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24.08.10.
Dead
baby link to Peter Pan author
Detectives in
the United States have launched an investigation to see if Peter
Pan author JM Barrie is linked to the mysterious recent discovery
of two dead babies ... more
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21.08.10.
Rare
Oor Wullie annual bought for just 20p fetches £1000
The 1940 Oor
Wullie annual was the first ever to be published. The book, with
the iconic image of Wullie on his bucket adorning the cover, is
one of only a handful discovered in recent years ... more
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Evolving
English exhibition
The British Library
is launching an exhibition - Evolving English: One Language, Many
Voices – that will, for the first time, explore the English language
from Anglo-Saxon runes to the modern day rap ... more
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19.08.10.
Historic
manuscripts expected to draw record crowds
A display of
historic manuscripts expected to draw record crowds to Hereford
Cathedral has been unveiled. The project features one of only four
revised issues of the Magna Carta, dating back to 1217. It is on
display with the city’s very own Mappa Mundi and a host of other
manuscripts ... more
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Salinger's
toilet up for auction -- seriously?
It's a hard-to-believe
EBay listing: a toilet "PERSONALLY OWNED & USED" by J.D. Salinger.
The price? One million dollars. The listing claims that the toilet
was purchased from the new owners of Salinger's home in Cornish,
N.H. Salinger, the author of "Catcher in the Rye," died in January
at the age of 91. How exactly the lister might verify that the toilet
was used by the reclusive author is unclear ... more
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17.08.10.
Adolf
Hitler 'was not a brave soldier' claims new book
Dr Weber said:
"I never thought I would write about Hitler as so many books have
been written about his life. "But virtually everything that we do
know is based on Mein Kampf or Nazi propaganda" ... more
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16.08.10.
Impressions
of Nature
Few nature prints
survive from the fifteenth century (or have been identified as such)
but methods of producing them became widely known and used in northern
Italy in the first half of the sixteenth century. This was a time
when there was a growing interest in the medicinal uses of plants
– the botanic gardens at Pisa were established in 1543, those at
Padua and Florence both in 1545 – and the production of herbals
with nature prints was another manifestation of such interest ...
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13.08.10.
Collections
of Brirish Raj era to be auctioned
Auction of antiquarian
books, maps, prints and photographs spanning more than 200 years
from 18th to 20th century with emphasis largely on the "company
period - the golden era of the British Raj" would take place on
August 17 ... more
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The precious
unprinted contents of book
Marginalia and
forgotten mementoes are often squirreled away inside conventional
books. What will become of such treasures in the age of the ebook?
... more
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The 50 best
cookbooks of all time
As chosen by
Observer Food Monthly's expert team. Part 1: Numbers 50-11 ... more
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11.08.10.
Antique
city maps gaining ground
City maps are
emerging as the hottest segment of the growing collectible antique
map market. Once dismissed as an afterthought, vintage maps of today’s
largest metropolises are in huge demand, according to Jason Miklian
at Miklian Antiquarian Maps ... more
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Slice of
Potteries history goes under the hammer in U.S
A Wedgwood family
Bible dating back to 1630 is going up for auction in America this
month after being discovered in an attic in Maine. It is believed
the Bible has been owned by two important Burslem potters – Dr Thomas
Wedgwood and Enoch Wood – before ending up on the other side of
the Atlantic Ocean ... more
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Scott's 99-year-old
Antarctic manuscripts found
A 99-year-old
manuscript has been discovered detailing captain Robert Falcon Scott’s
plans to be the first to reach the South Pole. The handwritten notes,
acquired by Canterbury Museum, are a lecture Mr Scott gave to his
men on the ice, setting out the journey to the pole ... more
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09.08.10.
Roald
Dahl: the spy who loved me
In an exclusive
extract from his new Roald Dahl biography, Donald Sturrock recounts
how, as a dashing young air attaché, the writer enraptured New York
society’s greatest beauties ... more
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Books given
strange new life at Globe Gallery
Two installations
of arresting strangeness and beauty can be seen in the contemporary
art crucible that is the Globe Gallery in North Shields ... more
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Guardians
of the nation's attic
Los Angeles -
The National Archives keeps watch over 10 billion historical records.
And its treasure hunting team keeps watch over collector shows and
EBay for the scraps of valuable history that have been stolen ...
more
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07.08.10.
129
million different books have been published
For those who
have ever wondered how many different books are out there in the
world, Google has an answer for you: 129,864,880, according to Leonid
Taycher, a Google software engineer who works on the Google Books
project ... more
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'Batman'
sells for $657K
A certified original-print
copy of a rare Batman comic book sold for $657,250 at a public auction
on Thursday. Much interest generated in the "Aloha Copy" -- a nickname
due to its previous ownership by an anonymous Hawaii consignor --
was likely due to its display at this year's San Diego Comic-Con
... more
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Mid Wales
turns into Middle Earth
An army of Tolkien
fans is expected to descend on a tiny Welsh community next week
for an international gathering of scholars and devotees. The Festival
in the Shire is a conference, exhibition and fair celebrating themes
inspired by the author of Lord of The Rings and The Hobbit ... more
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A book too
dangerous to even open
I’d be very surprised
if you found a copy of Dr Fairer’s Book of Black Art in any bookshops
but if you do, take care. Even in 1857 Jeremiah Sullivan admitted
“Until very lately it was believed there was great danger in opening
this book” ... more
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05.08.10.
Death
of a book collector
On July 31st
Irwin Toby Holtzman, one of the more prominent book collectors and
library supporters of the second half of the twentieth-century,
passed away. Over the years Holtzman built numerous collections
and the fruits of his labor can be found in 15 libraries around
the world ... more
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Very rare
17th century atlas leads auction
The Gerard Mercator
work will star ahead of Samuel Johnson's dictionary and Charles
Dickens ... more
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Eye-popping
pulp and fantasy art at Heritage
An unemployed
antiques dealer, who had a taste for the high life and drove a Ferrari,
was jailed for eight years on Monday for handling a stolen copy
of a rare first collection of Shakespeare's plays ... more
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Bible of
Mormonism founder selling for $1.5m
The personal
bible of Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, has turned up for
sale at a rare bookstore in Salt Lake City. This week, Utahns had
a chance to look at the one-of-a-kind historical tome. Whoever buys
the $1.5 million bible will also get genealogical notes about the
Smith family not found anywhere else ... more
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AbeBooks’
most expensive sales in July 2010
July's most expensive
list is a good one. Topping the list is a rare 1846 edition of the
first English translation of Alexandre Dumas' classic tale of loyalty,
adventure and camaraderie, The Three Musketeers. The second most
expensive item is chilling to read, in more ways than one - the
harrowing true account of an ill-fated expedition to the Antarctic
in 1910, written by one of the survivors. This first edition fetched
upwards of five grand and included maps, colored plates and folding
panoramas ... more
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02.08.10.
Raymond
Scott jailed over Shakespeare book
An unemployed
antiques dealer, who had a taste for the high life and drove a Ferrari,
was jailed for eight years on Monday for handling a stolen copy
of a rare first collection of Shakespeare's plays ... more
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Comic book
buff selling rare copy of Batman No.1
A longtime Alaska
comic book buff is selling one of the gems in his vast collection,
a rare copy of Batman No. 1 published 70 years ago ... more
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Star appeal
sees rare Rowling work in auction for £25,000
A rare unpublished
work by Harry Potter author JK Rowling is being offered for sale
for £25,000. The item is a hand-drawn, personal horoscope and natal
chart which Rowling gave to the newborn son of a friend at the time
she was writing the first Potter book ... more
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Rare Books
as Investments?
Sheila Markham
in conversation with Chris Dennistoun ... more
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The Letters
of Sylvia Beach
Sylvia Beach,
sometimes called "the midwife of literary modernism", wrote the
kind of letters that any of us might produce if we were running
an under-capitalised cottage industry while simultaneously trying
to be nice to James Joyce. In other words, the stream-of-paper communication
which issued forth most days from the Shakespeare & Company bookshop
in Paris during the interwar years is chock-full of worries about
recalcitrant radiators, searing headaches and whether or not it
might be possible to smuggle banned copies of Ulysses into the US
by way of the Canadian border ... more
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Inside JG
Ballard's archive
Following the
British Library’s recent acquisition of the JG Ballard archive,
Tim Martin has been given exclusive access to the manuscripts. He
traces the evolution of the daring and highly original author of
Crash ... more
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