The Boston Globe has published an online slideshow of independently owned bookstores in Boston, and ABAA members were certainly the ‘stars’ of the show, making up half of the total bookstores listed.  Congrats to our Bostonian sellers!

Please click here to view the slideshow.

Almost all of these dealers will be exhibiting at the Boston Antiquarian Book Fair next week.

Despite economy, local bookstores endure [Boston Globe]

Click here to read a brief opinion piece about used books and their relation to e-readers.

I strongly agree with the author that it doesn’t have to be “one or the other”, and I don’t by any means think that the market for printed matter is going to disappear.  What are your thoughts?

I’m a Used Bookseller, and I’m Not Afraid of E-Books [WSJ Speakeasy]

Photo: Reena Rose Sibayan/The Jersey Journal

In 1863, Union Army Captain William A. Treadwill of the 4th New York Regiment took a book of court records from a Virginia county courthouse and shipped it north to Boston, presumably to keep the book as a relic.  The book made its way from Boston to Jersey City, where it remained in the Jersey City Free Public Library for the past 150 years.  The book was recently unearthed while librarians were parsing through the library’s holdings in order to prepare for an upcoming exhibit to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.  It contains transcribed summaries of court records from 1749 to 1755.

Carl Childs, the director of Local Record Services at the Library of Virginia, was thrilled to hear of the book’s discovery.  The vast majority of pre-Civil War records from the Stafford County Court were destroyed, so this book helps shed some light on that period.

Some interesting entries in the book include:

• A judge’s order that a man is paid 50 pounds of tobacco for serving as a witness for two days.

• A lawsuit of an unhappy widow who challenged the decision that she be awarded a dowry of just one-third of her late husband’s estate.

• Details of a case in which someone being fined for cursing in church.

The book was given to Childs, and back to Virginia, last week.  It will be copied for the public, and then bound and restored to be kept in the Library of Virginia.

Jersey City library returns spoils of Civil War, a 220-year-old book of court records, to Virginia county [The Jersey Journal]

I found a great post about Books of Hours on a French blog about medieval manuscripts, and it provided several videos on various Books of Hours.  Below I have included a short informational video on the structure of a medieval manuscript, as well as the two parts to a video from the Folio Society on the Fitzwilliam Book of Hours.  Enjoy!

The Structure of a Medieval Manuscript

The Fitzwilliam Book of Hours

Videos: Books of Hours [The Medieval Manuscript]

In anticipation of the 75th anniversary of the publication of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, Harper Collins has announced that it will be releasing 110 of Tolkien’s original illustrations for the book, twenty of which are previously unpublished.  The illustrations were compiled into a book entitled The Art of The Hobbit, which will be released on October 27.  The drawings have been in Tolkien’s archive at the Bodleian Library at Oxford, but were only recently ‘discovered’ by Harper Collins after the images were digitized.

The Art of The Hobbit

The illustrations include line drawings in ink, watercolors and sketches, and contain “his conceptual sketches for the cover design, a couple of early versions of the maps and pages where he’s experimenting with the runic forms, as well as a couple of manuscript pages”, notes David Brawn, publisher of the new collection.  Brawn hopes that The Art of The Hobbit coupled with the upcoming anniversary will allow the spotlight to shine on “the book which started it all”, as well as give novel insight into Tolkien and The Hobbit, his first book.  Of the The Art of The Hobbit, Brawn says,

“It shows that Tolkien’s creativity went beyond the writing, that it was a fully thought out conception. When he writes about the hobbit hole ["In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort"], he’s designed it as well. And by doing that, it makes his description more vivid … Tolkien was an accomplished amateur artist. He was a great admirer of Arthur Rackham and you can see a little bit of that style coming through.”

Also slated for publication this month are new editions of The Hobbit.  Harper Collins hopes that these new editions and the 75th anniversary will help bring attention back to the novel prior to the release of Peter Jackson’s film next year.

Note:  The first edition of The Hobbit was published in September 1937, but Tolkien delivered the manuscript to publishers in October 1936, which is how Harpers Collins explains starting the 75th anniversary celebration early.  

Tolkien’s Hobbit drawings published to mark 75th anniversary [The Guardian]

It has just been announced that ABAA member Larry McMurtry of Booked Up in Archer City, TX will be stepping in as the “New Books” columnist for Harper’s Magazine.  He will be filling in for Zadie Smith, who is on temporary leave.

Congrats, Larry, we can’t wait to read the column!

‘Lonesome Dove’ author Larry McMurtry writing books column for Harper’s Magazine [Washington Post]

Please click here to read an article about ABAA member John W. Freas of Tamerlane Books.  Nice article, John!

John Freas’ library is his portrait [Delaware County News Network]

Last fall, Johns Hopkins’ Sheridan Libraries acquired the Dr. Elliott and Eileen Hinkes Collection of Rare Books in the History of Science.  The collection is comprised of more than 300 items, which Dr. Hinkes acquired over the course of two decades, and will be on display for the public in an exhibit entitled Eureka!.  

Earle Havens, the William Kurrelmeyer Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at the Sheridan Libraries, said, “The historical sweep and ambition of the Hinkes Collection are staggering, from telescopic visions of the heavens from the ancient world to the most seminal subatomic reflections upon the fundamental nature of matter and energy in the modern era.”  The collection includes  a 1495 edition of the celestial works of Aristotle, early editions of pioneering works from the European Enlightenment, and rare off-prints of groundbreaking essays from the early to mid-twentieth century.

Eureka! is on display at the George Peabody Library (17 E. Mount Vernon Place) and will be open to the public from October 24, 2011-February 29, 2012.

‘Eureka!’ opens at the George Peabody Library [The JHU Gazette]

EUREKA! The Dr. Elliott and Eileen Hinkes Collection of Books of Scientific Discovery

In 1998,  a 13th century Greek Orthodox prayer book sold at auction at Christie’s New York for $2 million.  Why did it sell at such a high price?  It’s a palimpsest, an erased and overwritten document, and the true value of the book lays beneath the prayers, where one can make out the faint markings of a much older text– the only surviving copy of the essential works of Archimedes.

The palimpsest had been identified in 1906 by Johan Ludvig Heiberg, a famous Danish historian who was able to decipher and transcribe portions of the text.  The scope of his research was limited, however, by the limited technology at the time and because he was working with the bound text.

As soon as the palimpsest was sold in 1998, William Noel of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore contacted the buyer to request permission to loan the palimpsest and put it on temporary display at the Walters.  To Noel’s surprise and delight, the buyer arrived in Baltimore with the palimpsest in hand and offered to fund an extensive scholarly project to conserve and study it.  Noel was appointed director of the Archimedes Palimpsest Project, and he embarked on a twelve year journey ‘into’ the text.

Conservators, historians, manuscript experts, and scientists from around the world assisted the project, and Noel pointed out that “dedicated scholarship has brought these erased texts back to light.”  X-rays were particularly helpful in revealing text beneath saints’ portraits, but regular x-ray beams were not focused nor powerful enough to uncover the iron-based ink of Archimedes’ text.  The palimpsest was taken to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center to use the accelerator itself as the source of x-ray emissions.  Perhaps the most challenging aspect of the project, however, was disbinding the palimpsest, a task that was necessary for conserving and studying the piece.  Art & Antiques magazine reports:

When Ioannes Myronas and his colleagues harvested the parchment from the Archimedes manuscript for reuse in the prayer book, they scraped away the original text, which apparently held no interest for them, cut the pages along the spine edge, rotated them by 90 degrees and folded and rebound them in a way that yielded a new book with pages roughly half the size of the original. As a result, key portions of the Archimedes text were trapped in the gutter of the prayer book’s spine. Complicating matters, at some point during the 20th century a misguided restorer attempted to strengthen the prayer book’s sewn binding with a modern synthetic glue such as might be used by woodworkers. “For Abigail [head of conservation for books and paper at the Walters] to free those pages from the binding without further damage or loss was a delicate and time-consuming operation,” says Noel. “The glue was stronger than the parchment.”

The fruits of twelve years of conservation and research will be displayed in an exhibit, Lost & Found: The Secrets of Archimedes, at the Walters Art Museum from October 16, 2011 through January 1, 2012.  Click here to visit the exhibition website.

Eureka! [Art & Antiques]

Lost & Found: The Secrets of Archimedes [Walters Art Museum]

The ABAA is pleased to announce that member interviews can now be viewed on abaa.org.