Sunday, April 24, 2016

Links & Reviews

- Shakespeare, Shakespeare, Shakespeare! Louis Bayard writes the Bard's obituary for the NYTimes. This week's "On the Media" is given over to him (and it's quite a good episode). Michael Pennington reflects on five decades of performing Shakespeare's plays for the TLS.

- The Shakespeare's Beehive authors respond to Adam Hooks (and others, in part).

- Sarah Laskow has a great piece at Atlas Obscura about Audubon's hoax species, created to fool Constantine Rafinesque. Sarah's piece is based on Smithsonian curator Neal Woodman's recent article in Archives of Natural History, "Pranked by Audubon: Constantine S. Rafinesque's description of John James Audubon's imaginary Kentucky mammals."

- The BL has launched a new Hebrew Manuscripts site.

- Carla Hayden appeared to breeze through her Senate confirmation hearing this week. Coverage from the Baltimore Sun, Roll Call.

- Nate Pedersen visited UVA last month and has posted a video of his tour with David Whitesell of David's exhibition on the gothic novel, "Fearsome Ink."

- The David Rumsey Map Center opened at Stanford last week.

- John Y. Cole has been appointed Library of Congress Historian, with Pam Jackson named as the new director of the Center for the Book.

- The Supreme Court denied cert this week in the Authors Guild v. Google case this week, ending that long saga once and for all (one can hope).

- Seth Gottlieb writes for the APHA blog about a recent "hand press crawl" he and some teammates took to research wooden common presses around New England. They are working this year on the design and construction of a press to be installed in RIT's Cary Graphic Arts Collection.

- Christopher Minty writes about New York printer James Rivington for The Junto.

- Anne Jarvis, currently university librarian at the University of Cambridge, will become university librarians at Princeton on 1 October.

- The Guardian has more on the dispute over the Birds' Head Haggadah, mentioned last week.

- Kayla Haveles posts at Past is Present about John Hancock's 26 April 1775 letter requesting that paper be sent to Isaiah Thomas at Worcester so that he can resume printing.

- State Library of Victoria cataloger Richard Overell writes about the process of cataloging the John Emmerson collection.

- Some 19th-century French woodblock-printed wallpaper is highlighted in the Princeton Graphic Arts Collection blog.

- Tom Teicholz writes about the Arthur Conan Doyle collection at the Toronto Reference Library for Forbes.

- At The Collation, Abbie Weinberg offers a "defense of the card catalog."

- John Schulman has a haggadah primer over at the ABAA blog.

- There's an excerpt from Chanan Tigay's The Lost Book of Moses in Tablet.

Reviews

- Joshua Hammer's The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu; reviews by David Wright in the Seattle Times and Rebecca Rego Barry at Fine Books Notes.

- David Cesarini's Disraeli: The Novel Politician; reviews by Jonathan Rosen in the NYTimes and Benjamin Balint in the WSJ.

- Chanan Tigay's The Lost Book of Moses; review by David Holahan in the CSM.

- Andrew Dickson's Worlds Elsewhere; review by Jonathan Bate in the WSJ.