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May 30, 2008

Canada's Attic Owl Bookstore Closes Shop

"The arrival of Chapters didn't hurt Ed Lemond, because his niche at Moncton's Attic Owl bookstore was selling used and rare books, but Lemond says he couldn't compete with the popularity of internet bookselling on massive sites like Amazon."

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May 28, 2008

President of the Huntington Library Featured in L. A. Press

"At the Huntington, Koblik's colleagues describe him as a people person with a big smile and an ear for ideas and contrary opinions. With a jampacked calendar and a residence on the grounds -- where he lives with his wife, Kerstein, an urban planner -- he's the face of the institution. But he is never happier than when he's poking around in the bowels of the Munger Research Center, where tens of thousands of books and manuscripts reside on metal shelves in a compact storage system."

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Borders Relaunches Online Bookstore

"Bookstore retail chain Borders relaunched Tuesday its own online bookstore, after seven years of conducting its e-commerce through a partnership with Amazon (NSDQ:AMZN).com. Borders originally left the e-commerce industry."

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May 27, 2008

Harry Ransom Center Awards More than 50 Fellowships

" The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin has awarded more than 50 research fellowships for 2008-09. These fellowships support research projects requiring substantial use of the Center's collections of manuscripts, rare books, film, photography, art and performing arts materials."

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Mary Dockray-Miller Researches Book of Hours

"Dockray-Miller, who teaches English literature at Lesley University in Cambridge, is publishing a paper that prints, for the first time, three prayers from a 122-page medieval manuscript secreted in the Boston Public Library's rare books collection."

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Dartmouth Library's Special Collections are Teaching Tools

"Far from gathering dust, Rauner Special Collections Library's massive collection—100,000 rare books, six and a half million unique manuscripts, the Dartmouth College archives, and a range of other materials—is being increasingly used by professors and students to inform and complement their teaching and research. More than 70 undergraduate classes are scheduled to visit Rauner this academic year, while five years ago there were only eight."

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May 23, 2008

The "Little Shop of Horowitz" in East Hampton, New York

"The new shop will be many things: a sister store to Glenn Horowitz Bookseller at 87 Newtown Lane, an extension of a business on 64th Street in New York called John McWhinnie @ Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, and an expression of the personal tastes of Mr. McWhinnie, an art and rare books dealer who has a house in Northwest Woods. Its name itself is a hybrid: John McWhinnie and Glenn Horowitz Bookseller."

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Illustration Art on Exhibit in Santa Barbara

"Assembled from the collection of Santa Barbara resident Zora Charles, the exhibit was created in collaboration with the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Mass., the only museum in the U.S. devoted to the art of children's books."

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Rare Books in New Delhi

"Started by Vijay Bisht and Ajay Bisht in 1998, the shop has been catering to the DU students. But how did the collection begin? "

“'Students place orders for photocopying books from the rare books section of different libraries. But some forget to collect them or leave them behind once they are through with exams. That is how this collection grew,' says Bisht."

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May 21, 2008

Collecting James Bond Books

"These days Bond is about as collectable as you can get. Here, I give an indication of what a fine copy in its original dust jacket would fetch today. The jacket is all-important. That of Casino Royale is legendarily rare, and five years ago one fetched more than £13,000 at auction; that's just the jacket - there was no accompanying book. Caveat emptor, however: in the jargon of the book-collecting world, this was a 'first state' jacket. A 'second state' jacket, carrying a quote from a Sunday newspaper review on the front inside flap, sold in the same year for just £600. "

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Oxfam Volunteers Uncover Rare Sherlock Holmes Book

"Discovered in an Oxfam shop, the rare copy of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study In Scarlet, sold for more than £15,000 after a bidding war between buyers in the US and the UK."

"The first edition book broke its upper reserve price of £9,000 to fetch £15,500 at the Bonhams Auction in Oxford."

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McMaster University Library Digitizes Rare Books

"With the support of Kirtas' Canadian reseller Ristech, McMaster
University will be using the Kirtas APT BookScan 2400RA to digitize rare,
out-of-print books. Once the books are digitized and processed, files will
be made available to the world on the Internet through the university
library and for sale as print-on-demand books on Lulu.com."

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May 19, 2008

"Barron's" Explains Rare Book Investment

"The highest price paid for a printed book was $8.8 million for John James Audubon's Birds of America, sold by Christie's in 2000. The priciest manuscript or hand-printed book was Leonardo Da Vinci's Codex Leicester, bought by Microsoft's Bill Gates for $30.8 million in 1994."

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Rare Bible Returns to Nova Scotia

"LUNENBURG, N.S.–Richard Luckett knew he had a problem when a water pipe burst in his college room where 10,000 books – some dating back 400 years – lined the walls from one end to the other."

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King Arthur on Exhibit in Brittany

"Rennes launches the first ever major exhibition on the legend of King Arthur on 15th July 2008. In partnership with The French National Library the exhibition traces the cultural history of the Arthurian myth and has been nominated as an 'Exhibition of National Interest'".

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May 16, 2008

Robert Lenkiewicz: Book Collector

"In the six years since his death, Lenkiewicz's estate has been gradually sold off to the tune of more than £5m. While sales of his enormous collections of books at Sotheby's – the occult and witchcraft were among his favourite subjects – account for about £1.6m of the total, the rest of the money has been generated through sales of his paintings. "

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Google Adds Another Library to Its Roster

"The University of Texas library in Austin Texas has better than one million written works, and Google intends to convert them all into digital format and add them to the Google Library Project. Some of the university's collection includes some rare books and manuscripts from early Latin American history. "

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Rare Books and Water Don't Mix

"Among the books damaged that day was a Bible printed by John Baskett, a printer to King George III. Mr. Luckett enlisted Maggs Bros, one of the world’s largest sellers of rare books and manuscripts, to find replacements for the irrevocably damaged books. The replacement Bible he received was not at all what he expected."

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May 15, 2008

Shakespeare in Las Vegas

"Bauman Rare Books, a familiar landmark on Madison Avenue in New York for lovers of antiquarian books and autographs, announces its opening at The Shoppes at The Palazzo in Las Vegas. Visitors to the new luxury retail center can take home something truly unusual -- like an inscribed copy of Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea or a 1550 printing of Chaucer. This is the third location for proprietors Dave and Natalie Bauman."

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Stephen Gould's Books at Stanford University Libraries

"During his career, Gould wrote 300 consecutive essays for Natural History, the monthly magazine of the American Museum of Natural History, and more than 20 books, many of them bestsellers. He also assembled what he believed was a definitive library of the history of early paleontology, said Rhonda Shearer, Gould's widow."

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Digitizing Rare Manuscripts in Kashmir

"“In Jammu and Kashmir, we have a glorious history of 5000 years at our back. That is why the oldest manuscripts India presently possesses are a set of sixth century Buddhist texts, which were found buried in the hills of Kashmir 60 years ago. Our researchers have found rare ancient Sanskrit, Tibetan, Arabic and Persian treatises on number of subjects including ayurveda, diabetes, astrophysics, interpretation of dreams, surgical instruments, concepts of time and war techniques. We want to catalog and preserve all the precious subjects for the generations to come,” Zafar said."

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May 12, 2008

Former Lenin State Library Reopens to Public

"In a city where architectural monuments are readily torn down or gaudily renovated beyond recognition, Pashkov House, which reopened in October after an $80 million renovation, is one of the few restoration projects lauded by preservationists."

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University of Texas Law Library in the News

"Roy Mersky was a giant in his field who made the University of Texas law library one of the best in the nation, friends and colleagues said. Along the way, he taught worldwide, wrote prolifically and compiled a résumé more than 40 pages long. "

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Philadelphia Book Festival at the Free Library

"WITH THE return of the Philadelphia Book Festival this weekend, and a grand expansion project for the Central Library in early stages, the corridors of the Free Library are abuzz with excitement. But beyond the library's mile-high stacks of journals, encyclopedias and novels, there are underappreciated treasures that even the most fervent book lovers don't know about. "

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May 07, 2008

Early Editions of Yale Newspaper Go Online

"The Yale Daily News (YDN) is the oldest college daily newspaper in the United States, and has been covering student life at Yale and in New Haven for 130 years. The Library has now digitized key periods from the YDN including January 1878 to June 1879, the first year of the YDN's publication; the period covering the two World Wars; the era of civil unrest, coeducation, and the Black Panther trials from 1967 to 1970; and the early years of President A. Bartlett Giamatti's administration from 1978 to 1981."

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Wayne Rhodes: Director of Virginia's Jones Memorial Library

"Not even a power outage can stop Wayne Rhodes from doing his job. "

"Rhodes, director of the Jones Memorial Library, recalls a night when the power went out while he was working. The emergency lights came on, but the back part of the library, where they keep all reference materials, was plunged into darkness. "

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Rare Maps at the World's Biggest Charity Book Sale

"RARE Victorian maps of Edinburgh – as well as hand drawings of the city's first tram routes – are to be included in the world's biggest charity book sale."

"The collection was gifted to organisers of the annual Christian Aid fundraiser, being held this weekend at St Andrew's and St George's Church on George Street."

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May 05, 2008

Mughal Albums from the Chester Beatty Library

"Situated in the heart of Ireland's capital city, the Chester Beatty Library is an art museum and library which houses the great collection of manuscripts, miniature paintings, prints, drawings, rare books and some decorative arts assembled by Sir Alfred Chester Beatty (1875-1968). The Library's exhibitions open a window on the artistic treasures of the great cultures and religions of the world. Its rich collection from countries across Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and Europe offers visitors a visual feast. "

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In Search of Margaret Mitchell Papers

"ATLANTA — A legal battle over prized documents purportedly belonging to Gone With the Wind author Margaret Mitchell has blown over but the final resting place of the disputed papers is still a secret."

"The legal sparring involving the cache — apparently discovered in a file cabinet decades after they were written — was settled in January but no one will say where the trove of documents is now."

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Audubon on Exhibit in Greenville, South Carolina

"'Audubon’s Birds of Americais the most important illustrated book ever published, I think most people would agree,' said Scott."

"The University of South Carolina was one of the first subscribers to the book in 1831, he said. Now, only 125 copies survive worldwide. "

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May 02, 2008

Exhibit of Persian Manuscripts in New Delhi

"An exhibition of Persian Manuscripts and rare books inaugurated Thursday in New Delhi at Dr. Zakir Husain Library of Jamia Millia Islamia university as part of Iranian Cultural Week in India organised by the university. "

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High-Tech Exhibits at the Library of Congress

"Edits such as this are captured in a new exhibit at the Library of Congress that allows visitors to literally zoom in on the specific words and phrases that formed the basis of the American republic. They can see different versions of historic documents and examine them line by line, using interactive, touch-activated computer screens that show the library's first high-definition scanned images of the drafts."

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Scanning Rare Books at the University of Michigan

"Mitchel is among hundreds of librarians from Minnesota to England making digital versions of the most fragile of the books to be included in Google Inc.'s Book Search, a portal that will eventually lead users to all the estimated 50 million to 100 million books in the world. "

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