December 11, 2013
A watercolor portrait of Jane Austen commissioned by her nephew in 1869 sold for $270,000 at Sotheby’s on Tuesday. The anonymous private collector who purchased it called the portrait “the most important likeness of Jane Austen ever to appear on the open market.” The painting by James Andrews was taken from a pencil portrait by […]
December 10, 2013
Two strong women characters dominate the latest novel by Sue Monk Kidd, “The Invention of Wings.” Her “Secret Life of Bees” was a runaway bestseller in 2003. Kidd examined different theories of feminist theology in that book. This time she focuses on a young girl, Sarah Grimke, and the girl given to her as a […]
December 10, 2013
Fifty-two “envelope poems” written by Emily Dickinson in the early 1860s have been published in a coffee table size book titled Emily Dickinson: The Gorgeous Nothings. These “pocket-size” poems written on parts of envelopes have been in print since the 1950s, but “this is the first book devoted to full-color, actual-size facsimiles of a specific […]
December 3, 2013
Former library director Marino Massimo De Caro is accused of theft and embezzlement of thousands of volumes of rare books, including “centuries-old editions of Aristotle, Descartes, Galileo and Machiavelli” from the Girolamini Library in Naples. The president of the Italian Antiquarian Bookseller’s Association noted that “this is the biggest books scandal to hit in the […]
December 3, 2013
If you’re the parent or grandparent of a 2 to 5-year old, you must be living under a cone of kiddie lit isolation if you haven’t heard of the oh-so popular books by Mo Willems. Featuring the all-about-me Pigeon, the ever polite Duckling, best friends Elephant and Piggie, and more, the stories are presented in […]
December 3, 2013
The Bodleian and the Vatican Libraries have joined forces to make a number of rare ancient texts available free to the public, including a 1455 Gutenberg Bible, a manuscript of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, and the oldest surviving Hebrew codex. Funded by a $3.2 million grant from the Polonsky Foundation, this “unique cultural and scholarly enterprise […]
November 26, 2013
The basic idea of this net is simple and yet I did a double take when I saw it. Most of us probably don’t have room for such a contraption in our homes, but it looks like a great way to add some excitement to a library or den. Sort of like a built-in tree […]
November 25, 2013
The New York Times published an article earlier this month about the latest trend in the hospitality industry: library installations. The featured hotel was the Fogo Island Inn in Newfoundland, Canada, which features a collection specific to local history and culture. Not only are inns taking to this new amenity, the posh Trump SoHo Hotel […]
November 22, 2013
New York Public Library has acquired author Tom Wolfe’s archive, including materials for his novels, letters from friends Hunter S. Thompson, William F. Buckley and Gay Talese, works of journalism, and interviews with “historically significant figures like the test pilot Chuck Yeager.” Library president Anthony W. Marx called the archive “amazing”, saying: “His work touches […]
November 21, 2013
This year’s National Book Award for fiction was awarded to James McBride for The Good Lord Bird. His novel, narrated by a child follower of John Brown, was praised by the judges for “a voice as comic and original as any we have heard since Mark Twain.” Considered an underdog up against such writers as […]
