Who Saved Timbuktu's Priceless Manuscripts?

Librarians.

From a piece in the Global Post...

The saving of Timbuktu’s priceless manuscripts owes everything to the bravery of an unlikely group — librarians.

The coalition of Tuareg separatists and Islamic militants who overran the city last April were just the latest in a series of foreign invaders to sweep into the fabled desert city, so the owners of Timbuktu’s manuscripts did what they have always done — they hid them.

An ancient city squeezed between the Niger River and the Sahara Desert, Timbuktu was a center of Islamic scholarship and trans-African trade in its Medieval heyday but has gradually declined in the centuries that followed. The city's manuscripts are a unique treasure trove of scholarly information. Handwritten and many hundreds of years old, they are irreplaceable.

Anne Frank in the 21st Century

New photos, videos and and an app shed fresh light on Anne Frank's family life.

From a piece in the Guardian...

A photo of Anne with her elder sister and parents out together in May 1941 near their home in Amsterdam is a poignant reminder of the freedom they lost, while a jaunty image of Anne, taken by her sister Margot, shows her leaning over the balcony of a block of flats and letting her hair fly. The picture was meant to include their grandmother, Rosa, but a note in the scrapbook explains that she moved out of the way at the last moment.

Original documents, diary pages and footage are all included in the first app edition of The Diary of a Young Girl, the journal written by the teenage Frank during the two years she spent concealed from the Nazis in an annexe behind a warehouse.

Book, Once Owned by Sir Isaac Newton, Found

Thomas Browne’s Myographia Nova was found in a Welsh library.

From a story on Wales Online...

Rare book cataloguer Ken Gibb discovered the book, Thomas Browne’s “Myographia Nova” or “A graphical description of all the muscles in the humane body”, at the Rare Books Collection at Cardiff University Library. He traced it back to the famous physicist’s library by tracking down the owners of several bookplates left inside.

He began to research the bookplates – paper marked with the owner’s coat of arms – last November, as part of a larger project after the university bought 14,000 rare volumes from Cardiff Public Library in 2010.

Unknown Carl Sandburg Poem Found

A volunteer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign found it.

From a story in the Chicago Tribune...

Gullerud has volunteered at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library every Thursday for more than seven years. For the past two years, he's been working to classify and enter a file folder of poems into the school's electronic system.

He was working through poems by Sandburg this month when he came across "A Revolver" typed on scratch paper and recognized its relevance to current cultural debates across the country.

"When I wrote down that last line, I knew this was really big," Gullerud said.

Sandburg, a Galesburg native and at one time a Chicago newspaperman, received Pulitzer Prizes for poetry in 1919 and 1951 and another in 1940 for his biography of Abraham Lincoln.

Hundreds of Lost William Blake Etchings Found

Researchers at the University of Manchester’s John Rylands Library have stumbled upon a treasure trove of works by poet and artist William Blake.

From a story in the Independent...

After two years work the students, overseen by Blake expert and Manchester university art historian Colin Trodd, found about 350 engraved plates designed by Blake in the collection.

The library has held works by Blake including hand-coloured illustrations of Young’s Nights Thoughts, but the team suspected more were hidden in the collection of a million books and records.

John Rylands library archivist Stella Halkyard said: "The students had some specialist training in identifying prints from David Morris at the Whitworth Art Gallery before hunting through the collection. They found out we actually had a huge number of commercial engravings by Blake.”

Many will go on show at the library next month.

Librarians of the Twitterverse

The New York Review of Books discusses the Library of Congress's efforts to collects all the Tweets.

From the story...

Here in the twenty-first century, the Library of Congress is now stockpiling the entire Twitterverse, or Tweetosphere, or whatever we’ll end up calling it—anyway, the corpus of all public tweets. There are a lot. The library embarked on this project in April 2010, when Jack Dorsey’s microblogging service was four years old, and four years of tweeting had produced 21 billion messages. Since then Twitter has grown, as these things do, and 21 billion tweets represents not much more than a month’s worth. As of December, the library had received 170 billion—each one a 140-character capsule garbed in metadata with the who-when-where.

The library has attached itself to the firehose. A stream of information flows from 500 million registered twitterers (counting duplicates, dead people, parodies, imaginary friends, and bots) who thumb their hurried epistles into phones and tablets and PCs, and the tweets pour into Twitter’s servers at a rate of thousands per second—tens of thousands at peak times: World Cup matches, presidential elections, Beyonce’s pregnancy—and make their way in “real time” to a company called Gnip, a social-media data provider in Boulder, Colorado. Gnip organizes them into one-hour batches on a secure server for download, where they are counted and checked and finally copied to reels of magnetic tape, to be stored in a couple of filing cabinets. In different locations, for safety. If you have ever tweeted, rest assured that each of your little gems is there for posterity.

Of course, the chance of even your very best tweet being seen again by human eyes is approximately zero.

William Saroyan's Mustache Clippings

As trash goes, authors' clutter in the right hands equals big money.

From a story in the Wall Street Journal...

Authors, take notice: Remember those crates of scratch pads and tax returns in the garage? The trunkful of hotel bills and childhood doodles in the garden shed? Don't junk any of it—not before you call up somebody in Ken Lopez's line of work.

Mr. Lopez, who has a book-jammed office in this small town, is a broker—one of a dozen in the country—who deals in the flotsam of authorship. He sells to rich research libraries, which sort it and shelve it so scholars can mine it for clues to creativity.

"If you had William Faulkner's laundry list, would you care?" Mr. Lopez said not long ago. "The answer is, 'Yes.' So if it's true for Faulkner," he added rhetorically, "it could be true for you."

Being dead helps but isn't required. Mailer sold his 1,062 boxes for $2.5 million in 2005 and died in 2007. In 2003, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein sold 83 Watergate boxes, also to the Ransom, for $5 million. After 20 years of marketing for the likes of William S. Burroughs (dead) and Peter Matthiessen (alive), Mr. Lopez puts prices for interesting paper piles at $30,000 to $300,000.

 

 

Inside the Vatican Library

Hans Christian Andersen's 1st Fairy Tale Found

The Tallow Candle, thought to have been written by schoolboy Andersen, has been discovered in private archives by a Danish historian.

From a story in the Guardian...


The Tallow Candle was discovered by local historian Esben Brage in the dense private archives of the Plum family, revealed Danish paper Politiken, which printed the story in its entirety today. Brage was in the reading room at the National Archive for Funen in Odense when he stumbled across a small, yellowing piece of paper at the bottom of a box and realised it might be important. Two months later, experts have now confirmed that the story was written by Andersen.

"This is a sensational discovery. Partly because it must be seen as Andersen's first fairytale, and partly because it shows that he was interested in the fairytale as a young man, before his authorship began."

15th Century Book on Fighting Witchcraft Found

The University of Alberta proud owner of rare book on fighting witchcraft.

From a story in the Toronto Star...

The book, Invectives Against the Sect of Waldensians, is a how-to guide to expunge all evil and vanquish the dark forces of witchcraft. He said the 150-page manuscript is thought to have been written around 1465 by a monk in France’s Burgundy region, possibly for Edward IV of England. 

“The real evil is actually in this book, and it’s human. It’s not magical,” he said. “It’s a view of one’s fellow human beings as agents of the devil that is truly evil.” 

Gow came across the book in 2005 while scouring the university’s Bruce Peel Special Collections Library for teaching material. It is exceedingly rare — only four copies are known to exist.

Wormholes in Old Books Preserve a History of Insects

Discover Magazine takes a look at the bugs that live in our books.

From the piece...

There’s no way of telling how old a particular hole is. Instead, Hedges looked at prints in actual books. Since the books bear their date and place of publication, Hedges could trace the provenance of each hole to a specific year and country.

He studied more than 3,200 such holes, made between 1462 and 1899. Those from northern Europe, including England, Germany, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia, were round, and just 1.4 millimetres wide on average. Those from southern Europe, including Spain, Portugal, Italy and most of France, were larger, with average diameters of 2.3 millimetres. The southern holes also included many long tracks—these were made when the beetles, rather than burrowing straight out, exited from the wood in diagnonal paths that followed the grain.

An incredibly rare first edition of Jane Austen's novel Emma is tipped to sell for 200,000 pounds after being discovered.
The three volume presentation copy is the only one from the original print run of 12 known to exist today.
The literary legend requested that 11 of the books went to members of the Royal family, including the Prince Regent, and her own family.
The one that has now emerged for sale was gifted to Anne Sharp, a close friend of the novelist.
A clerk at the publishers was specifically instructed by Austen to pen the words 'from the author' on the title page of the book, which is still present today.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2236080/Last-surviving-edition-copy-Jane-Austens-Emma-set-fetch-200-000-auction.html#ixzz2CrYGvXYp
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

An incredibly rare first edition of Jane Austen's novel Emma is tipped to sell for 200,000 pounds after being discovered.
The three volume presentation copy is the only one from the original print run of 12 known to exist today.
The literary legend requested that 11 of the books went to members of the Royal family, including the Prince Regent, and her own family.
The one that has now emerged for sale was gifted to Anne Sharp, a close friend of the novelist.
A clerk at the publishers was specifically instructed by Austen to pen the words 'from the author' on the title page of the book, which is still present today.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2236080/Last-surviving-edition-copy-Jane-Austens-Emma-set-fetch-200-000-auction.html#ixzz2CrYGvXYp
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

An incredibly rare first edition of Jane Austen's novel Emma is tipped to sell for 200,000 pounds after being discovered.
The three volume presentation copy is the only one from the original print run of 12 known to exist today.
The literary legend requested that 11 of the books went to members of the Royal family, including the Prince Regent, and her own family.
The one that has now emerged for sale was gifted to Anne Sharp, a close friend of the novelist.
A clerk at the publishers was specifically instructed by Austen to pen the words 'from the author' on the title page of the book, which is still present today.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2236080/Last-surviving-edition-copy-Jane-Austens-Emma-set-fetch-200-000-auction.html#ixzz2CrYGvXYp
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

The only one from the original print run of 12 known to exist

The writer requested that 11 of the books went to members of the Royal family and her own family

Auction to be held at Sotheby's next month

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2236080/Last-surviving-edition-copy-Jane-Austens-Emma-set-fetch-200-000-auction.html#ixzz2CrXrEvX6
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

The only one from the original print run of 12 known to exist

The writer requested that 11 of the books went to members of the Royal family and her own family

Auction to be held at Sotheby's next month

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2236080/Last-surviving-edition-copy-Jane-Austens-Emma-set-fetch-200-000-auction.html#ixzz2CrXrEvX6
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

Note-Taking’s Past, Deciphered Today

The New York Times was taking notes at a note taking conference.

From the story...

“I thought I’d take my notes in a new way today,” said Judith Davidson, an associate professor of education at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, who was using Penultimate software and a stylus to inscribe cursive notes onto her iPad —  when she wasn’t filling every bit of blank space with colorful abstract doodles, that is. 

“I’m a felter, so sometimes I slip into thinking about felting,” she explained. “There are all these other things that go on in your head when you take notes.” 

The far-flung things that go on in scholars’ heads when they think about notes became clear at the daylong gathering. Presentations touched on talking points scribbled on Sarah Palin’s hand during a speech, fliers stapled to telephone poles and Twitter posts about the conference itself that were read from the stage all day (the event was live-streamed), many of which expressed anxieties about listeners’ own note-taking abilities.

Paper Maps vs. Digital Maps

Unpublished Truman Capote Story Now Published

It'll be in the December issue of Vanity Fair.

From a story in the Los Angeles Times...

In the December issue of Vanity Fair, which hits shelves this week, readers can get a taste of a missing chapter from Truman Capote's famously unfinished novel, "Answered Prayers." In Vanity Fair's table of contents, look for the piece by Capote titled "Yachts and Things."

Capote was at work on "Answered Prayers" for almost 20 years. He signed the contract in 1966, which was postponed, renewed and recalculated for larger and larger advances. It is rumored that he was offered $1 million to finally complete his manuscript -- but he couldn't meet the deadline. Parts of the manuscript that had appeared in Esquire magazine were gathered together after his death in 1984 and published, incomplete, as "Answered Prayers."

"Yachts and Things" was known to be a chapter planned for the book; the six-page story that appears in Vanity Fair was found among Capote's archives at the New York Public Library.

Rare Witch Hunting Manuel Unveiled

A rare medieval manuscript on how to recognize, question, torture and burn witches is being resurrected at the University of Alberta.

From a story in Global Montreal...

History professor Andrew Gow, who came across the originally miscatalogued book and is now working on translating it from medieval French to English, describes the content as "atrocious."

"If I were to describe this book, I'd say, well, think of all of the most evil books in Harry Potter and the Malfoy's library, well those were imaginary evil. This is real evil, right here," he says.

However, due to the timing of its creation around 1460, ahead of mass state-sponsored witch hunting in Europe, Gow also considers the text to be a priceless cultural artifact that holds great insight into the history of Europe.

Database Planned for Robert Burns Manuscripts

An 18-month project is being launched to produce the first ever extensive database of Robert Burns manuscripts.

From a story on BBC News...


Professor Gerard Carruthers, of Glasgow University, said: "This is a hugely significant development which will greatly benefit those who study the writings of Robert Burns. 

"The man, as we know, was a voracious author who penned more than 600 poems and songs."

"This database will not only allow for quick and easy access to the materials but it will also enable us to identify and put back together papers that have become separated, and even allow us to show examples of genuine Burns works and Burns forgeries."

BurnsScotland is a partnership agreement between the university, the National Library of Scotland, the National Galleries of Scotland, Glasgow Life, the National Museums of Scotland, Dumfries and Galloway Museums, East Ayrshire Museums and South Ayrshire Museums.

The American Antiquarian Society

Women's History Library Saved

London School of Economics steps in to rescue Europe's most extensive collection of women's history amid funding fears.

From a piece in the Guardian...

Founded in 1926 by the leading suffragist Millicent Fawcett, the collection has evolved into Europe's leading source of documents relating to every aspect of women's lives, including women's rights, suffrage, sexuality, health, education, employment, reproductive rights, the family and the home.

One of its most intriguing and popular exhibits is the return portion of a train ticket from Victoria station in London to Epsom, which was among the personal effects found on Emily Wilding Davison, the 41-year-old suffragette martyred under George V's horse at the 1913 derby, and which raises the question of whether she intended to kill herself that day.

Professor Craig Calhoun, director of the LSE, said: "It is of vital importance that strong historical collections are maintained and I am proud that LSE has been able to step in to keep the Women's Library open.

Rare Hemingway Works Going to University of South Carolina

A Hemingway collector has bequeathed his collection to USC.

From a piece in the Huffington Post...

The 70-year-old Grissom was joined by his wife Julie, 46, at a special showing of the collection in the Ernest F. Hollings Special Collection Library on USC's Columbia campus. Dozens of books in their original dust jackets, along with pamphlets, magazines, proofs and papers are on display in glass-covered cases.

Teachers will be able to access the collection to help students better understand Hemingway's creative writing process, university officials said.

"It provides a tremendous resource. It makes writing real in a very powerful way," said William Rivers, chairman of the university's English Department. "There is no other place in the world now where scholars can go to look at Hemingway's primary materials."

Grissom said his efforts began in his 20s as a medical student, and grew over the years. From the time he first read "The Green Hills of Africa," until he published his own bibliography of Hemingway's work in 2011, Grissom said he intended his collection to be used by scholars.

Grissom said the collection includes more than 1,200 copies of novels and first editions as well as 2,500 additional items such as editor's proofs that few collectors even know exist.

For Sale...

Thomas Edison's notebook.