Rare Book News

Marian Gore: Antiquarian Bookseller

"Antiquarian bookseller Marian L. Gore, who specialized in tomes about food and wine, once opened a book on ancient cookery and started to read a 15th century recipe for 'Goos in Hochepot.'"

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Islamic Texts Online at Walters Art Museum

"In a quiet, windowless room deep inside the Walters Art Museum, a digitization specialist places a 900-year-old Quran into the cradle of the Stokes Imaging System."

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Record Price for "X-Men Comics"

"The X-Men #1 was sold for a world record price of $101,000 (£60,000) during a comic book auction in Arnold, MO."

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Dante's Comedy in Mumbai

"Very few people know that within the high security vaults of the Asiatic Library are priceless Italian and Latin books stored with great care. The rarest of the lot is the richly illustrated edition of Dante's Comedia Divina (Divine Comedy) (1757)."

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Rare Books in Kansas City

"Standing among the 10,000 rare books in the stacks of the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City, Bruce Bradley, the director of the history of science special collections, pulls out a copy of "The Starry Messenger," the revelatory book in which Galileo detailed his astronomical observations made with his own "spyglass" -- the instrument that would later be known as the telescope."

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The "L. A. Times" Discusses Literary Manhattan

"First stop on this trip and home base: the Library Hotel in midtown, which I had been itching to visit since I discovered it online. Our cab driver didn't know the hotel, which I took as a good sign."

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HP vs. Google in Digital Rare Books

"Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) has partnered with the University of Michigan in making more than half a million rare and hard-to-find books from the school's library available for sale over the Web."

"The offering is through HP's BookPrep online service that lets people search for out-of-print books in HP's repository of scanned books."

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First Edition "Leaves of Grass" in Athens, Georgia

"Nothing prepared Arnold for the book a Fayetteville man brought in for appraisal a few months ago, however."

"The book was a first edition of Walt Whitman's seminal poetry book, 'Leaves of Grass,' and laid in the book long ago was a postcard written and signed by the great American poet."

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HP Offers Rare Books on Demand

"In a bid to save part of our classical heritage, major libraries are partnering with technology companies like HP to scan previously hard-to-find works using high-resolution photography. These scans are then cleaned up to remove any blemishes caused by wear and tear."

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Cornell University Exhibits Rare Lincoln Items

"An original handwritten copy of the Gettysburg Address and signed copies of the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution will be part of the exhibit at Cornell’s Carl A. Kroch Library."

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Rare Books on Exhibit in Islamabad, Pakistan

" A two-day exclusive display of collection of rare and contemporary books on art, literature, culture, religion and social issues started at Nomad Gallery on Saturday."

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UCLA Library Receives Shakespeare Collection

"Valued at just under $2 million and consisting of 72 books published between 1479 and 1731, among them several printings of Shakespeare's works, the collection is the largest gift ever given to the rare book library, which was built in 1926 and is located in Los Angeles' historic West Adams District."

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Wellington Square Bookshop in Chester County, PA

"The new store specializes in arcane, eclectic and obscure works, featuring rare, collectible and used books, many from Hankin’s personal collection. On the shelves are such classic writers as H.G. Wells, J.D. Salinger and Ernest Hemingway alongside collections of Italo Calvino and Primo Levi."

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African Art at the World Digital Library

"The digital library features unique cultural materials — including manuscripts, maps, rare books, films, sound recordings, prints and photographs — collected from libraries and archives around the world."

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Harvard to Digitize Rare Chinese Books

"One of the biggest collections of rare Chinese books outside China is to become freely available as Harvard University has agreed to digitise the titles."

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