The Engineering Library at the University of Minnesota was one of 8 buildings evacuated after a typed note was found. No mention of what the note said.University of Maryland at College Park: e-mail stating that a bomb was “in a book in a library.”Library at the University of Texas at Austin: Threatening note found. No mention of what the note said. It was the 5th note found on campus since the Va. Tech shootings. This is where George Bush lived when governor of Texas.West Port High School in Ocala, Florida. Someone found a handwritten note in a book drop. A...
A Lady’s Books Go To Auction
Bloomberg is reporting that Annette Campbell-White, who runs a venture capital firm that specializes in early stage medical technologies, will be selling her book collection through Sotheby's in London.Highlights of the collection include:First Editions of:F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great GatsbyT. S. Elliot's The Wasteland andJames Joyce's Ulysses.An inscribed copy of Ernest Hemingway's In Our Timeand the typescript of Evelyn Waugh's Decline and FallI am uncertain why the California based collector is sending her books to auction in London. She did offer the collection to a New Zealand University (Campbell-White was born there) "but they didn't seem to understand the value."...
Patrolling
Charles Johnson essay in the Seattle PI on a cure for our post-literate, "superflat" society.Edward Champion adds another nail to the newspaper book review coffin. He contends that book reviews are "tailor-made for digital delivery". Hard to argue.Project For Public Places article Libraries That Matter. Get ready for the 21st century library as they "extend their mission well beyond the storage of knowledge."Flickr set from popcornyouth of The “The Big Red C” Buzz Spector's book installation at Cornell's Hirshland Gallery.popcornyouth is the arts blog of the Itacha Times where they also have a great interview with Spector
Side By Side. Finally
For the first time, after who knows how many thousands of years, the sacred texts of the world's three monastic faiths, Judiasm, Christianilty and Islam have been gathered together for an exhibition at the British Library.The exhibit Sacred: Discover What We Share: The World's Greatest Collection of Jewish, Christian and Muslim Holy Books brings together the rarest sacred texts in existence.Highlights include:A tattered copy of the Dead Sea Scrolls andA"Qur'an commissioned for a 14th-century Mongol ruler of modern Iran who was born a shaman, baptised a Christian, and converted first to Buddhism, then Sunni and finally Shia Islam."There is a...
The Book Review Shuffle
The Book Review sections of all major newspapers are under intense pressure these days.The National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) campaign to Save the Book Review is a noble effort and one I fully support but the problem is not in saving the Book Review sections it is about reinventing them.It is about widening the scope of their missions. The book landscape has changes dramatically in the last 10 years while the book review sections, for the most part, have barely moved.It is about serving all the different types of book lovers that exist in our communities not simply covering newly...