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.

14.01.05  Hot pursuit has unhappy ending for rare-book shop. Bookstore owner Stephan Magina now knows what kind of damage a heavy pickup going 100 m.p.h. can do to a concrete block building. "I didn't expect anything near as bad as this," he said...more  Add a comment.

14.01.05  Museum to digitise palm-leaf manuscript collection. The Indian public will finally have a chance to freely access ancient records dating back to the 18th century. This is because the world's largest collection of palm-leaf manuscripts will soon be digitised...more  Add a comment.

14.01.05  Science fiction illustrator Frank Kelly Freas dies. Frank Kelly Freas, who has died aged 82, was an illustrator whose work enriched the covers of hundreds of science fiction magazines and books. Freas eschewed the "rockets and ray guns" stereotype for images that represented the heart of the story...more  Add a comment.

14.01.05  The 'best book ever' celebrates 400 years. Don Quixote, the endearing tale of a mad, errant knight and his sidekick, Sancho Panza - described variously as the "universal novel" or the "bible of humanity" - celebrates its 400th birthday this week, kicking off a year-long party for one of the world's most acclaimed literary works...more  Add a comment.

13.01.05  The 'Little Prince' author bracelet fight. A French fisherman who found the bracelet of the author of the 'Little Prince', Antoine de Saint-Exupery, who disappeared mysteriously six decades ago, took legal measures on Tuesday to claim 13,000 Euros in damages from the writer's family...more  Add a comment.

13.01.05  Willo Davis Roberts, mystery and children's author, dead at 76. Willo Davis Roberts, a prolific and award-winning mystery writer and children's author who was one of the first to confront difficult issues for youngsters, is dead at 76...more  Add a comment.

13.01.05  Celebrity tie-ins boost UK book trade. Cooks, gardeners and explorers to the rescue -- celebrity tie-ins from hit TV shows have proved a real gold mine for the British publishing industry. Great literature it ain't -- but stars sure can shift books...more  Add a comment.

13.01.05  Bookseller Sacked over 'Blog' Plans Appeal. A bookseller who was sacked by the Waterstones chain for making satirical remarks about the company in an online diary today said he plans to appeal against the decision. Since his case went public, Mr Gordon said he has been heartened by e-mails of support from as far afield as China, Brazil and Canada. He said: "Anybody who works for a living and writes online will be concerned about this"...more  Add a comment.

13.01.05  Swedish Police recover stolen Rare books. A recent audit following a series of thefts from some of Sweden's largest libraries revealed that Stockholm University Library was missing eleven rare books, worth over one million crowns. Police have now recovered five of them...more  Add a comment.

12.01.05  Following Pop Culture's Paper Trail. The 29th annual Papermania Plus show, The largest exhibit of antique paper memorabilia and ephemera in New England, featured items of interest for both the dedicated and the casual collector. The 160 exhibitors from 15 states and Canada displayed everything from original movie posters to 19th-century postcards to TV Guides from decades past...more  Add a comment.

12.01.05  Library book returned 78 years late. Alabama man discovers national parks volume borrowed from Ohio library in April 1927...more  Add a comment.

12.01.05  Friend aided paralysed writer to die. Spain has laid a mystery to rest after a friend of quadriplegic writer Ramon Sampedro admitted she helped him take his own life after a 30-year battle for death, depicted in Oscar-tipped film "Mar Adentro"...more  Add a comment.

11.01.05  Kerouac knickknacks go up for bid online. Items from Jack Kerouac's original book collection and personal wardrobe are currently up for bid online. Included among the treasures are his "personally owned and worn hat" in olive drab, and a "quintessential Jack Kerouac archive" featuring philosophic works by Schopenhauer and Pascal with notes scribbled in Kerouac's hand...more  Add a comment.

11.01.05  Bookseller fires employee over blog. An employee of UK book chain Waterstone's has been fired for material he included in his blog...more  Add a comment.

11.01.05  Bristolians go under Siege for reading adventure. For the third year running, residents of Bristol have been invited to participate in their very own city-wide reading group. Over the next few weeks, 4,500 copies of The Siege, by Helen Dunmore, will be distributed to schools, libraries and businesses...more  Add a comment.

11.01.05  US Civil War maps online. Civil War buffs are getting access to a treasure trove of information - thousands of original maps and diagrams of battles and campaigns between 1861 and 1865, all posted on the Internet...more  Add a comment.

11.01.05  Rebulding Iraq's Once-Prized Library. The looting of Iraq's Archeological Museum was highly publicized after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime. But Iraq's National Library and Archives suffered even more devastating losses. With almost everything lost and little money to repair and replace, the library has had difficulty regaining its footing...more  Add a comment.

10.01.05  Rachmaninovs in legal battle with Sotheby's for 'lost' score. A legal battle will begin this week to determine who owns an autographed manuscript of Sergei Rachmaninov's best-loved symphony. The work was found last year after being lost for almost a century...more  Add a comment.

10.01.05  Saudi Poet Makes History. Jeddah - It looked like a scene from the Western literary world when book lovers made a beeline to get the copies of a newly published book signed by its author. The groundbreaking event took place at Jarir Bookstore when Saudi writer and poet Nimah Ismail Nawwab presented herself to sign her book of poetry entitled "The Unfurling"...more  Add a comment.

10.01.05  Isaac Newton collection moving to Pittsburgh?  The 50,000 rare books, 30,000 secondary titles and assorted other materials include one of the world's three greatest assemblages of works by and about Sir Isaac Newton. They are contained in the Burndy Library, which is weighing a move to another city now that an agreement that has kept it on MIT's Cambridge, Mass., campus since 1992 will end in August 2007...more  Add a comment.

09.01.05  Collector's Corner: Black Memorabilia. Many people feel uncomfortable discussing Black memorabilia, but as the prices of these collectibles escalate, it is only natural to take a closer look at the subject...more  Add a comment.

09.01.05  Library considers selling presidential letter collection. The East Cleveland Public Library has a letter and autograph collection featuring 39 U.S. presidents. It was donated to the library in 1966 and updated through the 1970s.     The library board has received estimates from auction houses, including Sotheby's, which valued the letters at nearly $160,000....more  Add a comment.

09.01.05  A fistful of dollars. Does anyone in Canada have $2 million to spend on Greg Gatenby's collection of 28,000 books? Most of them are signed first editions and, according to one antiquarian book dealer, "probably one of the largest collections of inscribed books in the world"...more  Add a comment.

09.01.05  Manuscript may be by Mark Twain. Waco - A Baylor University professor has uncovered what he believes is a previously unknown section of a Mark Twain essay. Joe Fulton, an associate professor in American literature, said the six-page manuscript appears to be the ending of an essay, Corn-Pone Opinions, published after Twain's death...more  Add a comment.

08.01.05  A voice in the dark. Before she died last month, Susan Sontag hailed a literary masterpiece - smuggled out of Soviet Russia and finally rescued from obscurity after she found it in a second-hand bookshop in London...more  Add a comment.

08.01.05  For sale: one modest terrace, birthplace of a Poet Laureate. The unprepossessing terraced house that was birthplace and occasional poetic inspiration for the late Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes, is up for sale...more  Add a comment.

08.01.05  ‘On the Road’ manuscript goes on display. The University of Iowa Museum of Art will present "Jack Kerouac: On the Road," an exhibition of Kerouac's scroll manuscript of the iconic Beat Generation novel, typed on nearly 120 feet of continuous paper. The manuscript will be shown Jan. 19 through March 13 in the museum's North Gallery...more  Add a comment.

08.01.05  Fossicking for old books, By Anthony Marshall. Alice's bookshop in Rathdowne Street, North Carlton, is one of those places that smells the way a bookshop should. There is a kind of mustiness and old-leather sweetness. Its owner, Anthony Marshall's recollections as a bookseller are a delight for bibliophiles and anyone who cares about books...more  Add a comment.

07.01.05  BBC to join the book club club. In the wake of the runaway success of Richard and Judy's book club, BBC1 has decided to launch its own version, Page Turners, with the help of Fay Weldon and Marian Keyes...more  Add a comment.

07.01.05  UK book fair decline continues. UK book fairs continued to show a decline in the number of dates, from 659 in 2004 to 604 this year. This represents a year on year drop of about 8%. Whilst this is considerably less than the 12% drop last year, it still represents a cumulative drop of 24.5% from the high point of 2002...more  Add a comment.

06.01.05  UK government tried to jail lesbian author. Newly released documents show that the British government in the 1920s had made secret plans to put lesbian author Radclyffe Hall on trial for obscenity.
    The documents had been kept from the public in the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions for more than 75 years. They show that the government of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin wanted to disgrace Hall for writing The Well of Loneliness, considered the first great lesbian novel, and force her to defend herself against the charge that she was corrupting the young...more  Add a comment.

06.01.05  Book on Jamaican immigrants wins Whitbread award. Small Island, a saga of Jamaican immigrants in postwar Britain written by Andrea Levy, was named novel of the year in the Whitbread Book Awards Wednesday...more  Add a comment.

06.01.05  Will Eisner, a Pioneer of Comic Books, Dies at 87 Will Eisner, an innovative comic-book artist who created the Spirit, a hero without superpowers, and the first modern graphic novel, "A Contract With God," died on Monday in Fort Lauderdale, where he lived...more  Add a comment.

05.01.05  Sarajevo Street to be named after Susan Sontag. "The city of Sarajevo (and) its citizens express their sincere thanks to an author and a humanist who actively participated in the creation of the history of Sarajevo and Bosnia," said a statement from the office of Mayor Muhidin Hamamdzic...more  Add a comment.

05.01.05  SwapSimple.com text book exchange launched. In response to skyrocketing college textbook prices and the desire of college students everywhere to have access to affordable textbooks, SwapSimple, Inc. today announced the release of SwapSimple.com - a nationwide online book exchange service enabling students to obtain the textbooks they need in exchange for the textbooks they have finished with, without the need of buying or selling...more  Add a comment.

05.01.05  The Beatles' bog roll up for bids. A roll of toilet paper from legendary Beatles studio Abbey Road from around the time the Fab Four would have been using the facilities conveniences has surfaced on eBay with an auction price of £40,000...more  Add a comment.

04.01.05  Movers and Shakers. Henry VIII’s handwritten notes on his divorce to Catherine of Aragon, evidence that Karl Marx was prevented from securing British citizenship; and proof that rock star Elton John started life as Reginald Dwight are just some of the documents on view at the National Archives’ new exhibition in Kew: Movers and Shakers: Geoffrey Chaucer to Elton John...more  Add a comment.

04.01.05  Irvine Author Welsh's 'debt' to Jane Austen. Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh has revealed that Jane Austen's genteel fiction was a major influence on him. Welsh, famed for his gritty stories about drugs, poverty and misogynistic characters, said he also owed much to Sir Walter Scott and George Eliot...more  Add a comment.

03.01.05  Annals of Medicine. The story is that the Malloch Rare Book Room of the New York Academy of Medicine was built in 1933 to look exactly as a rare book room ought to look. And so it does.
    The room, at once grand and intimate, is richly paneled in dark wood. Iron chandeliers and glass-shade table lamps give off a warm light. The walls, from parquet floor to molded ceiling, are lined with important old books, the upper ones reachable only by ladders...more  Add a comment.

02.01.05  The top 350. In this season of top ten lists, Americana Exchange has listed the three hundred fifty highest prices paid at book auctions during the past year...more  Add a comment.

02.01.05  Comic books donated to French museum. Paris - Spiderman, Captain America, the Incredible Hulk and Daredevil have bounded across the Atlantic in a single leap - a giant donation of almost 300,000 vintage comic books to a French museum.
    Jean-Pierre Mercier, who manages the collection for France's National Center for Comic Books and Images, said he was "flabbergasted" when he learned in March that Marvel Enterprises wanted to donate the huge quantity of comic books dating back as far as the 1950s...more  Add a comment.

02.01.05  Libraries to close in John Steinbeck's home town. California - Salinas's plight has drawn international attention because of a much-noted irony: The city that will soon go without libraries produced one of America's brightest literary lights, novelist and Nobel laureate John Steinbeck, whose odes to the working class, such as "The Grapes of Wrath," drew inspiration from the denizens of this fertile valley...more  Add a comment.