates
until then. I shall do my best to stay out of bookshops whilst away,
but you never know ... :)
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28.05.09.
The house where Big Brother was born
A pilgrimage
to Jura reveals the distant and untouched glory of Orwell's cottage
at Barnhill ... more
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Manuscript
may be a medieval women's magazine
Canadian researcher
discovers historic document filled with romance and recipes ...
more
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Exile's epic
history published at last
A handwritten
Latin manuscript that was missing for 300 years has been translated
into English for the first time by an 81-year-old Irish scholar.
University College Cork historian Denis O’Sullivan, a former surgeon
at Cork University Hospital, spent more than three years painstakingly
translating the historical manuscript and his finished work, The
Natural History of Ireland, was launched in Cork last night ...
more
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27.05.09.
ABA steps up efforts to resolve Slade affair
The Antiquarian
Booksellers Association (ABA) has stepped up its efforts to recover
books stolen by its former president, David Slade, from Sir Evelyn
de Rothschild ... more
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Auctioneer
to 'sell' Robert Burns' Auld Lang Syne
The original
Robert Burns manuscript of Auld Lang Syne is going under the hammer
at a Capital auction house in August. But whoever buys the unique
piece – expected to fetch about £50,000 – will not be able to give
it pride of place in their home. Instead the artefact will be restored
and placed in the new Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Ayrshire,
beside a plaque bearing the name of its new patron ... more
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26.05.09.
Cooking for Marie Antoinette
Ivan Day once
milked a cow into a glass of wine while researching the syllabub.
Hattie Ellis meets a man who stops at nothing to re-create ancient
recipes ... more
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D-Day bomb
raids were 'close to a war crime'
The RAF bombing
raids in Normandy following the D-Day invasion were 'close to a
war crime', a leading British historian has claimed. Antony Beevor
has singled out Bomber Command's massive raids on the key city of
Caen for particular criticism, describing the terrible suffering
of French civilians trapped in the city as it was virtually destroyed
... more
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Japanese
horror novel printed on toilet roll
At just nine
short chapters the author says 'The Drop' can be read in a few minutes
and is printed several times on each roll of toilet paper, each
copy taking up just 90 cm ... more
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Shia books
thrown in Afghan river
Provincial authorities
in south-western Afghanistan have thrown thousands of books, mainly
about Shias or Shia Islam, into a river ... more
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Rare Avicenna
manuscript recovered
Police have recovered
a rare manuscript of the Persian polymath Avicenna's The Canon of
Medicine which was recently stolen from his mausoleum in Hamadan
... more
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22.05.09.
Unpublished Auden poems surface in film archive
Three unpublished
poems by WH Auden have surfaced in the archives of the British Film
Institute more than 70 years after they were written ... more
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'Golden Age'
comics fetch plenty of green
The payoff came
Thursday when the 78-year-old Menomonee Falls man sold 72 comics
from the 1930s and 1940s for $518,000, less the 6% he pays the auction
house ... more
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Iran arrests
'Agatha Christie serial killer'
Police in Iran
believe they have caught the country's first female serial killer
and are claiming she has disclosed a literary inspiration behind
her attempts to evade detection: the crime novels of Agatha Christie
... more
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21.05.09.
Dylan not author of auction poem
A poem thought
to have been written by a young Bob Dylan has been exposed as a
copy of lyrics written by country singer Hank Snow ... more
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20.05.09.
Guilty plea in Ebay ''Autographed'' books scam
A man has pleaded
guilty in federal court in Philadelphia to a book fraud -- forging
famous authors' signatures and selling the books on Ebay as signed
originals ... more
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Toeing the
Line
A very rare cartoon
entitled ‘A Set-to for the Speakership’ by political satirist Charles
Jameson Grant is for sale at the Antiquarian Book Fair, Olympia
for £6,500 ... more
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Do you listen
to bookshop shelf-talkers?
You have almost
certainly seen a shelf-talker, even if you didn't know it was called
that: one of those little cards attached to the shelf on which a
bookshop – or, better, an individual bookseller – pours out their
enthusiasm for the title above ... more
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19.05.09.
600-year-old manuscripts lie in a shambles
At least 4,000
rare and six-century-old manuscripts are falling apart at the Hazrat
Pirmohammed Shah Library and Research Centre due to paucity of funds
... more
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“Like burning the furniture to keep warm”
Some faculty
members at the Jesuit-run University of San Francisco are up in
arms over economic contingency plans that include selling some of
the university’s rare books collection and auctioning off pieces
of valuable art owned by the school ... more
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UK scientist hopes to 'read' 3,000-year-old scrolls
Brent Seales,
the Gill professor of engineering in UK's computer science department,
will use an X-Ray CT scanning system to collect interior images
of the scrolls' rolled-up pages. Then, he and his colleagues hope
to digitally "unroll" the scrolls on a computer screen so scholars
can read them.
"It will be a challenge because today these
things look more like charcoal briquets than scrolls," Seales said
last week. "But we're using a non-invasive scanning system, based
on medical technology, that lets you slice through an object and
develop a three-dimensional data set without having to open it,
just as you would do a CT scan on a human body" ... more
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18.05.09.
Court ends dispute over Steinbeck's works
Ending a decades-long
dispute over the rights to John Steinbeck's classic literary works
such as Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath, the U.S. Supreme
Court today declined to hear an appeal by the son and granddaughter
of renowned novelist John Steinbeck, thereby affirming that the
rights to the author's best-known early works lawfully belong to
the Estate of John Steinbeck's widow, Elaine Steinbeck ... more
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'Golden Age'
comics go up for auction in Dallas
The collection
boasts the likes of "Batman" No. 1 and "Marvel Comics" No. 1. The
most expensive comic — expected to clear $100,000 — is the scarce
"Marvel Mystery Comics" No. 9, noted for its cover battle between
the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner — the first time two superheroes
appeared in the same story ... more
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Jonathan
'Wossy' launches Twitter book club
Richard and Judy's
book club might be meeting an untimely end this summer but Jonathan
Ross has stepped into the literary breach, launching a book club
on Twitter which has sent his first choice, Jon Ronson's The Men
Who Stare at Goats, soaring up the bestseller charts ... more
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Opening a
new chapter on old books
Opening an independent
(secondhand)bookstore on Danforth Ave. last month called Re: Reading
was almost a mission for Sheedy, but it still seems like a strange
thing to do in these times of "ebooks" and cut-rate, Internet bookselling
sites. Opening one near some bigger, more established bookstores
in the midst of what's considered the worst recession in half a
century seems even stranger ... more
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15.05.09.
Why paper still cuts it
News online,
the rise of the e-book, photo prints in decline - it all points
to a paperless future. But here's betting we can't live without
the stuff ... more
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A novel way
to beat the blues
In quiet moments
all authors hope their work may some day change the world. Few ever
realise the dream, but if a scheme currently running in West Yorkshire
is anything to go by, novelists may yet be the secret weapon in
the battle against stress, depression and loneliness ... more
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Not so elementary,
my dear Watson
For more than
a century, Sherlock Holmes, the most famous creation of Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle, has captivated mystery fans, literary scholars, and
researchers of virtually every stripe. But, as dozens of Doyle scholars
and Sherlockians showed during a recent three-day symposium at Harvard,
the Holmes stories represent only a small part of Doyle’s contribution
to literature ... more
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A rare snapshot
of England's battlegrounds
Don McCullin
is one of our greatest living photographers. Best known for his
war photography, McCullin also recorded striking images of England.
Nick Ahad on a celebration of his work ... more
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14.05.09.
Piece Of Dr Pepper iistory fails to sell
A tattered 359-page
ledger from the Waco drugstore where Dr Pepper was invented more
than 120 years ago failed to sell at auction, Dallas-based Heritage
Auction Galleries said Wednesday. The gallery said bidding for the
book containing a recipe titled "D Peppers Pepsin Bitters" failed
to meet the $25,000 minimum reserve ... more
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Science dominates
Samuel Johnson prize longlist
Samuel Johnson
himself would, no doubt, have been delighted: a biography of his
sparring partner and confidante, the woman he referred to as his
"dear Mistress", is in the running for the literary award named
in his honour ... more
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Profile of
magician and book collector Ricky Jay
“The pleasure
of locating a book or a poster on eBay is completely different than
walking into [a bookstore] and finding something you’ve been looking
for for 20 years. It’s just a very different experience than typing
something onto your computer and finding it. And I’m not claiming
there isn’t some joy in that, but it’s very different. What I truly
do fear is places that sell books and ephemera are closing down.
Because that used to be the great delight for me. Before I had a
home, all those years that I spent on the road opening for rock
and roll bands and Cheech and Chong and various people, and living
in a small place or on people’s couches. When I would come back
to the city the first thing I would do would be to go to a bookstore.
I just felt comfortable in print shops and bookstores. Just sitting
there. And that feeling is still really strong” ... more
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13.05.09.
Tintin breaks records at auction
It’s a good thing
Tintin’s hair is already standing on end — even he might be surprised
by an auction held on Sunday in Belgium at which more than $1.57
million in Tintin-related artwork and items were sold ... more
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Sony UK sponsors
Guardian Hay Festival
Sony UK is aiming
to steal a march on Amazon's Kindle in a battle of the ebook readers
by sponsoring the Guardian Hay Festival ... more
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John Lennon:
The New York City Years
“He was a New
Yorker already, in Liverpool,” said Yoko Ono yesterday of her late
husband. Ono was speaking at the opening of “John Lennon: The New
York City Years” at the local annex of the Rock and Roll Hall of
Fame in SoHo. Ono worked with curator Jim Henke to put together
the show, which presents photos, hand-written lyrics and other ephemera.
They drew on the Hall of Fame’s permanent collection, as well as
that of the John Lennon Museum in Tokyo and Ono’s personal stash
... more
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Money off
at WHSmith for charity donations
WHSmith has teamed
up with the British Heart Foundation to offer money off vouchers
to those who donate books, dvds or cds to the charity ... more
(Thanks
to Clive Keeble for the link.) Add a comment
08.05.09.
Rubbish poetry
Two shabby looking
volumes which were recently found in a skip in France have turned
out to belong to Lord Byron and Shelley ... more
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Book of a
lifetime: Buffalo Bill Wild West Annual
It would have
been given to me by my parents, the Christmas after my 12th birthday,
1950, cementing an interest in "cowboys and indians" that, for as
long as I could remember, had been played out with friends – or,
if necessary, by myself – in the streets and gardens of north London
or on the open plains of Parliament Hill Fields and Hampstead Heath
... more
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Controlled
chaos
This is the 8th
article in the “Book Wars” series of articles, a series of articles
where the author interprets the strategies taught in The 33 Strategies
of War by Robert Greene, and applies them to the business of the
independent bookseller, in the arena of the difficult book trade
... more
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Napoleon
Bonaparte – the romantic novelist
Napoleon Bonaparte
may be known as one of the greatest military leaders of history,
but another talent has been unveiled as his romantic novel is set
to be released in English ... more
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Ottoman Turkish
manuscripts course
Uiversity of
London will host a study course on Ottoman Turkish manuscripts between
1-4 June ... more
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The next
age of discovery
In a 21st-century
version of the age of discovery, teams of computer scientists, conservationists
and scholars are fanning out across the globe in a race to digitize
crumbling literary treasures. In the process, they're uncovering
unexpected troves of new finds, including never-before-seen versions
of the Christian Gospels, fragments of Greek poetry and commentaries
on Aristotle ... more
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07.05.09.
Biblio launches UK site
Biblio, Inc.,
which operates Biblio.com, today announced the launch of its new
UK website, Biblio.co.uk. While Biblio.com is one of the largest
used book marketplaces in the world and carries books from independent
booksellers in over 40 countries, Biblio.co.uk will be primarily
focused on serving European customers who are looking for second
hand and antiquarian books specifically from the UK or other parts
of Europe ... more
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The decline
and fall of books
Traditional bookshops
are closing; vending machines are churning out novels; and e-books
are the new paperbacks; so is this the final chapter for the book
industry? ... more
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Dan Volkmann,
collector of rare books, dies
Dan Volkmann
spent 39 years collecting a complete first-edition set of Californiana
books called the Zamorano 80 - a feat accomplished by only three
others ... more
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Penguin shows
off its SF covers
Alison Flood
is dazzled by the publisher's display of its classic science fiction
jacket designs ... more
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05.05.09.
Lost manuscript unmasks details of original Ponzi
The memoir —
“The Ponzi Story,” typed on 206 double-spaced pages and completed
around 1962, six years before Mr. McMasters died at 94 — is part
of a trove of 2,200 books, manuscripts and pamphlets on swindlers
and their frauds, hoaxes and confidence games acquired a year ago
and recently catalogued by John Jay College of Criminal Justice
... more
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Working on
Coptic archives
The Coptic Museum
archives, considered to be the world's most important Coptic library
and containing more than 5,000 manuscripts and books, are being
given a facelift ... more
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JRR Tolkien
fans await latest book
A scholarly translation
of a 1,000-year-old Norse text will make an unlikely best-seller
this week as it becomes the latest book by JRR Tolkien to be published
posthumously ... more
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01.05.09.
US government dumps children's colouring book
A children's
colouring book that depicts the burning towers of the 9/11 terror
attacks and the devastation of Hurricane Katrina has been removed
from a US government website over concerns that its contents could
prove upsetting ... more
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Judging books
by their Cover
This summer,
the Bodleian Library will celebrate the art and craft of bookbinding
from both traditional and contemporary perspectives with two major
exhibitions ... more
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