Happened a couple of months ago, but haven't seen any comment on it elsewhere. Stanford New Service has the details:An accomplished and renowned collector, Fliegelman specialized in "association copies." These books have a great, sometimes huge, added value largely because of who owned them. In this case, some of Fliegelman's books once belonged to Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, George Washington, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster and the Empress of Russia. One of them carries the most famous American signature of all, John Hancock.
New Acquisitions
Harvard's Houghton Library has a new blog highlighting recent acquisitions to their Modern Books and Manuscripts division. Each post focuses on one item, with images as well as often-fascinating background and history. Personal faves so far include an Emily Dickinson manuscript, a telegram from the Lincoln assassination conspiracy, and a sort of 19th century version of The Dating Game:The set, which arrived in its original box, includes forty hand-colored cards depicting men and women. The twenty cards picturing men each contain a member of a different profession and a rhyming, nineteenth-century, pick-up line. The cards featuring women contain various polite...
Expand the Public Domain : Release the ‘Orphans’
UPDATE : May 20th - Lawrence Lessing has a must read op-ed on the issue in the New York Times titled "Little Orphan Artworks"**************************************************************************In the copyright world 'orphans' refer to all the books, films, pieces of art etc. that are banished to the storage rooms of museums and libraries across the country because their creators cannot be found.There are literally millions of items that go unprocessed because the places that house the material are afraid of being sued. With potential fines upward of $150,000 per item it is safe to say they will go unprocessed for a long time unless...
The Dark Side of the Bush Presidential Library
In a speech last week President George W. Bush touted the plan for his new Presidential Library at Southern Methodist University calling it "a place where we get the thinkers from around the world to come and write about and articulate the transformative power of freedom, abroad and at home."Bush expects to raise $500 million for the library making it the costliest Presidential Library to date. The half-a-billion dollars is twice the total amount Bush spent on his entire 2004 Presidential campaign! Just think if public libraries had that kind of kind of support while he was in office.Among the...
Dead Central : The Grateful Dead Archive Lands in Santa Cruz
"All of this stuff doesn't belong to us - it belongs to the culture that spawned us,...It seemed like getting it into a campus archive, with access to the people in the community that gave rise to this, was the right thing to do." - Bob WeirIt was announced this week that the University of California at Santa Cruz will be the new home of the Grateful Dead's archive. The archive will be housed in a room dubbed 'Dead Central' in the McHenry Library.The Archive contains 30 years of material including original documents, clippings, media, article and other publications about...