"Lucien Carr, who brought together, befriended and served as muse for novelists Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs and poet Allen Ginsberg, the core of literature's Beat Generation, died Friday of cancer in Washington, D.C. He was 79."
"Lucien Carr, who brought together, befriended and served as muse for novelists Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs and poet Allen Ginsberg, the core of literature's Beat Generation, died Friday of cancer in Washington, D.C. He was 79."
"What makes things even more complicated is that no one really knows what are the exact factors that deteriorate paper. Some have claimed that lignin is the main factor with regards to the deterioration of paper whilst others have claimed the contrary."
"“Iran is among the top ten countries in publishing and is also exporting books to neighboring countries,” he noted."
"Price, a longtime bookseller in the neighborhood, should have been in terrible spirits watching her livelihood disappear. But she managed to smile, gratefully thanking customers who have been streaming in since Monday when a story about her ran in The Sun. She estimates she sold as many as 10,000 books."
"The rare book department on the third floor is probably the largest in New York, and has the musty smell that is catnip to bibliophiles. A vault holds the rarest of the rare. The store's inventory includes incunabula (early printed books, dating back to 1500 or before), with the oldest a leather-bound volume with bronze clasps that is an intricately decorated commentary on the Psalms printed in 1480 in Cologne, Germany."
(If you don't want to register to read that site you can go here.)
"A first edition of Mutiny on the Bounty will be sold at auction in the Capital next week."
"The rare manuscript was written two years before Captain William Bligh’s full account of the voyage and is expected to fetch more than £5000 when sold on Tuesday."
"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."
"Accompanying this Bible will be other objects from the Gothic period, psalters and reliquaries, arms and armor, other religious artifacts, and everyday domestic items, many similar to those seen in the pages of the manuscript itself."
"Parsippany-based Skanska USA Building Inc. has been awarded the construction-management contract to build Princeton University's futuristic science library, which was designed by renowned architect Frank Gehry."
"The Vincent van Gogh Foundation recently acquired a significant early drawing by Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) for the Van Gogh Museum: Portrait of Jozef Blok."
"The subject was a well-known street vendor of books in The Hague. He traded in literature and magazines, and was known as the 'open-air library of the Binnenhof"
"A collection of his poems has been seized by Russian police as part of a crack-down on "obscene" literature. The move has horrified the nation’s literati in a country where serious literature is a serious business and popular with the masses."
"Literary historians, gossips, critics and would-be biographers will just have to be patient: one of the last outsiders to have seen the legendary second volume of the letters of TS Eliot today predicts that it will never be published while his widow is still alive. "
"India has the largest collection of manuscripts in the world composed in different languages and on materials such as birch bark, palm leaf, cloth, wood, stone and paper."
"The critic and book collector John Baxter, whose book A Pound of Paper (Doubleday) is a must for novice book collectors, says: “The primary appeal of Gollancz thrillers is the weirdness and eccentricity of the editorial choices."
(New "Wild at Heart" Book is taking Christianity by Storm)
"...the kingdom of heaven suffers violence and violent men take it by force”, it advocates the 'deep and holy goodness of masculine aggression'"
"In Seattle, the $165 million Rem Koolhaas-designed central library — with a four-level spiral ramp and a unique glass box structure — has drawn raves from architecture critics and become an instant landmark. The $92 million Salt Lake City library, designed by Moshe Safdie with a rooftop garden and a five-story atrium called the "urban room," is a popular gathering spot."
"Oxfam has become the largest retailer of second-hand books in Europe, with sales estimated at £15 million in the current financial year. It is expanding its network of specialist bookshops from 70 to an estimated 100 by the end of the next financial year."
"Rowena Morrill, a book illustrator from New York, has been painting images portraying the world of science fiction and mystical fantasy for nearly 30 years."
"Edward Hoyenski, Rare Books and Texana Collection assistant curator, learned that Morrill happened to be in town this week and managed to arrange a last minute appearance for her."
"The seductive, jewel-like quality of their shimmering pages stands in sharp contrast to the often gruesome subject matter being depicted, whether it be scenes of the Passion or vivid and precise images of torture, execution or war."
"Welcome to the Daryaganj bazaar. It is here that a serpentine 1.5 km queue of rare second-hand books and magazines overnight springs up at scores of makeshift stalls on crowded pavements."
"A Harvard librarian allegedly dubbed too sexy for a promotion has subpoenaed Harvard President Lawrence Summers to testify in federal court about a university culture her lawsuit claims rendered her invisible because she is a black woman."
"...this set of nearly 2,500 children’s books has been sitting dormant on the shelves for years, only recently seeing daylight after the group volunteered to help catalog them."
"And it's her bookshop, filled with books in a genre she knows well. Mattes remembers getting turned on to mysteries as a kid when a bookmobile would visit her Des Moines neighborhood and she got hooked on stories by British author Enid Blyton."
"Collecting odd, old items is something Bernie, Mo., resident Bob Keathley has done for a long time. In 1983, that interest in antiques led him to purchase a more than 200-year-old history text called "1700s in America," originally authored by German historian Christian Sprengel in 1783 for distribution at the 1784 World's Fair in Germany."
"Fragments of 12 Dead Sea Scrolls, part of the historic cache found in 1947 by a goat herder and now on exhibit at the Gulf Coast Exploreum, have lured a record-breaking first-week crowd of 9,200 to the Mobile museum."
"The book, with an estimated value of EUR 50,000 (USD 65,000), was recently uncovered in a private library in western France by rare books expert Pierre Poulain, who described the edition as a rare find."
(So she collects Gore Vidal ...and Tipper Gore.)
"I own over a thousand signed mystery books," he said. He reads more than mysteries, however, and estimates he buys about 500 books a year."
"And I read about 100 books a year," he said, "so I run a 400-book deficit."
"A UMass Amherst computer science professor has developed an automated keyword-retrieval program that could make searching handwritten documents easier for researchers and students."
This story is all over cyberspace today, on the mainstream newspaper sites: Kansas City Star, Grand Forks Herald, Bradenton Florida Herald, Myrtle Beach Sun News, San Luis Obispo Tribune, Columbus Ledger-Inquirer, Biloxi Sun Herald, Centre Daily Times, Minnesota Pioneer Press, Duluth News Tribune, Macon Telegraph, Monterey County Herald, Charlotte Observer, San Bernardino Sun, etc.
"One of the book's chief delights is the wry humanity of Mole's employer, the wise old antiquarian book-seller Mr Carlton-Hayes."
(They usually call us "musty" instead of "wise.")
"Michael van Rooyen, founder of Loot.co.za, says his company's sales were double the normal level in October and November, outstripping the industry growth of around 30% during the festive season."
"When the Feminist Bookstore Network closed in 1999, its roster listed 120 member bookstores in the U.S. Roughly 30 feminist bookstores remain."
"While the Wisconsin Historical Society contains one of the largest American history archives anywhere, fewer people have visited in recent years -- 40 percent fewer than in 1987 -- as more of them, including students at the nearby University of Wisconsin, turn to the Internet as their basic research tool."
CBS is reporting this news story also, here.
...same story also reported online by: Janesville Gazette, Boston Herald, Hampton Roads Daily Press, New York Newsday, Orlando Sentinel, Chicago Tribune, LA Times, Baltimore Sun, Connecticut The Day, Porterville Recorder etc.
"Govindaraju is 70. But even at this age, he is literally 'hunting' for rare books by stepping into every wastepaper mart in the city. 'I used to wander through the streets and wherever I sight a wastepaper mart, my search begins in the bundles of books kept there', he recounts. As of now, he has over 8,000 books in his collection."
"A lot of work goes into repairing and maintaining the 225,000 rare and old documents housed at the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, according to the library's Web site. The special collections library, located on the third floor of Deering Library, includes a 4,000-year-old Mesopotamian tablets and 19th century paintings in addition to old books."
Read this news story.
"Asked if he felt insulted by critics who argue it is dumbing down to choose celebrity judges for big literary awards, he told Reuters at Tuesday's awards ceremony: 'It is not insulting to me. I am very dumb as everyone knows.'"
"...he reminisces about the abundance of bookstores -- where now scores of Starbucks and martini bars exist -- that flourished 30 years ago when he arrived in this city."
"...the new main library collection includes unique volumes, such as a 9th century manuscript of the Book of Epistles in Greek, 15th century parchment scrolls, Cicero’s letters in Latin and a copy of Griboyedov’s Woe from Wit."
“We shall scan these rarities to make them available to mass readers in an electronic form,” Ms Pantsa said"
"So the historical society and many other institutions with large collections are doing something they see as means of survival: They're going digital creating and uploading images of many items in their collections for all the World Wide Web to see."
"The version of O Saw Ye My Maggie was found in the former library of Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford, near Melrose, bound into a printed copy of The Fornicators' Court, a risque work by Burns, of which only 10 copies were printed."
"The European Fine Arts Fair (TEFAF) is now regarded as one of the most, if not the most influential art and antiques event in the world."
"...Book of Hours, Visitation, Illuminated manuscript on vellum, Bruges, circa 1450. ...Heribert Tenschert Antiquariat Bibermuhle AG."
"The archive contains more than 150,000 letters and manuscripts by Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Darwin, David Livingstone and other literary and scientific figures."
"It was amassed over successive generations of the John Murray publishing house, and is described as a unique literary treasure trove with close links to leading Scottish writers and thinkers of the 19th century."
"Hans Peter Kraus, one of the foremost booksellers of the second half of the 20th century, and his wife, Hanni, assembled the collection."
"Hans and Hanni Kraus generously donated their collection of Drake materials to the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress in 1980."
"The Macclesfield Psalter, a compendium of medieval piety and outrageously bawdy jokes, will stay in East Anglia, where it was made in about 1320, thanks to a national appeal which has raised the £1.7m to match the auction price offered by the Getty Museum in California."
"On Sept. 3, 1786, a slim volume entitled Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect was published by Burns's friend, John Wilson of Kilmarnock. 612 copies printed, cross-stitched, three pence each; today -- on the very rare occasions when a copy surfaces -- it is one of the most valuable first editions in the world."
"These days, when he looks for a cookbook, he's looking for old cookbooks. 'That's what we do on vacations is look in book stores and search around,' he said."
"She owns more than 600 hardbacks and 200 paperbacks, including many foreign editions. She has Nancy dolls and games, a lunch box and a diary, and the tapes of past Nancy movies and TV series."
Do the Grolier Club, Columbia University, The Armory Book Fair, Brooklyn Art Alliance, New York Public Library, Center for Book Arts, etc.
"Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay bought it three years ago for $2.43 million, a record for any manuscript. He wanted to share it with the world by putting it on the road in a 13-stop, four-year tour. Iowa's museum is the first to unroll it all the way."
"Twenty years ago, a woman bought a stack of papers for $10 at a yard sale in Texas. The papers included part of Andrew Jackson's journal--and the 64-word missive written and signed by Edgar A. Poe."
The Minnesota Historical Society acquired the document through a local rare book seller, who received it from an individual in Vancouver, B.C. The $40,000 cost was raised through donations.
"The Upper West Side used to be chockablock with independent bookshops," Cushman says from atop the ladder he is using to shelve books. "They're all gone."
"Despite the healthy Christmas sales, the walk-in, walk-round bookstore is doomed. "Cyberglobalism" is about to happen."
"With the opening of the book market in China, Amazon.com recently bid for two small Chinese online book retailers. Dangdang.com, an online book distributor with annual revenues of $9.6 million, reportedly rejected a buyout from Amazon for $150 million. Joyo.com, the second largest online book distributor in China, was acquired by Amazon for $75 million."
(How to be a Literary Tourist in Tam o’ Shanter Land)
"The Irish are known for their storytelling," Conroy said. "So we wanted to put in a prestigious library that captured the best of what Irish literature has to offer."
"'I admire anybody that wants to open a bookstore. It's a risky business,' says Merchantville rare books dealer Tom Congalton, president of Between the Covers Inc., who, like Almon, has a special interest in African-American literature and mysteries."
(Was a $600,000 German book stolen in Germany in World War II by an American GI?)
"A 900-year old book on astronomy in Sanskirit Kiran Tilak translated into Arabic by Al-Biruni, a distinguished astronomer, historian and Indologist of the 11th century, has been preserved in the library."
"...the Sears, Roebuck heir who in his late 30's came down with what one writer diagnosed as "a most virulent case of bibliomania."
(It's a news story about the Grolier Club's Exhibit of Early Printed Books)
(You have to register (only once) to read the New York Times, but it's free and worthwhile.)
"Drive down to New York, to the Lower East Side. That's where Yiddish-readers used to live, that's where you'll find Yiddish books!"
(He was the Duke of Wellington’s lieutenant general in the Peninsular War.)
She ripped one of the pages. (Previously...Harry Truman kissed it.)
"He regularly browses through the Fishing Collectibles section at the Cherry Hills Book Store."
(With jpg of requisite resident Bookstore Cat.)
"I picked up a 40-year-old notebook and found original letters saved in it from Jefferson and Madison dealing with the War of 1812."
Michigan State University's Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop is holding an online book auction.
Slashdot: "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters."
"For the complicated questions, Keneller did research at the library, using microfiche in the pre-Google days."
(...the private library of golf professional and past captain of the PGA, Alan Walker.)
"The North Plains man decided to sell cords of firewood for $200, each measuring 4 feet high, 4 feet wide and 8 feet long, to benefit the future library."
(Hamburgers taste good with French Fries. Books do not.)
"There's an unclaimed $1 million out there — somewhere."
"The jackpot is actually 12 jewels hidden in very public places around the United States. Think diamonds, think rubies, think the rarest, most perfect Kashmir sapphire."
(Its library system is world-class.)
"We're the largest public genealogical collection in the nation," says Krull, a Williams College grad. Last year, he adds, 2 million people used the library, borrowing 5 million books. And that was with two of the 13 branches closed."
"Her selection of mint condition first editions and complete dated series is reason why Rebecca York, author of the 43rd Light Street part of the Harlequin Intrigues series, dubbed her service “The Candy Store."
"A medium-sized book with 160 pages required the skins from about 20 calves."
"Whether your tastes run to cracked leather sofas and piles of first editions or wall-to-wall Peruvian poetry, nothing beats a browse in a truly fine emporium."
"The book's lead author is Terry Jones, best known as a member of Monty Python, but also a keen medievalist whose books include Crusades and Chaucer's Knight."
"Many have heard people moving and talking in the basement were the bathroom is located."
"If your lucky you will see the librarian who was thought to have been killed down there on a late shift."
(The library should promote the hauntings. Ghosts are good for business.)
Charles Blockson is "best known for his book collection, housed at the Temple University Library."
See Blockson's important Afro-American book collection here.
"the Library of Congress' decision to post 2,240 maps and charts and 76 atlases and sketchbooks on the Internet is the most exciting news Civil War students have received in years."
You can see what all the buzz is about here.
"The Saint John's Bible, the only handwritten and illuminated Bible commissioned since the advent of the printing press, is going on national tour."
"Inscribed on vellum and ornamented with medieval-style illustrations and 24-karat gold leaf, the rare volume was commissioned by Saint John's Abbey and Saint John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota."
You can see the St. John's Bible here.
"Thanks to the indifference of the officials, the library with thousands of rare books and manuscripts has turned into a heap of rags."
Serbia's most infamous "war criminals" become best-selling novelists.
"Both books were written while their authors were on the run."
"With only one yuan, or 12 U.S. cents people can read for a whole day."
...because trying to make money selling regular books would have been "like slicing one wrist slowly."
Mysterious program to debut soon. "It's a book addict thing."
The "coming soon" website is here.
"There was almost a knightly feel to the [Milan fashion] show, with its setting of stag heads among antique books, the clothes studded like the leather library chairs and the colors dark and rich as the animal-print chocolates for the guests."
(Bookstores should sell stag heads?)
"According to him, there are volumes of as-yet unexplored, non-professional literary criticism at this popular website, in the form of customer reviews, which are ripe for academic scrutiny."
(The American Scientist Online reviews both books.)
Read this review here.
"The novel was first printed in Italy because Lawrence realised its erotic nature would cause outrage in the UK."
Or, if you are a Scottish Nationalist, you can read it in the Scotsman here.
"Nobody cares much for 19th century English literature in Rumbek, judging by a copy of "David Copperfield" gathering dust in south Sudan's only bookshop for hundreds of miles."
"This is the best manuscript collection in North America, possibly the world," said Deborah Schoenfeld, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley."
Browse this extraordinary manuscript collection online here.
" 'It appears that slaves had been trying to carry crates of books to safety when they were overwhelmed by the eruption,' he says."
"There may b