A celebration of the life and work of Gabriel García Márquez February 11, 2020 – Posted in: Content, Exhibits, In the Stacks, Libraries, Special Collections

photo by Maria Mendez In 2014 the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas acquired the archive of the Nobel Prize winning Latin American literary superstar Gabriel García Márquez. In 2015 the archive was opened to researchers and quickly became one of the Ransom Center’s most accessed collections. Passport, 1955-1991 In 2017 an online archive of over 25,000 items from the collection was released into the world and now, for the first time, an…

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International flavor comes to America: Early Ethnic cookbooks February 9, 2020 – Posted in: Bookselling / Collecting, Content, Exhibits, Special Collections

Chinese-Japanese Cook Book by Sara Bosse and Onoto Watanna [pseud.], Chicago, Rand McNally [c1914]. First Edition The folks at Rare Books Digest have put together an informative list of first appearances of various ethnic cookbooks in America. From the 1828 first American publication of a French cookbook to the first Greek cookbook that, amazingly enough, wasn’t published in this country until 1942! Here’s a sampling. El cocinero español by Encarnación Pinedo. San Francisco, 1898. This…

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The Bookseller “spurred me on”: The deeply troubling Carnegie Library theft January 17, 2020 – Posted in: Bookselling / Collecting, bookshops, Content, Special Collections

One was the sole archivist for and head of the rare book room at the Carnegie Library. The other was an antiquarian bookseller and proprietor of Caliban Books. They both recently pleaded guilty for their part in one of the biggest library heists on record, stealing millions of dollars worth of material from the Carnegie library. For pretty much as long as they were at the helm of their respective workplaces Greg Priore and John…

In the Stacks: Medicine and Madison Avenue January 9, 2019 – Posted in: Content, In the Stacks, Libraries, Special Collections

The Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History at Duke University holds an extensive collection of more than 3 million items that document the history of sales, advertising and marketing throughout the past two centuries. From that massive archive comes the digital collection Medicine and Madison Avenue. A gathering of close to 600 advertising items and publications illustrating the rise of consumer culture and the birth of a professionalized advertising industry in the United States.…

A university in the UK unveils what just might be the oldest known fragments of the Qur’an July 23, 2015 – Posted in: Books and Technology, Content, Libraries, Special Collections

Last November we reported that a German University had discovered what was then one of the earliest known copies of the Qur’an. The folks at the Coranica Project, part of the University of Tübingen, had placed a manuscript of the Qu’ran to between 649-675 AD. Now researchers at the University of Birmingham have unearthed a copy that according to radiocarbon testing was written on parchment that originated between 568-645 AD, making it easily one of the oldest known fragments. It is quite possible…

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