" Who: Chuck Parkhurst traveling with his wife Sandy from Arizona.
Where they’re going: This book collecting duo – who even have their own rare book business – were on their way to Texas, first to Archer City and then Dallas for a book fair."
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"A devoted collector of books and literary memorabilia, Kennedy recently received a grant to produce a DVD focusing on Sacramento's literary scene under the name The Archive Group, or TAG."
"Over the years, he has been a force in book-collecting himself, despite his impoverished lifestyle. He once owned an impressive collection of Beat Generation books, Hansen said."
"Since many local titles go out of print, a strong secondary market is often created for rarer titles. Oak Knoll has 971 old Delaware titles for sale on its Web site, ranging from a $1 church publication to a two-volume set of "The History of Delaware," a seminal 1888 book. The cost? $700."
"It's easy to understand the allure of a rare book, but booksellers say it's not as clear why Delaware books have such a hold on Delawareans. "It's kind of odd, because it's not true of every state," said Peggy Tatnall, who buys local-interest books for the Borders at Churchmans Crossing. "I think it's partly because Delaware is small and we have a strong history."
"Obviously, there is a strong case for the universal library that Google wants to create. No one wants to stand in the way of the diffusion of knowledge. But the cost would be too high if the future publication of books, particularly learned books, was prejudiced. I am an interested party, at the interface between university authors and university libraries. So far as I am concerned, Google must accept the rights in intellectual property. The survival of the book depends on that."
Read this editorial.
"IPSWICH — As Boston continues to celebrate the 375th anniversary of Puritan settlers' arrival in the Massachusetts Bay Colony aboard the Arbella, two Ipswich treasures are part of an exhibit at the Boston Public Library."
"Photographs of the Ipswich Historical Society's 1599 Geneva Bible and poet Anne Bradstreet's "Several Poems" are on display at the library through the end of the year."
"Just a decade ago, Britain was littered with alluring, dusty, pleasantly smelly little shops packed with mile upon mile of shelves of books. Some survive, but many more have closed their pages for the last time."
"Driving through market towns and turning up on the doorstep of what a few years ago was an exciting shop, one now finds boutiques, organic greengrocers, mobile telephone hawkers or private houses. The second-hand bookshop in the provinces is on its last legs."
"This is a novella about books and obsession. Yet it is a story that all book lovers must read and read obsessively."
"It begins with the premise that “books change people’s destinies.” This profound and indubitable observation follows the curious death of Bluma Lennon, professor of literature in Cambridge, who, on a spring day in 1998, stepped out of a bookshop in Soho having bought a secondhand copy of Emily Dickinson’s poems and was knocked down dead by a car at the first street corner as she was reading the second poem."
"The National Library of Scotland recently unearthed the two broadsides, or early newsletters, documenting the last days of Watt, who was hanged for high treason in Edinburgh in October 1794.
Watt and his associate, David Downie, who was later reprieved, were tried for being members of a seditious organisation, the Friends of the People, which had links with the infamous Jacobins in France, who had helped purge the country's aristocracy"
"On the second floor of the Houghton Library for rare books at Harvard, a roomful of men of middle-to-elder years in business attire and a few women sip sherry from little flutes and lean to examine rare manuscripts in glass cases. They are jolly and convivial. Soon they will repair to the Harvard Faculty Club across the street for a dinner and speaker."
"No less a personage than Richard Booth, who turned Hay-on-Wye in Wales into the world's first book town, had given his blessing to the Gold Cities Book Town Association, placing the neighboring Gold Rush hamlets of Grass Valley and Nevada City, Calif., in the company of such other bookish venues as Larry McMurtry's Archer City, Texas; Kedah Darul Aman, Malaysia; St.-Pierre-de-Clages, Switzerland; and Fjaerland, Norway."
"After serving for nearly four years as caretakers to roughly 5,000 bound volumes of newspapers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Baker and Brentano donated their American Newspaper Repository to the Duke University library."
"What is a rare book? Ken Gloss, proprietor of Boston's Brattle Book Shop, shared his thoughts on the subject with a small handful of people who came to hear his presentation on rare books at the Bolton Public Library Thursday, Nov. 17. He said that, in evaluating the worth of a book, you need to consider it in the context of its publication. For example, he said, book printing was well-established in New England around 1720 to 1730, and many were printed during that time period. He said that, because printing was not well-established in the Midwest during that timeframe, a book printed in Ohio in 1725 would likely be worth considerably more than a book printed in New England the same year."
"It is in unique collections like these that Neal sees a bright future for libraries. In fact, at the April 2005 Association of College and Research Libraries annual conference in Minneapolis, Neal told an audience of librarians that in the digital age, librarians are poised to enter a new “golden age” of special collections, spurred by digitization and greater online access to primary resources."
"In the past month alone, three veteran booksellers -- Jamie Fraser, Michael McBurnie of McBurnie & Cutler, and David Mason -- have carted their precious volumes to new quarters. And the agents of bibliophobic cleansing? Soaring rents, landlords eager for more lucrative tenants and the continuing migration of the used-book business to the Internet. Both Mr. Fraser and Mr. McBurnie are now operating from their homes, while Mr. Mason has moved to a basement near Adelaide and Spadina."
"A stack of "The Apprentice" by Lewis "Scooter" Libby sat on the shelves of the Lorem Ipsum bookstore for more than two years, with only one selling for $2.88 during the period. Then, Libby's indictment came, and now the same books are in high demand with a relatively low supply, causing their prices to skyrocket to over $900 on online book distributors like Amazon.com."
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"Handwritten pages of Bob Dylan's student poetry have fetched a staggering $78,000 (€66,000) at a Rock & Pop Memorabilia auction in New York - the highest bid to date for the legendary singer/songwriter's material."
"Yesterday's sale at Christie's also marked the earliest Dylan memorabilia ever to go under the hammer. The rare manuscripts, which make up 16 pages, date from his student days at the University of Minnesota."
"Calling upon schools and colleges in the respective states to take steps to digitise old and rare books in their own languages for the benefit of future generation, he informed that in his office, over ten million pages of old and rare books had been digitised."
"Talking about preservation of manuscripts, the President suggested that the state-of-the-art Nano technology could be used to preserve, retrieve and document them."
Read this article.
"The Library of Congress is launching a campaign today to create the World Digital Library, an online collection of rare books, manuscripts, maps, posters, stamps and other materials from its holdings and those of other national libraries that would be freely accessible for viewing by anyone, anywhere with Internet access."
"This is the most ambitious international effort ever undertaken to put precious items of artistic, historical, and literary significance on the Internet so that people can learn about other cultures without traveling further than the nearest computer, according to James H. Billington, head of the Library of Congress."
" More people are turning to the Bible as a safe refuge from a struggling stock market and rising inflation, pouring large sums of cash into rare 1611 King James Bibles, centuries-old Matthew-Tyndale Bible leaves, Hebrew scrolls, prayer books and other ancient liturgical texts."
"At Sotheby's Western Manuscripts sale in London in June, a three-volume, 13th century Bible in Latin with prologues attributed to Saint Jerome sold for $1.8 million, while an 11th century Bible sold for $164,081, well above the estimate."
"n honor of the bicentennial celebration of Lehigh founder Asa Packer’s birthday, Graphic Design III students presented books they designed in commemoration of Packer’s achievements and social philanthropy on Thursday in the University Center."
"The books will become a permanent part of Lehigh’s special collections, which serves as the repository for the university’s collection of rare books and manuscripts."
"As befits the editor of the Collins Library (best known for reclaiming the notorious English As She Is Spoke), the author favors bookstores and libraries over most other repositories of the past. A visit to Columbia's rare-book room—and the incongruity of looking at daguerreotypes on blond-wood tables under buzzing fluorescent lights—prompts a flight of fancy about the suite of period rooms Collins would build for his ideal library, equipped in this case with a fainting sofa, a damasked ottoman and "the yellow pallor of a gaslight chandelier." While Collins's facts are occasionally unreliable (not Swift's "Modest Proposal" but Defoe's Shortest Way With the Dissenters was the "hoax meant to be so absurd that it would backfire on its erstwhile proponents") the charm of his manner and the originality of his critical intelligence mark this sensitive rendering of Paine's afterlife."
"Bamako, Mali: Mali and South Africa have laid in Timbuktu (1,000 km from Bamako) a foundation stone for the construction of the Ali Baba Research and Islamic Documentation Institute."
"The institute will include a library aimed at preserving the ancient manuscripts about the history and culture of this Islamic holy city, reported the Mali news agency on Wednesday."
" "The physicality of language is writing," says Steve Clay, founder and director of Granary Books, "the book is in some sense reliving and reviewing its former life like the proverbial dying person."
"There is no definition of an artists' book. Clay, founder and director of Granary Books, a New York based publishing company specializing in poetry and artists' books, describes them as linking, "the verbal and the visual into a seamless hole."
"Jinbo-cho, Japan's mecca for book lovers, is undergoing a quiet transformation that will change the way people browse for books."
"The district in Tokyo's Chiyoda Ward hosts 45 bookstores for new books and 120 offering rare and secondhand books, with estimated combined holdings of 3 million titles and 10 million books."
"An electronic database is now being constructed to catalog these inventories on a Web site for the public."
Read this article.
"Reed gave away almost all that he owned and earned. He devoted significant time and funds to building up a collection of rare manuscripts and books at the Dunedin Public Library, which included manuscript and printed bibles and autograph letters. The Alfred and Isabel and Marian Reed Trust was established in 1939. Among its activities, the Trust assisted various philanthropic organisations, published or subsidised the publication of dozens of religious and secular books and booklets, and donated money to a kauri park in Northland."
"Palmer's two bookstores -- Fireside Books and Alaskana Books -- sit within 150 yards of each other, but they have little in common besides a downtown address. Alaskana, on Denali Street, is as much museum as bookstore. It boasts 25,000 rare and out-of-prints books exclusively on Alaska."
"Fireside Books sells a mainstream line of mass-market fare and also stocks lesser-known, independent titles."
"The rare book will be on show to the public for the next two years as part of the library's new permanent exhibition, Mirror of the World: Books and Ideas, opening on December 9."
"Also on display is a novelty Midget Library, published in Scotland in 1895, of 12 small-scale reference books and magnifying glass, worth a few thousand dollars."
"Sometimes the New York Public Library can seem like the world's most interesting attic. Its well-known treasures include a Gutenberg Bible and Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. But who knew that it had one of the country's greatest collections of illuminated manuscripts?"
" Many of the books at the library of Tehran University’s Law College were destroyed in a fire that broke out on Wednesday morning, the Persian service of CHN reported."
"The extent of the damage to the library is still not clear, with experts hoping that its rare manuscripts are still intact."
"Book Lust: It's not like she's pushing heroin, Nancy Pearl's friend assured her. They're just books. She's just suggesting a few titles, some books people might enjoy."
"But for anyone who loves books, Pearl is the most effective dealer on the block. Try this, she'll say. You'll like it."
"When I finally opened the heavier boxes, I found a treasure of books from the personal collection of my husband's father, Mort. These were books I had never seen before, with inside flaps inscribed in a scratchy signature, tagging ownership for his library and of his acquired knowledge. As I fingered those dusty, yellowed pages that had been unread for years, I became excited. I was ready to learn more about Mort."
" Fairfield, Connecticut — Pequot Library is temporarily abandoning its plan to sell 38 rare books."
"The rarities, some of which date to the 1500s, are potentially worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Part of a collection donated 107 years ago by benefactor Mary C. Wakeman, they are stored at Yale University."
"You can pick up a first edition of Christmas Carol or De Revolutionibus on the net if you have a few thousand dollars to spare."
"What you can at times buy for Rs 10 from stalls at College Street or Free School Street in Kolkata, can also be had for $50,000 from rare book stores doing business online. In recent years there has been a growth in online sellers of rare books."
"Prince Henry's collection of 2,000 sporting books and artworks of mainly hunting and equestrian scenes reflect his life as a country gentleman. Highlights of the sale will include The Master of Game, an exquisite mid-15th century hawking manuscript once owned by Horace Walpole, which is expected to sell for between £80,000 and £120,000."
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"While it's not clear how many extant books actually have been bound in human skin, many older libraries (such as the library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia which has four such books, including one with a visible tattoo) have such tomes in their collection, suggesting that anthropodermically bound books number somewhere in the hundreds. Many of these books were likely bound in the 18th or 19th centuries, though some may be centuries older, while a few may even be younger."
"The Library of Congress, which houses the second largest collection of Benjamin Franklin papers in the world, will celebrate the tercentenary of the statesman’s birth with an exhibition titled “Benjamin Franklin: In His Own Words.”
"The display features 75 items drawn from the more than 8,000 documents in the Benjamin Franklin Collection in the Library’s Manuscript Division and other Franklin manuscripts in the Thomas Jefferson and George Washington papers. Also included in the display are books from Franklin’s personal library, maps and other visual materials provided by the Library’s Rare Book and Special Collections, Geography and Map, and Prints and Photographs divisions."
"The original Pageant, a bookstore, opened in 1946 on the renowned Bookseller’s Row that stretched along Fourth Ave. from Astor Pl. to 14th St. A passion for reading and writing drew owner Sidney Solomon, Rebecca and Shirley’s father, to the book business when he returned from World War II. As young girls, Rebecca and Shirley spent almost every holiday from school working in the Ninth St. shop. When their father died in 1986, Shirley continued the business."
"After retiring as a state official, Malik Fadjar, former religious affairs minister during President BJ Habibie's administration and former education minister during the administration of President Megawati Soekarnoputri, is realizing his long-cherished dream of owning a good library."
"On Oct.22, his dream came true with the opening of his library, called Rumah Buku Cerdas (Smart Library or RBC). You can find in this library Malik Fadjar's own collection and books donated by a number of parties."
"Two extremely rare editions of the Book of Mormon printed in the 1840s have been stolen from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' Institute near the University of Utah."
"The safe that contained an 1840 edition printed in Nauvoo, Ill., and the 1841 edition printed in Liverpool, England, was kept in a cupboard in an office inside the Salt Lake University Institute of Religion. A secretary noticed the safe was missing on Tuesday."
"The 1840 edition and the 1841 edition are worth about $35,000 and $25,000, respectively, said Ken Sanders, who owns Ken Sanders Rare Books in Salt Lake City."
"WHO KNEW THAT THE NATIONAL Gallery of Art possessed one of only two complete, never-bound, original sets of John James Audubon's Birds of America? The other such set reportedly is in Moscow."
"A selection of the National Gallery's hand-colored etchings--some fifty marvelous works printed between 1826 and 1838--is being shown with a modicum of fanfare in the West Building's ground-floor Central Gallery through March. The last time the National hung its Audubons was in 1984, when, again, a small fraction of the set of 435 prints went up on the walls; and the last exhibition before that was in 1969. Hundreds of prints remain in drawers in the gallery's storerooms, shown only by appointment."
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"John Steinbeck may have died 37 years ago, but his legacy as a great American writer lives on — especially with regards to Stanford’s recent acquisition of his Nobel Prize gold medallion. The medallion, which was given to Steinbeck upon receipt of the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, was recently donated to Stanford University Libraries.
Steinbeck, the author most famous for “The Grapes of Wrath,” was enrolled as a student at Stanford University from 1919 to 1925, although he never graduated. According to William McPheron, librarian for Special Collections, “he is certainly the most famous author associated with the University.”
"Leeds University's cookery collection, which includes hundreds of cookery books from as far back as the 15th century, is among five of its archives which have been commended for their importance."
"The library houses 93 million archival letters, maps, church records, diaries and state and business records. It has magazines, newspapers, local government records, architectural drawings and plans, Bible records, genealogical notes and charts, sheet music, posters, prints and engravings, postcards, paintings, sculpture and photographs."
"Its book collection includes volumes from the late 15th century, while the archival collections contain records from the early 17th century."
"No less a personage than Richard Booth, who turned Hay-on-Wye in Wales into the world's first book town, had given his blessing to the Gold Cities Book Town Assn., placing the neighboring Gold Rush hamlets of Grass Valley and Nevada City, Calif., in the company of such other bookish venues as Larry McMurtry's Archer City, Texas; Kedah Darul Aman, Malaysia; St.-Pierre-de-Clages, Switzerland; and Fjaerland, Norway."
"Bernard Quaritch, dealers in antiquarian books and manuscripts since 1847, has opened its first exhibition devoted to photography. In its catalogue, Images of Asia, there are 137 19th-century photographs and albums of China, Japan and South-East Asia assembled for Quaritch by consultant Lindsey Stewart, formerly a photography specialist at Christie's."
"For example, a collection of Civil War books might have been worth $200,000 some 10 years ago. Now because of the Internet, the collector would be lucky to get one-fifth of that, Baldwin said. People find some books in their attic, do not know the value of the volumes and put the collectiononline. Without professional appraisals, the collections are undervalued, which drives the price down for everyone, he said."
"Accredited journalists and research scholars will henceforth be granted access to the Parliament Library following a decision by Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee to have optimum utilisation of the rich deposits available at the facility."
"The Richard T. Liddicoat Gemological Library and Information Center contains the world's largest collection of books on gemology and jewelry. The Cartier Rare Book Repository and Archives, the climate-controlled area Schupak recalled, holds many important volumes, one of which dates back to the 15th century."
"What's chic about used bookstores is the sublime indifference to hot authors and titles. Step inside and there is no season of Tom Wolfe or Zadie Smith. There is, in a way, no now. Books from 1950 can stand beside books from 1980. A weathered dust jacket is a sign of prosperity, the mark of a book that has held up -- at least physically -- over time."
"A RARE first edition of a Charles Dickens masterpiece takes centre stage at an auction to be held in Liverpool today."
"It is part of a spectacular private library collection, containing more than 160 books from novels to history."
"Quigley's Rare Books & Antiques has been on the Dahlonega square about 12 years. The store focuses on Southern classics from Harper Lee's "To Kill A Mockingbird" to Mark Twain's masterpieces."
"In a glass box on top of rack of 19th century Bibles is the store's prize piece: A nearly flawless first edition of Margaret Mitchell's "Gone with the Wind."
"The quintessential Southern novel comes with a preserved dust jacket and a $10,000 price tag. It's rare because it was from the novel's first printing in 1936, before it was successful."
"Instead, Amerik Kachigian, 72, a semi-retired Granite City lawyer, has spent his life collecting books, storing them away like a well-read squirrel preparing for winter."
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"Amazon.com on Thursday said it would let readers buy digital pages, chapters and entire books through two plans that present a broad challenge to a controversial strategy of Google Inc."
Read this article.
"Microsoft announced a "strategic partnership" with the British Library that will allow the software group to digitise 25 million pages of content -- the equivalent of 100,000 books. The deal with one of the world's great libraries will be seen as an attempt to make up lost ground in its battle with Google, which only on Thursday unveiled its first digital book collection."
"Everything old is new again. With the entrance of Microsoft into the mass book digitization process, the status of books as “the next big thing” in digital content has been confirmed. Newspapers and the general trade press continue to treat Yahoo!’s participation in the Open Content Alliance as its way of competing with Google Print in this now critical content arena. However, most of the activities in OCA appear to be centered around libraries and the Internet Archive, a not-for-profit organization."
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"Many of those volumes offer Southerners valuable insight into their agrarian heritage, and, thanks to Callaway Gardens, hundreds of editions are now available for public viewing. On Wednesday, the famed gardens and resort in Pine Mountain announced the donation of more than 1,000 rare volumes to the Atlanta History Center's Cherokee Garden Library. The books, given in memory of gardens founder Virginia Hand Callaway, had been on loan for 10 years to the niche library, which houses more than 6,000 other volumes."
"Among the rare buys are a Jerusalem Bible illustrated by surrealist painter Salvador Dali, leather-bound Congressional papers from the late 1700s, a 1909 publication of Georgia's Confederate Records and books signed by former President Jimmy Carter. The items on sale have been donated and don't come from the archives' collection."
"The decline in second-hand booksellers has accelerated over the last three years, falling from 1,200 to just 600, according to figures obtained by The Independent."
"Such a decrease is explained by the massive rise in popularity and continued success of online booksellers, ranging from antiquarian book vendor ABE, to the likes of eBay and Amazon."
"Durham, N.C. -- Distinguished scholar John Hope Franklin will be one of the featured speakers at a Nov. 18 symposium celebrating the 10th anniversary of the John Hope Franklin Collection of African & African American Documentation at Duke University."
"With new projects starting seemingly every day, Alice Schreyer, special collections librarian at the University of Chicago, agrees with Neal’s assessment that libraries are on the cusp of a new “golden age” for special collections. “There have been marvelous joint efforts on several fronts,” she says. In the past, Schreyer notes, special collections could be rather isolated but no longer. “The most exciting thing about this 'golden age’ is creating partnerships with faculty and librarian colleagues,” she says. “What excites me most is how much at the center special collections has become."
"Nearly 75,000 manuscripts, centuries old, are housed at L D Institute of Indology here. While these manuscripts were till recently preserved using traditional methods, the institute has now built a laboratory for treating some of the damaged ones. It is also approaching people, monasteries, temples and madrasas so as to collect and preserve the ancient treasure."
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"We know that there are over 12 thousands manuscripts belonging to the Azerbaijani nation that are beyond the boundaries of our country at present," says the deputy-director of the M.Fuzuli Institute of Manuscripts of ANAS and a candidate of philological sciences Pasha Kerimov."
"The library welcomes donations of books and references. The biggest donation came from a donor in Kuwait who provided the first collection of 1000 rare books and references, worth tens of thousand dollars."
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