Recently in News Category

IOBA awards two scholarships annually to support the professional development of its member booksellers, without regard to their level of accomplishment or the length of their time in the book trade.  IOBA believes that every well-educated, well-informed, and ethical bookseller is a credit to the trade and the organization and considers these scholarships to be an investment in the future of bookselling.  One scholarship is given for the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar (CABS) (http://www.bookseminars.com/) in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and one open scholarship is given and can be used at CABS, the London Book School (http://www.ies.sas.ac.uk/london-rare-books-school), the California Rare Book School (http://www.calrbs.org/), or the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia (http://www.rarebookschool.org/).

AUSTIN, Texas — The Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin, acquired the archive of American poet Peter Orlovsky (1933-2010), an important figure in the Beat Generation.

Orlovsky was fellow poet Allen Ginsberg’s companion for more than 40 years, and his papers reflect significant aspects of their relationship. Orlovsky’s collection comprises manuscripts, journals and notebooks, correspondence, tape recordings, photographs and other personal documents, including unpublished poetry and prose works.

The Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA) is asking Congress to do its part to facilitate the spread of literacy and guarantee free speech by ensuring the U.S. Postal Service remains solvent and that special Media Mail rates stay in place.

The financially struggling U.S. Postal Service ended the second quarter of its 2013 fiscal year with a net loss of $1.9 billion and mounting debt. Efforts to eliminate Saturday delivery of mail were blocked earlier this year. But many fear plans to reduce debt could lead to higher postal prices, further reductions in service and the elimination of the reduced Media Mail rate many booksellers rely upon. Media Mail facilitates the spread of literacy and free speech by enabling the shipping of educational, literary and other written and electronic forms of communication at preferential rates.

Washington, D.C. — June 10, 2013 — This November, the National Archives will significantly expand its permanent exhibitions with the opening of the new David M. Rubenstein Gallery and Visitor Orientation Plaza. The project has been made possible thanks to a generous gift of $13.5 million from philanthropist David M. Rubenstein to the Foundation for the National Archives, an independent nonprofit that supports the mission and public programs of the National Archives.

 

The new permanent exhibition in the Rubenstein Gallery, Records of Rights, will use original documents, photographs, facsimiles, videos, and interactive exhibits to explore how Americans have worked to realize the ideals of freedom enshrined in our nation’s founding documents, and how they debated issues such as citizenship, free speech, voting rights, and equal opportunity. Exploring many stories—and showcasing the drive for civil rights for African Americans, women, and immigrants—the new exhibition chronicles the past and current generations whose efforts to secure equality under the law have shaped the country we live in today.

New York, NY, June 7, 2013—The Morgan Library & Museum announced today the appointment of Peggy Fogelman to the new position of Director of Collections. She will assume her responsibilities in September.

 

Ms. Fogelman has some twenty years of curatorial and senior management experience at museums across the United States, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts, and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. She was most recently Frederick P. and Sandra P. Rose Chairman of Education at the Metropolitan Museum.

New York, NY, June 5, 2013—The Morgan Library & Museum is currently displaying its sixteenth-century original Van Damme Hours to mark the occasion of the manuscript’s facsimile publication by Munich’s Faksimile Verlag. On view through October 6, 2013, the tiny (2.2 x 2.9 inch) Book of Hours is the creation of scribe Antonius van Damme and illuminator Simon Bening.

 

The Van Damme Hours has a storied provenance, having passed through no less than ten hands before entering the Morgan’s collection in 1924. Although the identity of the man who commissioned the work is unknown, the compelling history of the manuscript’s first known owner, John Strange (1732-1799), is well documented, as is the manuscript’s subsequent owners. Strange, a British dilettante whose eclectic interests included everything from sea sponges to Venetian paintings, supplied the manuscript with its distinctive detachable silver filigree binding. The binding is displayed alongside the manuscript at the Morgan, and replicated as part of the deluxe edition of the facsimile.

Setting off from Damascus in 1876, Charles Doughty travelled for 21 months across the deserts of arabia, through regions almost entirely unknown to Western eyes. He faced many hazards, from malnutrition and heat exhaustion to attack by hostile Wahabi communities. Initially he travelled with the Haj, before venturing into the desert interior alongside a Bedouin family and other nomadic groups. He reached the city of Unayzah, and finally Jeddah, in 1878.

His account of this remarkable journey is considered by many to be the finest travel book in the English language, and inspired T. E. Lawrence’s excursions 30 years later. Despite its abundant merits, it was little known until Lawrence became its most avid and practical reader — using it as a guide during his travels across arabia and admiring its descriptions of a bygone way of life. Today, it is celebrated both for its immense anthropological value and its uniquely innovative prose.

Minnesota Center for Book Arts (MCBA) is proud to announce the five finalists for this year's MCBA Prize — the first honor to recognize book art from across the field and around the world.

 

For the 2013 competition, a three-member jury reviewed 192 submissions from 158 artists representing 22 nations around the world, and narrowed the field to five finalists. These five works will be judged at MCBA during Book Art Biennial 2013 (BookArtBiennial.org), a two-day academic symposium on contemporary practice in the book arts. The winner will be announced at a gala award ceremony on Saturday, July 27. The five finalists each receive a $500 cash award, plus travel stipend to attend Book Art Biennial and The MCBA Prize Gala; the winner receives an additional $2,000 cash award.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania—May 23, 2013—Library Company Director John Van Horne has announced that he will retire in May 2014 after almost 30 years at the helm. When he took over leadership of the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1985, special collections libraries operated pretty much the way they always had. It was just before the advent of the personal computer, and the Library Company had recently acquired a Wang word processor. Van Horne remembers the first FAX machine arriving in 1987, a clunky affair which cost several thousand dollars and used thermal paper. Since then, the digital revolution has transformed almost every aspect of the research environment, from the electronic catalog and online databases to online access to digitized images of the collections.

 

Van Horne has presided over this dramatic transformation with attentiveness to the needs of visitors, researchers, and members; a keen instinct for opportunity; and an unwavering reverence for the institution's history and mission.  "This library has been in continuous operation for 282 years.  Benjamin Franklin himself believed that it helped instill in Americans their passion for democratic citizenship. I cannot imagine a more critical task than ensuring that scholars and the public are able to have access these collections and the historical insights they make possible-and that they are preserved for future generations."

OAK CREEK, Wisconsin (May 21, 2013) — The 33rd Annual George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award was presented at the annual conference of the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) held in Pasadena, California April 25-29, 2013. The award was established in 1980 to honor the memory of the premier New York City art book dealer and publisher George Wittenborn. The award is given each year to a North American art publication which represents the highest standards of content, documentation, layout and format in art publishing. One outstanding book published in 2012 was selected to receive the 33rd Annual George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award.

New York, NY, May 21, 2013—The Morgan Library & Museum announced today that it has added nearly 100 of its treasures to the Google Art Project.

The Google Art Project allows for these works—rare books, paintings, sculptures, and manuscripts—to be viewed in exceptional detail. In addition, the Morgan’s 1906 McKim building—an architectural gem comprising Pierpont Morgan’s Library and Study—can be appreciated in exciting new ways.

(New York, May 20, 2013)—Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, today announced two appointments in its Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters. Peter Barnet, who is currently the Michel David-Weill Curator in Charge of the department, will move into the newly created position of Senior Curator, and C. Griffith Mann, currently Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Cleveland Museum of Art, will become the Metropolitan Museum’s Michel David-Weill Curator in Charge of the Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters. These changes will go into effect on September 1.

Thomas Campbell said, in making the announcement: “Over the past 15 years, Peter Barnet has been a strong leader of his superb staff. Together they have presented an important roster of scholarly exhibitions, made significant acquisitions, and carried out essential upgrades and reinstallations in the medieval art galleries, both in the Met’s main building and at The Cloisters. Having now led The Cloisters into its landmark 75th-anniversary year, Peter has decided to focus on his scholarship, taking on new projects in research, curating, and writing.”

May 20, 2013—Harvard University Provost Alan M. Garber announced today that Sarah Thomas of the University of Oxford has been named vice president for the Harvard Library. In this role, Thomas will have overall responsibility for the Harvard Library, and will collaborate closely with the Library Board, the Faculty Advisory Council and the Library Leadership Team.  

Garber noted, “Sarah Thomas is a leader in her field with an exceptional record of success running major academic libraries. She is uniquely capable of building on the progress we have made thus far in responding to the evolving expectations of the 21st century scholar. Working closely with Library staff, faculty, students and school and university leadership, Sarah will help Harvard continue to set the standard for academic libraries worldwide.”

The Library of Congress today announced a summer essay contest in conjunction with public libraries in the Mid-Atlantic region encouraging rising 5th- and 6th-grade students to reflect on books that have made a personal impact on their lives.

The "A Book That Shaped Me" Summer Writing Contest is administered as part of summer reading programs at participating public libraries in Washington, DC, Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Prizes will be awarded and top winners will be invited to present their essays during a special presentation at the Library of Congress National Book Festival Sept. 21 and 22 on the National Mall.

What is considered to be a masterpiece in the world of rare books? Is it an attractive cover, skilfully executed illustrations or foremost content that makes a book valuable and sought after? This summer one will have a chance to find out for oneself, as Shapero Rare Books are bringing examples of the finest illustrated books ever produced along with first editions of the works that shaped the history of mankind to Masterpiece, the biggest fine art, antiques and design fair in London. 

The highlights include: 

• Fine set of the first edition of Adam Smith’s An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations - a cornerstone work, which the author spent ten years writing and perfecting before finally publishing it in 1776. 'The book succeeded at once, and the first edition was exhausted in six months...Whether it be true or not, as Buckle said, that the ‘Wealth of Nations’ was, ‘in its ultimate results, probably the most important that had ever been written’...it is probable that no book can be mentioned which so rapidly became an authority both with statesmen and philosophers' (ODNB).

Hyde Park, NY — The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum announces the completion of the first renovation of the Library building since it opened in 1941. The National Archives and Records Administration will formally open the Library's new state-of-the-art permanent museum exhibits on June 30, 2013 (museum visitors can see the exhibits between 2:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m., regular admission fees apply). An invitation-only, private Rededication Ceremony — scheduled for 11:00 a.m. on June 30 — will be webcast live at www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu.

With the upcoming release of Baz Luhrmann’s opulent new adaptation, collectors around the world are on alert for the emergence of examples of the very rare and desirable dust jacket of the first edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic, The Great Gatsby.

Sometimes called the most expensive bit of paper in modern literature, the dust jacket can add more than £100,000 to the value of the book itself.

The average price for a 1925 first edition in good condition without the dust jacket is at around £5,000-£7,000 whereas with the dust jacket the book is worth over £120,000.

Renowned rare bookseller Peter Harrington is expecting some interest in an example they have in their shop on Chelsea’s Fulham Road.

NEW YORK CITY, NY — Bauman Rare Books announces the acquisition of two substantial collections of early and important works of exploration, featuring the gripping journeys of George Anson, James Cook, David Livingstone, Richard F. Burton, Ernest Shackleton and others.  The explorers featured in these collections  were the original globe blazers, striking out for the farthest reaches of the world, plunging into the most inhospitable climates and continually risking their lives, all in the pursuit of science,  glory, Christianity and riches, according to David Bauman, proprietor, Bauman Rare Books. “These volumes offer a remarkable perspective on exploration and the incredible journeys that mapped the world and charted the course of history,” he said.  The volumes are featured in Bauman Rare Book’s newest catalogue, “Incredible Journeys,” which is available online and contains 58 choice and rare items in excellent condition.

 

Located on Madison Avenue in New York and Grand Canal Shoppes at The Venetian/The Palazzo in Las Vegas, Bauman Rare Books offers valuable early editions of meaningful works, many of which have been signed by the authors.

New York—Swann Galleries, an auction house that specializes photographs and other works on paper, has launched a social media project that reaches out to the global photography community of collectors, curators, dealers, critics, photographers and enthusiasts. The new blog, called Photophilia, is hosted on tumblr and offers a fully interactive platform for sharing your favorite photos. Swann defines Photophilia as an obsession, a love, a desire for photographs.

“Colleagues and customers are always engaging us in conversations about photography,” said Swann Photographs Senior Specialist Deborah Rogal, “and, often their first question is ‘what is your favorite image in this sale?’ So, we had the idea of opening that conversation up to a wider audience. We hope it will create new ways of experiencing, viewing and discussing photography.”

May 2, 2013 — The 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, marked by tragedy, are also known for being the first to incorporate a brand across all aspects of the games.

“The Munich games were really the first games to create a visual identity. And it was a visual and graphic identity that spoke to the new identity of West Germany,” said Matthew Gin. “This was important because it was the first games held in Germany after World War II.”

Gin, a Ph.D. candidate in architecture, was this year’s first place winner in the Philip Hofer Prize for Collecting. His collection “Between West Germany and the World: Design at the 1972 Munich Olympics” was deemed outstanding by the judges who evaluated this year’s entries.

Jerusalem and New York (April 29, 2013) — The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced today the joint acquisition of one of the finest illuminated Hebrew manuscripts ever created, a rare handwritten copy of the Mishneh Torah by Maimonides, one of the most important rabbinical figures of the Middle Ages. The manuscript was previously in the collection of Judy and Michael Steinhardt, New York, and will be shared by the two museums on a rotating basis.  

The Mishneh Torah is being acquired by the Israel Museum with support from: an anonymous donor; René and Susanne Braginsky, Zurich; Renee and Lester Crown, Chicago; Lynn Schusterman, Tulsa; and Judy and Michael Steinhardt, New York. Funding for the acquisition at the Metropolitan Museum will be announced at a later date.

LOS ANGELES, CA — April 2013 — For those that have been named an executor of an estate or are looking to downsize a home, NorthStar Moving ® Company, the leading eco-luxury mover in California, has unveiled a new customized package with A.N. Abell Auction Company to alleviate the stress and uncertainty of selling treasured possessions.

According to the Demand Institute, more than 40 percent of Americans ages 50 to 64 plan to move within the next five years or so. Baby boomers are deciding they don’t need their spacious homes anymore and at the same time, they are often handed the responsibility of selling their parents’ estates. Both transitions are overwhelming and emotional. Through this new partnership with Abell Auction, NorthStar Moving is making moving and estate sales a one-step, seamless process.

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington has announced that Don DeLillo, author of such critically acclaimed novels as "Underworld," "Mao II" and the National Book Award-winning "White Noise," will receive the first Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction during the 2013 Library of Congress National Book Festival, Sept. 21-22.

This inaugural award was inspired by a prior award the Library made for lifetime achievement in the writing of fiction — presented to Pulitzer Prize winner Herman Wouk in 2008. DeLillo follows in the path of four subsequent winners of the Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for fiction in connection with the Library’s National Book Festival: John Grisham (2009), Isabel Allende (2010), Toni Morrison (2011) and Philip Roth (2012).

NEW YORK, April 24, 2012 — The Museum of Modern Art has appointed David Platzker as a Curator in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books, Glenn D. Lowry, Director of The Museum of Modern Art, announced today. Platzker, widely known for his expertise in artists' books, multiples, and ephemera of the post-1960 period, will work closely with Chief Curator Christophe Cherix, participating in the curatorial program, including exhibitions, special projects, and acquisition initiatives. 

"Platzker's long-standing commitment to the study of artists' books, multiples, and ephemera will be a tremendous asset to the department. His research, publications, and curatorial projects over the past twenty years have helped redefine a broader notion of the field of printmaking," said Cherix. "He will play an important role in managing the Museum's extraordinarily comprehensive Fluxus holdings and facilitating cross-departmental projects."

PHILADELPHIA, PA April 17, 2013 — In a historic move, the Free Library of Philadelphia Foundation and The Rosenbach Museum & Library today announced their intent to merge, creating The Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia Foundation. The affiliation will bring together two of the world’s preeminent collections of rare books, artifacts, and manuscripts, including Bram Stoker’s notes for Dracula with Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and thus creating one of the greatest collections of rare books, manuscripts, Americana, and art anywhere in the world. This historic, joint decision will bring advantages to each institution, and most important, it will further solidify Philadelphia’s position as an educational and cultural leader in the nation. Today’s announcement marks the signing of a letter of intent following board approval by each of the organizations on April 16, 2013.

Siobhan A. Reardon, President and Director of the Free Library commented on this historic partnership: “The aim of this partnership is to build and sustain collections of Americana and English literature that are among the greatest in the world while furthering Philadelphia’s status as an educational and cultural leader. We couldn’t be more excited about The Rosenbach of the Free Library. We thank our philanthropic partners and future donors for helping us share these incredible collections with a wider audience than ever before.”

NEW YORK, 12 April 2013 — On 26 November 2013, Sotheby’s New York will auction one of the finest surviving copies of the Bay Psalm Book — the first book printed in what is now the United States of America. The Congregationalist Puritans who emigrated to Massachusetts Bay in search of religious freedom quickly set about to translate and produce a version of the Book of Psalms that was a closer paraphrase of the Hebrew original than the one they had carried from England. The first edition of the resulting Bay Psalm Book was printed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1640, and Sotheby’s will auction one of the 11 surviving copies in the dedicated auction. The present example comes from the collection of the Old South Church in the heart of Boston, Massachusetts — one of two remarkable copies presently in its collection - and the proceeds of the sale will benefit the church’s mission and ministry in the Greater Boston area.

No example of the Bay Psalm Book has appeared at auction since 1947, when another copy achieved a record auction price for any printed book at the time — many multiples of what other icons of printing achieved in that period, including the Gutenberg Bible, Shakespeare’s First Folio and Audubon’s Birds of America**. The present example of the Bay Psalm Book from the Old South Church’s collection comes to auction at Sotheby’s New York with a pre-sale estimate of $15/30 million*.

New York, NY, April 9, 2013—The Morgan Library & Museum will receive a gift from the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center of New York of twenty-eight letters written by J. D. Salinger. The gift commemorates the 150th birthday of Swami Vivekananda, who brought Vedanta, the religious and philosophical teachings of India, to the West in 1893. With this generous new gift, the Morgan now holds fifty-two Salinger letters in its collection.

J. D. Salinger was deeply influenced by Vedanta and had an enduring relationship with Swami Nikhilananda, founder and spiritual leader of the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center of New York. Salinger attended services and classes at the Center in Manhattan, and at the Vivekananda Cottage retreat in New York’s Thousand Island Park.

April 8, 2013, Westport, CT — With the runaway popularity of Antiques Roadshow, Pawn Stars and other shows amazing audiences by identifying the hidden value in their bric-a-brac and family heirlooms, families across the nation are sifting though their attics and basements in search of that special something that could make them rich.

 

According to John Reznikoff, a leading document and signature authenticator, “both sellers and collectors need an impartial expert to verify significant documents, manuscripts, letters, relics, and autographs in many categories, from sports and cinema, to space exploration and Presidential history.”

AUSTIN, Texas — Head librarian of the Folger Shakespeare Library Stephen Enniss has been appointed as the new director of the internationally renowned Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin.

Enniss will take over the duties of current Director Thomas F. Staley, who will retire Aug. 31. Staley, who has been responsible for scores of notable acquisitions and the Center’s enormous growth during his 25-year tenure, had announced plans to retire in 2011, but later agreed to postpone his retirement date. Staley, who is also the Harry Huntt Ransom Chair in Liberal Arts, will remain on faculty and plans to teach in the College of Liberal Arts. Enniss will start at the Ransom Center Aug. 1 to allow time for a smooth transition.

April 8th, 2013—New artist's book: “The Works of Master Poldy” based on James Joyce’s Ulysses, designed and produced by Dublin based artist & designer Jamie Murphy.

 

• What - Artist and designer Jamie Murphy is undertaking a new letterpress book, “The Works of Master Poldy,” based on the musings of Leopold Bloom, James Joyce's seminal hero of Ulysses. 

 

• When - Indiegogo campaign launched to fund the book planned for release by Bloomsday 2013, June 16th.

 

• Where - The book will be designed and printed at Distillers Press, NCAD, Ireland's foremost letterpress printing workshop.

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington has named a group of distinguished men and women in the field of literacy to serve on the advisory board for the new Library of Congress Literacy Awards.

These awards will be conferred for the first time in fall 2013 to recognize and support outstanding achievements in the field of literacy, both in the United States and abroad. The awards are made possible through the generosity of David M. Rubenstein.

CHICAGO — The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS) has selected four winners and one honorable mention for the 2013 Katharine Kyes Leab and Daniel J. Leab American Book Prices Current Exhibition Awards.

The awards, funded by an endowment established by Katharine Kyes Leab and Daniel J. Leab, editors of American Book Prices Current, recognize outstanding printed exhibition catalogs and guides and electronic exhibitions produced by North America and Caribbean institutions. Certificates will be presented to each winner at 3 p.m. on Sunday, June 30, at the 2013 ALA Annual Conference in Chicago.

A 1555 copy of Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica with the author’s own extensive hand-written notes and corrections is being made available for study at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto.

The book in question was acquired by a private collector at auction in Germany and has been generously placed on deposit by the owner at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library in order to make it available to the wider scholarly community.

NEW YORK, March 2013 — Columbia University Libraries’ Rare Book & Manuscript Library (RBML) is pleased to announce the acquisition of the archive of the author Dawn Powell. The collection includes published and unpublished manuscripts, artwork, first editions, and the long suite of diaries that capture her life experiences in New York City during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. 

Powell, a New York novelist whose posthumous champions included Gore Vidal, Edmund Wilson and Matthew Josephson, produced hundreds of short stories, ten plays, fifteen novels and extended diary volumes throughout her lifetime. Despite a prodigious output, Powell’s career was not widely regarded during her lifetime. When she died in 1965, most of her novels were out of print.

AUSTIN, Texas — The archive of Nobel Prize-winning writer and University of Texas at Austin alumnus J.M. Coetzee is available for research at the Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin. The bulk of the archive traces the author’s life and career from 1960 through 2012.

Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1940 and graduated from the University of Cape Town. After working three years as a computer programmer in England, he enrolled in The University of Texas at Austin in 1965 to pursue his Ph.D. in English, linguistics and Germanic languages, which he earned in 1969. While at the university, he conducted research in the Ransom Center’s collections for his dissertation on the early fiction of Samuel Beckett.

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — Ruth Lilly Dean of University Libraries Brenda L. Johnson has announced the appointment of Joel Silver as the director of the Lilly Library, effective April 1.

"Joel is known internationally within the academy for his impeccable credentials as a rare books curator, a prolific scholar and brilliant professor," Johnson said. "Over the past decade that Joel has served as associate director and most recently as interim director, Joel has become known for his collaborative leadership style and diligent work ethic. I have full confidence that he will be an outstanding director for the Lilly Library."

Maastricht, 19th March 2013 — TEFAF announced today that it has entered into exclusive discussions with Sotheby’s to explore the possibilities of developing a high-end art fair for China, via Sotheby’s Joint Venture in Beijing with GeHua in 2014. “TEFAF Beijing 2014” would represent a ground-breaking collaboration between a leading international auction house and the world’s most important art and antiques fair.

Ben Janssens, Chairman of TEFAF’s Executive Committee, said: “It has always been TEFAF Maastricht’s aim to be responsive to global trends in the art market. We feel now is the time to further develop our presence in China, one of the most important art markets.   As TEFAF has in recent years made great efforts to explore the market in China, we are excited to have agreed with Sotheby’s exclusively to explore the possibilities of a partnership with Sotheby’s Joint Venture to establish “TEFAF Beijing”. TEFAF is committed to contribute to the further growth of the market for European Art in China by facilitating a high end art market platform for Chinese collectors and international art dealers.”

Today, the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America joined with the Authors Guild, the American Association of Publishers, and other organizations, objecting to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN’s) plan to sell top-level domains to private companies.  Online retail giant Amazon has bid to be the exclusive custodian of .book, .author and .read domains.

 

ABAA President John Thomson called the move “anti-competitive” and a threat to the small businesses that make up the Association.

New York City, March 6, 2013—PEN American Center, the largest branch of the world’s oldest literary and human rights organization, announced yesterday at its Annual Members’ Meeting the newly-elected and reelected officer trustees of the Board, including John Troubh, Executive Vice President, and Jeri Laber, Vice President. Other newly-elected or reelected trustees of PEN’s Board are Jennifer Egan, Nathan Englander, Wendy Gimbel, Erroll McDonald, Elisabeth Sifton, and Andrew Solomon. Biographical information of these Trustees can be found here.

Commenting on the election result, PEN President Peter Godwin said: “It has been a privilege to be President of PEN American Center over the course of the last year. I have been happy to help build on the achievements of my predecessors, and to bring a greater number of esteemed writers and professionals onto PEN’s Board. PEN is the world’s oldest literary and human rights organization, and with our 90th anniversary behind us, we look to the future as new opportunities like the relaunch of PEN.org and our Declaration on Digital Freedom, plus our ever-growing membership ranks, demonstrate the scope of our reach. In today’s climate, PEN’s mission to encourage and protect writers’ freedom of expression has never been more vital.”

The ABA (Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association) is delighted to announce that the St Bride Foundation will be the official charity of the London International Book Fair which opens on Thursday June 13 and runs until Saturday June 15.

The St Bride Foundation was created in the 1890s originally as a social, educational and cultural centre and housed both a technical library and printing school providing tuition for local printers and students. The school eventually outgrew its premises and relocated, ultimately becoming part of what is now the London College of Communication. Much of the equipment remained on site and a new Printing Workshop re-opened in 2010 bringing the teaching of printing back to Fleet Street. The Foundation still provides a theatre, bar, function rooms for hire, and the only library in the UK entirely devoted to the history of printing and allied crafts.

February 19, 2013—Library of Congress National Book Festival Slated for Sept. 21-22. 

Book-Lovers Invited to Take “Books That Shaped the World” Survey

The 13th annual Library of Congress National Book Festival will be held on the National Mall between 9th and 14th Streets on Saturday, Sept. 21, 2013, from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and on Sunday, Sept. 22, 2013 from noon to 5:30 p.m., rain or shine. The event is free and open to the public.

Festival fans and other lovers of the printed word are invited to take a "Books That Shaped the World" survey on the Library of Congress National Book Festival website, www.loc.gov/bookfest/. The Library, which invited public comment on "Books That Shaped America" in 2012, will continue its multi-year Celebration of the Book with a look at Books That Shaped the World in 2013.

The Independent Online Booksellers Association (IOBA) is pleased to announce its newly elected Board of Directors for 2013: President, Chris Volk of Bookfever.com; Vice President, Jonathan Smalter of Yesterday’s Muse Books; Treasurer, David Friedman of Barner Books; and Secretary, Mark Lambert of Cereal City Books.  The Members at Large include Bruce Bell of Double-B-Books Ltd., Robert Stenzel of 4Shadows Books, Kara McLaughlin of Little Sages Books, Rock Toews of Back Creek Books, Gabe Konrad  of Bay Leaf Used and Rare Books, and Zhenya Dzhavgova of ZH Books.

This new, energized board is geared up for a productive year that will include a re-launch of The Standard, IOBA’s online journal, an increased presence in the bookselling community, and more benefits for its members. The board has a unified vision of what the IOBA is, as stated by new president Chris Volk:  “I see the IOBA as a group of booksellers, small and large, covering the entire spectrum of online bookselling - but unified in the fact that they care about the future of bookselling and that they believe buyers are entitled to an honest description of what they are purchasing sight unseen.  IOBA exists to support these sellers.”

Dreweatts & Bloomsbury Auctions are delighted to welcome Eric Knowles as a member of their team. Eric is a familiar face on television, appearing regularly on high profile antiques programmes and documentaries. He writes for various newspapers and magazines about antiques generally and ceramics and the Decorative Arts in particular.

 

‘It’s very exciting to be involved with the Dreweatts/Bloomsbury group,’ said Eric Knowles.  ‘The invitation to become involved with them was simply irresistible; knowing so many people in the organisation and the quality of their expertise and professionalism was a major attraction.  It is a wonderful opportunity for me to work closely with people I both trust and value.’

SAN DIEGO, Calif. — Edward E. Marsh has spent thirty years and millions of dollars assembling one of the largest and most significant collections of science fiction on the planet. And now he is gifting much of it to San Diego State University’s Love Library.

 

The gift, valued at more than $2.25 million, will eventually be displayed in the “Edward Marsh Golden Age of Science Fiction Room,” created specifically to house these works. It will take several months to catalogue the collection before it will be available to the public.

(Washington, D.C. — February 4) The American Writers Museum Foundation has been awarded a second grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The grant will help speed planning and exhibit design for the museum's building phase. A previous NEH grant helped fund the Museum's Concept Plan and the museum is now in the process of transforming that Concept Plan into a blueprint for the physical space and exhibit design.

 

"We are thrilled to have this financial support from the NEH. Equally important, we are appreciative of their continued support of our efforts to establish the first national museum in the United States dedicated to engaging the public in celebrating American writers and exploring their influence on our history, our identity, our culture, and our daily lives," says Malcolm O'Hagan, president of the museum foundation.

SAN MARINO, Calif. — If Downton Abbey had been an American country house, this family might have inhabited it. A groundbreaking new book about to be released by the Huntington Library Press, the publishing arm of The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, provides powerful new insights into the lives, remarkable wealth, collecting, and philanthropy of the Huntington family during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  The book examines the life of four Huntingtons: Railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington (1821-1900); his widow, Arabella (1850-1924); her son, Archer (1870-1955); and Collis’ nephew Henry Edwards Huntington (1850-1927), who subsequently married Arabella and went on to create the institution bearing his name.

The Art of Wealth: The Huntingtons in the Gilded Age, by Shelley M. Bennett, former curator of European art and senior research associate at The Huntington, is slated for wide release in early May, with an author speaking tour scheduled for the United States and Britain.

Barry Humphries, AO, CBE, the Australian comedian, satirist, artist, and author has been appointed a Patron of Honor by the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB).  The appointment recognises his major contribution to the antiquarian book trade.

Mr Humphries graciously accepted the honorary position following a joint invitation from the Presidents of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association (ABA) in the United Kingdom and the Australian and New Zealand Association of Antiquarian Booksellers (ANZAAB): Laurence Worms and Sally Burdon.  He joins a select body which includes Sir David Attenborough and Umberto Eco.

Submit a book to the most prestigious prize until the end of April 2013!

A prize with prestige and tradition, a strong support for scholarship: The ILAB Breslauer Prize for Bibliography of $10,000 US is awarded every fourth year to the authors of the most outstanding works on the history of the book. Famous scholars like Jean Peeters-Fontainas, I. C. Koeman and Anthony Hobson belong to the prize winners alongside Lotte Hellinga and Jan Storm van Leeuwen who were honoured with the 15th Prize in September 2010. Both, Lotte Hellinga's monumental "Catalogue of Books printed in the XVth Century now in the British Library, BMC. Part XI - England" and Jan Storm van Leeuwen's opus magnum on "Dutch Decorated Bookbinding in the Eighteenth Century" are shining examples for the enormous amount of knowledge - and work - which stands behind such brilliant studies in a scientific field that is essential for every kind of academic research, and for the rare book trade.

LAS VEGAS, NV -Bauman Rare Books, the country’s premier rare and antiquarian bookseller, is offering an extremely rare copy of what is considered the Bible of modern day economics: a first edition of Adam Smith’s An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
 
According to David Bauman, proprietor and founder of Bauman Rare Books, Smith’s masterpiece (originally published in London in 1776) is considered the most important work in modern economic thought. “The Wealth of Nations represented a shift in the field of economics, similar to Sir Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica for physics or Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species for biology,” said Bauman. “This work has become highly sought-after by collectors and institutions alike. The press run would not have exceeded 500 to 750 copies, with many of those surviving copies now permanently held by libraries and no longer in circulation for individual acquisition.”
 
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is the masterwork of Scottish economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith. The treatise is a reflection on economics at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and argues that free market economies are more productive and beneficial to their societies.
 
Henry Thomas Buckle’s History of Civilization calls Wealth of Nations “probably the most important book which has ever been written, whether we consider the amount of original thought which it contains, or its practical influence.” English political economist J. A. R. Mariott claimed that “there is probably no single work in the language which has in its day exercised an influence so profound alike upon scientific economic thought and upon administrative action.”
 
Still recognized as an early form of what today may be called mainstream economics, Wealth of Nations was first published during the Scottish Enlightenment and the Scottish Agricultural Revolution. Smith’s work also was important to the American Revolution, and later, to the development of the new nation that offered a major application for Smith’s free-market theory.
 
Smith’s writings were widely read by America’s Founding Fathers, spurring Jefferson to write, “In political economy I think Smith’s Wealth of Nations the best book extant.” Published in the same year as the Declaration of Independence, Smith touches on the situation in America at some length, showing uncanny forethought when he describes the emerging nation as “very likely to become one of the greatest and most formidable that ever was in the world.”
 
The exceptional work has influenced a number of authors and economists, as well as governments and organizations, including Jean-Baptiste Colbert, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus and Ludwig von Mises.
 
For more information on Bauman Rare Books and the first edition An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations visit www.baumanrarebooks.com.
 
About Bauman Rare Books
David and Natalie Bauman began their company in 1973 with their first investment in a box of 18th-century imprints, a love of literature and history, and a sense that this could be an interesting way to make a living.  Nearly 40 years later, with the addition of some 45 dedicated and talented researchers, salespersons, and creative personnel, Bauman Rare Books has evolved into one of the finest and most respected antiquarian book firms in existence today.  With locations in three great cities—Madison Avenue in New York; Center City in Philadelphia; and The Shoppes at The Palazzo in Las Vegas —the company is distinguished by its extraordinary inventory, meticulous research and exceptional customer service. Bauman has worked with both individual and corporate collectors to build some of the most extensive and impressive rare book collections in America today.  www.baumanrarebooks.com
 

(Boston, Massachusetts, July 31, 2012): A gift of $150,000 from Trustee Emeritus Caleb Loring, Jr., will fund the second phase of the Boston Athenæum’s “Confederate Access Project.” The gift will allow the Athenæum to conserve and digitize nearly 4,000 books and archival documents printed in the Confederate States of America during the Civil War and make them available to the public through the internet.

The Athenæum completed the first phase of the Confederate Access Project, also funded by Caleb Loring, Jr., in the summer of 2012. During the first year of the project, the Athenaeum cataloged, conserved, and digitized Confederate paper currency, financial documents, and postage stamps; improved existing cataloging for more than 1600 books and documents; and acquired a scanner custom-designed to safely scan bound books. All of those digitized documents are already available on the Athenæum’s website at www.bostonathenaeum.org.

The second phase of the project will create the largest and most accessible collection of Confederate materials available to the public anywhere in the world. James Reid-Cunningham, Associate Director for Preservation and Digitization, is directing the project.

“We are so pleased that Caleb Loring has agreed to fund a second year of our access project,” said Paula D. Matthews, Stanford Calderwood Director and Librarian. “The Confederate States of America Collection is one of the great treasures of the Boston Athenæum, an essential resource for scholars, students, and interested amateurs around the world. Two hundred items in our collection are not in any published bibliography, and may well be unique. Before this project, only a few hundred Confederate documents had ever been made available on line anywhere.”

The Athenæum began to assemble its Confederate Imprints Collection in 1865, immediately following the end of hostilities in the American Civil War.

Francis Parkman, the famous American historian and an Athenæum Trustee, traveled the war-ravaged southern states with funds to purchase Confederate printed material before it was lost to history. Librarian William F. Poole continued the search by actively advertising in the region and buying heavily. His goal was to acquire “everything printed in the South during the war that goes to illustrate the state and action of the Southern mind.”

The original collection was enlarged with the purchase of Confederate imprints from Judge Raymond S. Wilkins. In 1969, the Honorable George W. Ball, former U.S. Undersecretary of State and Ambassador to the United Nations, and his son, Douglas Ball, gave the Athenæum an extraordinary collection of Confederate currency, including about 6,200 examples of paper money and 500 CSA bonds and treasury certificates. The Ball gift contained many rarities and fine examples of the various types of engraved and lithographed designs used for bills issued by the individual states and the government.

The entire Confederate Imprints Collection numbers almost 12,000 items, including books, pamphlets, broadsides, newspapers, stamps, paper currency, government bonds, and maps printed during the Civil War.

The Athenæum has set up a new webpage, “Digital Collections at the Boston Athenæum,” http://cdm.bostonathenaeum.org/cdm, as a public access point for digital collections, including the Confederate Imprints Collection, via the internet. Developed over nine months, the project is part of the Athenæum’s “seamless method” approach to cataloguing and digitization.

The Bibliographical Society in conjunction with the University of Toronto is pleased to announce the publication of an important new online reference work for book history.  The British Armorial Bindings Database, begun by John Morris and continued by Philip Oldfield, is now available on the web at http://armorial.library.utoronto.ca/.
 
This catalogue which attempts to record all known British armorial bookbinding stamps used by personal owners to mark and decorate their books, reproduces over 3,300 stamps used between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, associated with nearly two thousand individual owners. 
 
Intended primarily as a tool to facilitate the identification of heraldic stamps, the database may be searched from many angles. Stamps may be searched by heraldic devices, such as arms, crest, mottoes etc. Owners can be found under their family name, their titular name, rank in the peerage, and by gender.  The 12,000 odd books which provide the sources for the stamps, from libraries around the world, may be sorted by author and title, and individual libraries can be searched for their holdings of armorial bindings. The database will be useful to rare book librarians, book historians, book dealers, students of heraldry, genealogists, and anyone with an interest in questions of provenance and the identification of coats of arms.
 
The database has been created and hosted at the University of Toronto and is made available as a free public resource through the sponsorship of the Bibliographical Society.
 
Links
The Bibliographical Society: http://www.bibsoc.org.uk/
University of Toronto Libraries: http://onesearch.library.utoronto.ca/
British Armorial Bindings Database: http://armorial.library.utoronto.ca/
 
 
Margaret Ford
Hon. Secretary
The Bibliographical Society

The Library of Congress Junior Fellows Summer Interns today presented more than 130 items from 32 unique collections housed in more than 20 Library divisions. The display provides the opportunity for fellows to discuss the historic significance of the collection items they have researched, processed and—in some cases—unearthed during their 10-week internship.

Topping their list of finds was an unknown and unreleased recording session of the great blues duo Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, which was found in the Universal Music Group Collection of some 200,000 historic master recordings that the Library acquired last year. Made in 1946 when the blues greats were still unknown, the recording was an audition tape for Decca Records. The duo would become nationally and internationally known in the 1950s and 1960s, during which time they recorded numerous albums, including backup on a 1959 album featuring Andy Griffith.

Also on view were rarely displayed items from the Library’s collections such as:

• A miniature replica (1.5 x 1.5 x 1 inches) of "Manual (Psalterium) of St. Ruperti," a Medieval manuscript
• The Venice Haggadah, 1716
• General John G. Barnard’s "A Report on the Defenses of Washington," including maps drawn during the Civil War, 1871
• A copyright application for Animate Toy Company’s "Bugville Games," 1916
• Transcripts from the trial of gangster Al Capone, 1931
• "Stories About Animals," by Leo Tolstoy, 1932
• Newport Folk Festival posters and memorabilia from the collection of musician and writer John Cohen, 1959-1964

Now in its eighth year, the Junior Fellows Summer Internship program is made possible through the generosity of the late Mrs. Jefferson Patterson and the James Madison Council, the Library’s private-sector advisory group. This year, a panel of Library curators and specialists selected 38 college students from among more than 600 applicants to participate in the program.

Founded in 1800, the Library of Congress is the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution. The Library seeks to spark imagination and creativity and to further human understanding and wisdom by providing access to knowledge through its magnificent collections, programs and exhibitions. Many of the Library’s rich resources can be accessed through its website at www.loc.gov.

DALLAS - As of today, July 25, collectors can officially download Heritage Auctions’ brand new Heritage Mobile Catalog (HMC) for iPad, completely free, at the Apple iTunes store.
 
“This is a fully interactive, completely immersive app that collectors will find completely in line with the first class Heritage experience they’ve come to know and appreciate,” said Paul Minshull, COO of Heritage Auctions. “We’re a company that not only embraces technological innovation, but also holds it to a very high standard. For many collectors this will provide significant change in their collecting experience.”
 
The Heritage Mobile Catalog, easily downloadable when “Heritage Auctions” is typed online at the Apple iTunes Store, the HMC allows collectors to download all the items in Heritage’s current and past auctions - viewable at your convenience, even while offline - and also browse the entire catalog, filter results based on keywords or a specific search, view a slide show of items, dig into full descriptions and large images, Bid and Track and update to current bid information any time a user connects to the Internet.
 
“This is the next step in collecting,” said Minshull “You can be in your pajamas, you can be on a boat in Caribbean or you could be hiking the Himalayas. If you have Internet service and an iPad, then you can now keep up with your auction.”
 
Heritage Auctions is far and away the largest auction house founded in the United States, and the world’s third largest, with annual sales of more than $800 million, and 750,000+ online bidder members. For more information about Heritage Auctions, and to join and receive access to a complete record of prices realized, with full-color, enlargeable photos of each lot, please visit HA.com.
 
Want to get the up-to-the-minute updates and breaking news stories about Heritage Auctions? Get them as they happen at: HA.com/Twitter; Facebook: HA.com/Facebook.To view a complete archive of Heritage press releases go to: HA.com/PR. To link to this press release on your blog or Website: HA.com/PR-2235.

Canterbury Cathedral and the University have joined forces in a bid to prevent a unique historic collection of several thousand manuscripts, early books, and pamphlets being broken up.

The Mendham Collection, which is owned by the Law Society of England and Wales, contains about 5,000 invaluable items including medieval manuscripts, rare books and unique copies of some of the earliest books to have ever been printed. It has been held under the custodianship of the University and Cathedral for nearly thirty years.

Despite an agreement that Cathedral and the University will retain the custodianship of the Collection until the 31 December 2013, the Law Society has given notice of its instruction to Sotheby's to remove the most valuable items on 18 July 2012 as part of a fundraising drive.

The collection was formed in the nineteenth century by Joseph Mendham, an Anglican clergyman with a keen interest in the history of theology. Since 1984 this collection has been accessible through the Cathedral to students and researchers from around the world. A full scholarly catalogue was published with public funds from the British Library in 1994; a condition of the funding was that the collection should not be dispersed.

The collection was donated by the Mendham family to the Law Society at the end of the nineteenth century on the understanding that it would be kept intact, and both the Cathedral and the University are deeply saddened by the Society's disregard for the family's wishes as well as its determination to break up a collection of such national significance.

Dr Alixe Bovey, Director of the University's Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, said: 'The collection is a valuable witness to the development of Protestantism and Catholicism, and the tensions between them, from the time of the Reformation up to Mendham's lifetime.

‘The imminent removal of the most valuable items will cause irreparable damage to the coherence and richness of this historic collection. While we appreciate the need for the Law Society to raise funds, we ask that the Society works with us to find a way to preserve this invaluable collection.'

The University has a world-wide reputation for its work in medieval and early modern research and offers a number of postgraduate programmes including an international doctoral programme in early modern studies which is funded by the European Union under the Erasmus Mundus scheme.

Philadelphia, PA, July 10, 2011. The Library Company of Philadelphia has digitized three rare albums that bring to life the world of African American women activists in antebellum Philadelphia. Purchased in part with funds provided by the William Penn Foundation, these albums make the Library Company the repository of three of only four such documents known to have survived intact. The 19th-century friendship albums of Amy Matilda Cassey and the sisters Mary Anne and Martina Dickerson inaugurate the Library Company's newly created African Americana Digital Collection.

Created by three young women active in the antislavery movement, these volumes provide unique insights into the culture, politics, and gender relationships of African American women of the antebellum era. Friendship albums bound in embossed and gilt morocco were popular gift items for young women in general, who filled them with tokens of sentiment and regard from friends, family, and admired figures. The Cassey and Dickerson albums contain essays, poetry, sketches, and floral watercolors contributed by figures prominent in the movement, including Sarah Mapps Douglass, Margaretta Forten, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Wendell Phillips.

Amy Matilda Cassey was born into New York's black elite in 1809 and joined that of Philadelphia in 1828 with her marriage to Joseph Cassey, a businessman who was a founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society and a sales agent for William Lloyd Garrison's newspaper The Liberator. Her album contains poems, prose, drawings, watercolors, and gouaches of flowers contributed by women of the African American communities in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Baltimore. The album also contains entries by noted abolitionists Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. Mary Anne Dickerson's album was created as a pedagogical instrument to promote cultivated expression, with contributions dating from 1833 to 1882. Contributors to this album include many members of the antislavery intelligentsia.

Antebellum African American Elite Activists
The floral artistry practiced by upper class African American women of the day allows viewers entry into a private circle wherein members would display their accomplishments for each other's pleasure and amusement. The artworks contained in these volumes are likely the earliest known signed paintings by African American women.

But the albums were also cultural and literary efforts, with contributions by cultural leaders of both genders that organize artistic voices in support of a unifying vision and cause. Amy Cassey and Mary Anne and Martina Dickerson, and the women in their circles, studied drawing manuals, instruction books, decorative floral works, women's periodicals, and the "language of flowers" literature, while they challenged slavery in public meetings, defied public opinion with their racially integrated organizations, published antislavery pamphlets, held antislavery fundraising fairs, and petitioned Congress for abolition.

Cassey and the Dickersons were active in the local black literary and debating societies, and the albums document the intimate connections of Philadelphia's black leaders with a larger network of activists and reformers. These albums are of extreme value as they demonstrate both the cultural and artistic vibrancy of the antebellum African American community and the interests of particular women within that society.

African Americana Online at the Library Company of Philadelphia

Adding substantially to digital resources in African American history, an online edition of Afro-Americana, 1535-1922: From the Library Company of Philadelphia has been introduced by Readex, a division of NewsBank. Created from the Library Company's acclaimed collection, which began with Benjamin Franklin and has steadily increased, this new online resource will provide researchers with more than 12,000 wide-ranging printed works about African American history. Critically important subjects covered include the West's discovery and exploitation of Africa; the rise of slavery in the New World along with the growth and success of abolitionist movements; the development of racial thought and racism; descriptions of African American life-slave and free-throughout the Americas; and slavery and race in fiction and drama. Also featured are printed works of African American individuals and organizations.

"The Library Company's Afro-Americana Collection is one of the most comprehensive and valuable archives of printed material by and about people of African descent anywhere in the world," says Professor Richard Newman of the Rochester Institute of Technology. "From early descriptions of African society and culture to the black struggle for justice in the Americas during the 19th century, it remains a touchstone for scholars and students alike. To have it available online and at your fingertips in a searchable format will be a dream come true."

About the Library Company of Philadelphia
The Library Company of Philadelphia is an independent research library specializing in American history and culture from the 17th through the 19th centuries. Founded in 1731 by Benjamin Franklin, the Library Company is America's oldest cultural institution and served as the Library of Congress from the Revolutionary War to 1800. The Library Company was the largest public library in America until the Civil War and includes the extensive personal libraries of prominent early American bibliophiles such as James Logan. Open to the public free of charge, the Library Company houses an extensive collection of rare books, manuscripts, broadsides, ephemera, prints, photographs, and works of art, and the second largest holding of early American imprints. Particular strengths of the collection include economic history, women's history, African American history, history of medicine, history of philanthropy, and visual culture. To find out more, please visit www.librarycompany.org.

NEW ORLEANS, La. - July 10, 2012 - Cakebread Art Antiques Collectibles, Inc. has completed the acquisition of New Orleans Auction Galleries, located at 510 Julia Street.

Cakebread Art Antiques Collectibles owner and businesswoman Susan D. Krohn purchased the assets of New Orleans Auction Galleries. Krohn is also the owner of Brooke Staffing Companies of Louisiana and Texas. A long-time auction devotee, Krohn brings a vast knowledge of antiques and understanding of the business to the expanding team of experienced experts at New Orleans Auction Galleries.  

“I’m thrilled to open a new chapter for New Orleans Auction Galleries.  We are putting a premium on building stronger relationships with our consignors and creating an even better experience for our buyers,” said New Orleans Auction Galleries CEO and owner, Susan D. Krohn. “Renovations of the building are already underway.  We can’t wait to open our doors and share our vision for the future.”

Founded in 1991, New Orleans Auction Galleries is located in the heart of New Orleans’ Warehouse and Arts District. Recognized as the premier auction house in the American South, New Orleans Auction Galleries is devoted to providing the finest antiques, art, estate jewelry, carpets and silver to the southern U.S. region, as well as around the world.

“Since the purchase of New Orleans Auction Galleries, we have seen an incredibly positive response to the new ownership, with new and returning consignors who are ready to do business with us. With more than 1,700 lots prepared for auction in July and more pieces being reviewed and readied for September’s auction, we have set our first auction dates for July 27 - 29, with a preview party on July 26,” said Ashton Thomas, president of New Orleans Auction Galleries. “With the outpouring of interest in New Orleans Auction Galleries, we are confident our upcoming auction will be a tremendous success.”

The July auction’s exhibition will be open to the public for viewing beginning Saturday, July 14 through the start of the auction on Friday, July 27 at 12 pm. The auction will feature a variety of unique items including the 1926 Times-Picayune sterling silver loving cup and a rare, signed Federal North Carolina Pembroke table, all of which can be viewed by the public at the preview party, July 26 from 5 to 8 pm.

For more information about New Orleans Auction Galleries, consigning and buying, visit www.neworleansauction.com or “Like” New Orleans Auction Galleries, Inc. on Facebook.

###
About New Orleans Auction Galleries
New Orleans Auction Galleries, Inc. is a distinctly sized auction gallery committed to working with consignors to provide buyers with timeless antiques, arts and collectibles. Situated in New Orleans, a premier auction destination, and located in a historic former cotton exchange building, New Orleans Auction Galleries, Inc. is ideally located to serve the people of the south, as well as the greater U.S. and overseas.

The Library of Congress has acquired the personal papers of American astronomer, astrobiologist and science communicator Carl Sagan (1934-1996).

A celebrated scientist, educator, television personality and prolific author, Sagan was a consummate communicator who bridged the gap between academe and popular culture.

The Sagan collection has come to the Library through the generosity of writer, producer and director Seth MacFarlane, and is officially designated The Seth MacFarlane Collection of the Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan Archive.

The collection comprises approximately 800 boxes of materials that document Sagan’s life and work and includes his extensive correspondence with scientific colleagues and other important figures of the 20th century. It also includes book drafts, publications files, "idea files" on various subjects, records of various symposia, NASA files and academic files covering the years he taught at Cornell University. Among the personal files are his birth announcement, handwritten notebooks of his earliest thoughts and grammar-school report cards. In addition to manuscript materials, the collection includes photographs, audiotapes and videocassettes. Researchers and scholars will be able to use the collection once it has been fully processed by the Library’s archivists.

"We are honored to preserve and make accessible to researchers the legacy of Carl Sagan, a man who devoted his life to the study of the universe," said Librarian of Congress James H. Billington. "The Sagan papers are a rich addition to the Library’s already-outstanding collection of science manuscripts and other materials from such prominent figures as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Sigmund Freud, J. Robert Oppenheimer and E.O. Wilson."

"Carl was the exemplar of the citizen scientist," said Druyan, Sagan’s long time professional collaborator and his widow. "For him, the values of democracy and science were intertwined. I can think of no more fitting home for his papers than the nation’s library. Thanks to Seth, Carl’s prodigious life’s work will endure to awaken future generations to the wonders of the scientific perspective."

Sagan and Druyan co-wrote several books, and the "Cosmos" television series and were co-creators of the motion picture, "Contact." Druyan was the creative director of NASA’s Voyager Interstellar Record Project (http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/goldenrec.html).

"The work of Carl Sagan has been a profound influence in my life, and the life of every individual who recognizes the importance of humanity's ongoing commitment to the exploration of our universe," said MacFarlane. "The continuance of our journey outward into space should always occupy some part of our collective attention, regardless of whatever Snooki did last week."

MacFarlane is the creative force behind the television shows "Family Guy," "American Dad!" and "The Cleveland Show." "Family Guy" has garnered four Emmys and seven Emmy nominations, including one in the Outstanding Comedy Series category. MacFarlane makes his directorial feature film debut on June 29, 2012, with the live-action and computer-generated comedy, "Ted." His orchestral/big band album, "Music Is Better Than Words," debuted at number one on the iTunes Jazz charts on Sept 27, 2011, and received two Grammy nominations, including Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album.

MacFarlane has teamed up with Sagan’s original creative collaborators—writer/producer Ann Druyan and astrophysicist Steven Soter—to conceive a 13-part "docu-series" that will serve as a successor to the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning original series, "Cosmos." Produced in conjunction with FOX and the National Geographic Channel, "Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey" will explore how human beings began to comprehend the laws of nature and find their place in space and time. By exploring never-before-told stories of the heroic quest for knowledge, the series aims to take viewers to other worlds and travel across the universe for a vision of the cosmos on the grandest scale.

Carl Sagan earned a Pulitzer Prize for his bestseller, "The Dragons of Eden: Speculation on the Evolution of Human Intelligence." His science-fiction novel, "Contact," became both a bestseller and a feature film. It is estimated that more than a billion people around the world have viewed his popular PBS show, "Cosmos."

Sagan specialized in planetary astronomy. His early work on planetary surfaces and atmospheres is considered pioneering, and he made landmark contributions to NASA’s Mariner, Pioneer, Apollo, Galileo, Viking and Voyager space-exploration programs. For his unique contributions, he was awarded medals for Distinguished Scientific Achievement and Public Service from NASA, the National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences.

A staunch advocate of the scientific method, Sagan was known for his research on the possibilities of extraterrestrial life, for his research and campaigns of public education on the dangers of global warming and the "nuclear winter" that could result from a nuclear war.

To examine Sagan’s legacy as a role model for future American scientists, the Library of Congress will sponsor a "Summit on Science Education" late next year. The event, which will bring together scientists, educators, policy-makers and students, will underscore Sagan’s conviction that it is critical to understand and appreciate the centrality of science in the everyday lives of Americans and to create a renewed national consciousness about preparing the next generation of scientists.

The Library of Congress, the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution and the largest library in the world, holds more than 151 million items in various languages, disciplines, and formats. The Library seeks to spark imagination and creativity and to further human understanding and wisdom by providing access to knowledge through its magnificent collections, programs, publications and exhibitions. Many of the Library’s rich resources can be accessed through its website at www.loc.gov.

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA -- Today marks the launching of the new used-book blog, "Get a Spine" (getaspinebooks.com), which chronicles two book lovers' pursuit of used classic literature, and the people they meet and places they go while in search of works to add to their home library.

Inspired in large part by a love of great literature and a strong belief in the importance of physical books and brick-and-mortar bookstores, "Get a Spine" is intended to be as much about the adventure as it is the acquisition. It is the moments of discovery, of surprise, and of joy that often accompany an outing in search of used classics that create a full story, and give the book a life of its own -- by the memories associated with the discovery -- once it's in our house.

As our first post on the newly launched site says:

"Some regular features of 'Get a Spine' will include: bookseller reviews from the places we visit; a book events and happenings calendar; a series we're calling "The Spine Nine," which asks the different booksellers we encounter the same nine questions about who they are, what they do, etc.; an 'Inside the Book' feature detailing the kinds of things one finds between the pages of a used book that aren't related to the story at all; an 'Overheard at ...' series, where we post some of the fun/funny/odd/other things we hear in our searching; links to resources and other sites/blogs of interest to used-book seekers; news related to used books and classic literature; and, of course, details about what we find, how we found it, and why we added it to our library. Plus, there will be much more to come as we go."

At "Get a Spine," we believe foremost that great works of literature are a supreme form of art, but we also strongly believe that a book, in its physical form, is often a work of art itself. We also believe the books we collect should be read. Our library is not a museum, and we don't want to live in a world where actual books are only display pieces.

Readers of/visitors to "Get a Spine" will have the opportunity to subscribe to the site to receive new posts when they are added; leave comments and/or suggestions or contact us about bookstores we should visit, editions we are seeking, information on sales, upcoming book events we should list, etc.; read bookseller reviews; view our card catalog; and hopefully get as much out of keeping up with "Get a Spine" as we do putting into it. It's a celebration of used books, classic literature, and the people who carry the torch for both.

About us

Deborah: Has read Pride and Prejudice eight times (once in Spanish). ... NaNoWriMo 2008 Winner. ... Holds a BA in English because she loves great works of literature, and a Graduate Certificate in Publishing because she needed a job. ... Has had library cards in six states and two countries. ... Top five favorite novels of all time: Bleak House (Dickens), Pride and Prejudice (Austen), Love in the Time of Cholera (Garcia Marquez), Jane Eyre (Brönte), The Razor's Edge (Maugham).

Kristian: Grew up in Cooperstown, N.Y., which is famous for being the home of America's first great and world-renowned novelist, James Fenimore Cooper. And also for the Baseball Hall of Fame. ... Once spent an 18th-birthday gift of $100 on used classic novels in Madison, Wis. ... Has cataloged and entered holdings for university and state historical society libraries. ... Re-discovered his love of spending time with great works of fiction after spending too many years without them.

(June 15, 2012 - Palm Beach, FL) The Palm Beach Show Group is pleased to announce the acquisition of the Los Angeles Art Show from the Fine Art Dealers Association (FADA). The acquisition that closed Wednesday includes the Los Angeles Fine Art Show: Modern & Contemporary and the Los Angeles Fine Art Show: Historic and Traditional. A specialized section within these shows, The Los Angeles IFPDA Fine Print Fair, will continue to function under the auspices of the International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA) but will be produced and managed by the existing Los Angeles Art Show production team.
 
The annual Los Angeles Art Show, created by FADA more than 17 years ago, is one of the longest running venues for contemporary, modern, and traditional art in the country. The 2012 show hosted more than 100 prominent galleries and drew more than 50,000 visitors with its two-show concept that distinctly separates modern and contemporary works from historical and traditional exhibits. The progressive show style provides two individual concepts under one roof and garners the appeal of an expansive international audience.
 
“The Los Angeles Art Show is uniquely diverse and is certainly one of the most interesting shows in the world,” stated Scott Diament, CEO of the Palm Beach Show Group. “We would like to thank FADA for developing a world class event with such a magnetic and international draw. We are confident that under our direction this show will be taken to the next level.”
 
The Palm Beach Show Group, headquartered in Palm Beach County, FL, currently owns and produces four nationally acclaimed shows including its’ signature Palm Beach Jewelry, Art & Antique Show, now in its tenth year.
 
In conjunction with Kim Martindale, the 17 year General Manager of the Los Angeles Art Show, the LA Art Show, Inc. will combine the large organizational strength of the Palm Beach Show Group with the managerial and local expertise of the KR Martindale team, to continue to produce high quality fairs.
 
Betina Tasende, President of the Fine Art Dealers Association stated, “As a well-respected organization of art galleries, FADA continues to fully support the Los Angeles Art Show. It has been a part of our association for the past 17 years and we are confident the Palm Beach Show Group has the necessary enthusiasm and infrastructure to grow this event appropriately.”
 
With historic ties to Far Eastern exhibitors and collectors, the Los Angeles Art Show merges the West Coast arts community with premiere Asian art presented by galleries from China, Korea and the United States. These galleries offer a rare glimpse into classical and modern Asian Arts. International highlights of the show also include prestigious European galleries and extraordinary South American exhibitors.
 
“The city of Los Angeles has established itself over the last 20 years as one of the most important art centers in the United States and the Los Angeles Art Show has been an important factor in making this happen,” stated Martindale, “We believe that the show will flourish under the direction of the Palm Beach Show Group. This transition will surely be smooth, and one that we have been looking forward to for quite some time.”
 
Plans for the show include the expansion of Modern and Contemporary components, an area in which the Palm Beach Show Group projects a massive potential.
 
“Our extensive marketing efforts will make an immense impact on the reach and participation associated with this show,” stated Diament. “We believe we possess all of the elements to take something as great as the Los Angeles Art Show and make it exceptional.”
 
The Palm Beach Show Group is currently welcoming applications for inclusion in the LA Art Show 2013 from national and international galleries. For more information about the Los Angeles Art Show, send inquiries to info@palmbeachshow.com.
 

BOSTON - May 2012 - Historic New England awards its 2012 Prize for Collecting Works on Paper to M. Stephen Miller and DeWolfe & Wood, Antiquarian Book Dealers.

Miller spent more than thirty years assembling the finest and most comprehensive collection of Shaker ephemera documenting Shaker industries and craft. Selections from his collection of more than sixteen thousand items have been included in numerous books on Shaker material culture and history and been shared with researchers and the general public through publication, exhibitions, and loans. His publications on Shaker ephemera include A Century of Shaker Ephemera (1988), Handled with Care (2006), From Shaker Laands and Shaker Hands: A Survey of the Industries (2007), and Inspired Innovations (2010). These books amply illustrate, describe, and contextualize his collections. The entire collection is being transferred to Hamilton College over a ten-year period, where it will be accessible for viewing on its digital collections website.

Specializing in Shaker material and Maine and New England history and literature, Scott DeWolfe and Frank Wood have assisted many institutions and collectors in assembling major collections since 1993 and have done much to promote and preserve a broad range of historic America on paper. DeWolfe & Wood use their expertise to locate significant historical materials and place them with appropriate owners, including Historic New England, the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, and Hamilton College, as well as with many private collectors.

Historic New England hosts a reception to celebrate the third annual Prize for Collecting Works on Paper on Monday, June 18, 2012 from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. at the Lyman Estate in Waltham, Massachusetts. To attend contact Development@HistoricNewEngland.org or call 617-994-5934.

This is the third annual Prize for Collecting Works on Paper, which was established by Historic New England to be awarded to a collector or dealer who has assembled or helped save a significant collection of historical material related to New England or the broader world that might otherwise have been left unrecognized or lost. The award recognizes collections of works on paper that reveal patterns of human thought and activity, ranging from books, manuscripts, photographs, prints, and drawings to all kinds of ephemera, such as trade cards, scrapbooks, or theater programs.

SAN MARINO, Calif.—The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens announced today plans to renovate and completely reinstall the Main Exhibition Hall of its historic Library building with a new, dynamic permanent exhibition designed to provoke visitors’ sense of connection to history and literature and to better highlight the value and uses of the Library’s incomparable collections of historical materials. The Main Exhibition Hall will be closed from June 5, 2012, to the fall of 2013 as the new installation, anchored by about 100 rare items from the collections, is constructed.
 
One of the most treasured pieces in the collection, the Gutenberg Bible, will be moved to the Huntington Art Gallery on June 5 so that it can remain on view uninterrupted. The other items, including the Ellesmere manuscript of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, a double-elephant folio edition of John James Audubon’s Birds of America, and rare early editions of William Shakespeare’s works, will come back on view late this summer in a portion of the Erburu wing of the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art that previously had been used for storage. This temporary installation will ensure that school programs, which serve about 3,600 children each year, can continue without interruption during the 2012-13 academic year.
 
“Scholars around the world are familiar with the depth and significance of the primary source materials at The Huntington, and now, with this thoughtful reimagining of the core Library exhibition, the public will be better able to explore one of our most crucial roles here—as a research center with glorious special collections,” Huntington president Steven Koblik said.
 
Designed principally by architect Myron Hunt (1868-1952) for Henry E. Huntington, and first opened in 1920, the Library’s Main Exhibition Hall served as a reading room for scholars until 1931, when a new reading room was constructed, and since has served exclusively as a gallery. The exhibition as currently installed was created in 1977 and has been only modestly updated since. The project announced today will include renovation of the heating, air conditioning, and electrical systems, but the most dramatic aspect of the $2.5 million undertaking will be the new exhibition.
 
“We’re seizing a historic opportunity with an ambitious plan,” said David Zeidberg, Avery Director of the Library. “We intend to highlight a selection of works from our collection of some 9 million items, each with countless stories to tell, in a concise display that won’t overwhelm, but rather delight and profoundly inspire people again and again. We’re fortunate to be faced with such an exciting challenge—one that occurs maybe only once in a generation.”
 
The new Library exhibition will begin with an introduction in what is known as the Trustees’ Room—not previously part of the permanent exhibition space —presenting a behind-the-scenes look at the activities of the Huntington Library today.  The display will be rooted in the importance of original materials and cover the topics of collecting, acquisitions, conservation, and research through videos, images, and original materials. This section will include a selection of books written by researchers who have used Huntington Library materials in their scholarship.
 
The exhibition then will unfold through the foyer and into the 3,456-square-foot wood-paneled, balcony-rimmed Main Hall, which will spotlight 12 key works in vignettes organized chronologically. The key works will begin with the Ellesmere manuscript of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and continue with landmark items, including the Gutenberg Bible, Shakespeare’s first folio, Audubon’s Birds of America, and Henry David Thoreau’s manuscript of Walden. The works will represent the strengths of the Library’s collection—English culture from the Middle Ages through the 18th century, American colonial history and the Revolutionary War, the American Civil War, English and American literature, and the exploration and development of the American West.
 
Each vignette will incorporate other rare works to help locate it in time and place, stimulating visitors to make connections and consider a wider context. For example, a first folio edition of Shakespeare’s collected plays, published in 1623, will be displayed alongside books that inspired him, works by his contemporaries, and rare items that reflect the world he lived in—from the British colonization of the New World to the writings of Galileo. Each vignette will offer unexpected juxtapositions and new insights into the collections, and into history itself.
 
Overall, the Main Exhibition Hall will be designed to be a comfortable, beautiful place that inspires people to read, reflect, and discuss, with benches and reading materials available throughout.
 
The exhibition is being designed by Karina White working with Gordon Chun Design, based in Berkeley, Calif., who worked together on The Huntington’s award-winning permanent exhibitions “Plants are Up to Something” in The Rose Hills Foundation Conservatory for Botanical Science and “Beautiful Science: Ideas that Changed the World” in Dibner Hall of the History of Science, which adjoins the Library’s Main Hall.    
 
CONTACTS:   Thea M. Page, 626-405-2260, tpage@huntington.org 
                        
Lisa Blackburn, 626-405-2140, lblackburn@huntington.org

# # #

New York, NY, April 26, 2012—The Morgan Library & Museum and the Churchill Archives Centre announced today the launch of DiscoverChurchill.org, a website developed in conjunction with the upcoming exhibition Churchill: The Power of Words, on view at the Morgan beginning June 8.
 
“We are all worms. But I do believe that I am a glow-worm”
 
The site, designed by MetaLake, LLC, was created to specifically generate interest in Churchill among a younger audience and educators. Featuring a modern design and media-rich content, DiscoverChurchill.org emphasizes Churchill’s contemporary relevance through the power of his words.
 
“Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result”
 
Those words—powerful, humorous, clever—are at the heart of the site, delivered in video footage and quotes. Nearly fifty years after his death, Churchill’s words still resonate in politics (he has been quoted by Presidents Obama, George W. Bush, and Clinton, among many others), and pop culture (his words have even inspired some of Angelina Jolie’s tattoos).
 
“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few”
 
Randolph Churchill, Winston Churchill’s great grandson said, “It’s absolutely stunning—I’m really, really impressed.”
 
Allen Packwood, director of the Churchill Archives Centre, said: “I hope and believe that this website will be a great vehicle for taking Churchill's words and deeds to a wider and younger audience.”
 
“Give us the tools, and we will finish the job”
 
DiscoverChurchill.org invites visitors to explore Churchill’s life and words through four main concepts:
 
-Leadership: Churchill was a tireless, hands-on leader—he watched as bombs fell on London during the blitz, visited the front line, and risked his personal safety to meet with Roosevelt and Stalin. This section also explores the ways in which Churchill masterfully crafted his words to rally the British, defy the Nazis, and appeal to the United States for help.
 
-Action: A man of seemingly endless energy, Churchill applied his motto, “Action this day,” to his own life. He served in the military from 1895-1900, became a member of the British Parliament at just twenty-five, learned to fly when aviation was in its infancy, changed his political allegiance twice, wrote some forty books in sixty volumes, produced over 500 paintings, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
 
-Impact: Churchill’s impact upon the twentieth century is difficult to overestimate. He was one of the most powerful voices to speak out against the dangers posed by Hitler and Nazi Germany, kept his country in the war in 1940, and forged what he referred to as the “special relationship” between theUnited States and Great Britain. Churchill coined or popularized such lasting phrases as “finest hour, “never give in,” and “Iron Curtain,” and consistently demonstrated the enormous effect words could have on mobilizing public opinion.
 
-New York: Churchill’s mother, the beautiful Jennie Jerome, was born in Brooklyn. New York was the first American city he visited, just before his twenty-first birthday and en route to military action in Cuba. His New York City adventures included being run down by a taxi on Fifth Avenue in December 1931—which secured him a prescription for medicinal alcohol at the height of prohibition; defending his controversial criticisms of the Soviet Union at the Waldorf Astoria in March 1946; and being awarded the city’s Medal of Honor in January 1952. New York was also the last city he visited, in April 1961.
 
“The future is unknowable, but the past should give us hope”
 
More to explore
DiscoverChurchill.org includes a variety of links that allow visitors to delve deeper, featuring Websites to Visit; Things to Do, See, and Read; and Places to Visit. The site also serves as a gateway to learn more about Churchill-related events that coincide with the Power of Words exhibition, such as the Morgan’s Churchill-related film series; the Tina Santi Flaherty - Winston Churchill Literary Series; and a one-day seminar/symposium at the Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, New York, exploring the relationship between Churchill and President Roosevelt.
 
About the exhibition
Churchill: The Power of Words is organized by The Morgan Library & Museum and the Churchill Archives Centre at Churchill College, University of Cambridge. The exhibition brings to life the man behind the words through some sixty-five documents, artifacts, and recordings, ranging from edited typescripts of Churchill’s speeches to his Nobel Medal and Citation to excerpts from his broadcasts made during the London blitz. It will be on view at the Morgan from June 8-September 23, 2012.
 
The Morgan Library & Museum
The Morgan Library & Museum began as the private library of financier Pierpont Morgan, one of the preeminent collectors and cultural benefactors in the United States. Today, more than a century after its founding in 1906, the Morgan serves as a museum, independent research library, musical venue, architectural landmark, and historic site. In October 2010, the Morgan completed the first-ever restoration of its original McKim building, Pierpont Morgan’s private library, and the core of the institution. In tandem with the 2006 expansion project by architect Renzo Piano, the Morgan now provides visitors unprecedented access to its world-renowned collections of drawings, literary and historical manuscripts, musical scores, medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, printed books, and ancient Near Eastern seals and tablets.
 
General Information
The Morgan Library & Museum
225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016-3405
212.685.0008
www.themorgan.org
Just a short walk from Grand Central and Penn Station
 
Hours
Tuesday-Thursday, 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.; extended Friday hours, 10:30 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; closed Mondays, Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day. The Morgan closes at 4 p.m. on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve.
 
Admission
$15 for adults; $10 for students, seniors (65 and over), and children (under 16); free to Members and children 12 and under accompanied by an adult. Admission is free on Fridays from 7 to 9 p.m.Admission is not required to visit the Morgan Shop.


 

The British Library has announced that it has successfully acquired the St Cuthbert Gospel, a miraculously well-preserved seventh-century manuscript that is the oldest European book to survive fully intact and therefore one of the world’s most important books. 



The £9 million purchase price for the Gospel has been secured following the largest and most successful fundraising campaign in the British Library’s history.

The single largest contribution to the campaign was a £4.5 million grant from the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) together with major gifts from the Art Fund, Garfield Weston Foundation and the Foyle Foundation. In addition, the campaign received a number of significant donations from charitable trusts, foundations and major individual donors, along with gifts from members of the public.

A manuscript copy of the Gospel of St John, the St Cuthbert Gospel was produced in the North East of England in the late secenth century and was placed in St Cuthbert’s coffin on Lindisfarne, apparently in 698. The Gospel was found in the saint’s coffin at Durham Cathedral in 1104. It has a beautifully worked original red leather binding in excellent condition, and it is the only surviving high-status manuscript from this crucial period in British history to retain its original appearance, both inside and out. As such, it represents a major addition to the Library’s world-class collections relating to the early history and culture of Britain, and its unrivalled collection of texts associated with the world’s great faiths.

Now in public ownership, the St Cuthbert Gospel is on display in the Sir John Ritblat Treasures Gallery in the British Library’s flagship building at St Pancras. Following a conservation review led by the British Library and involving leading international conservation and curatorial experts, the Gospel will be displayed open for the first time in this building.

To celebrate the successful acquisition, the Library has opened a special display exploring the creation, travels and near-miraculous survival of the Gospel across 13 centuries. Access is free to both the display and the Treasures Gallery where the Gospel is on show.

In addition, the manuscript has been digitised in full, allowing it to be made freely available online for the first time via the Library’s Digitised Manuscripts webpage.

Announcing the acquisition, the Chief Executive of the British Library, Dame Lynne Brindley, said: “To look at this small and intensely beautiful treasure from the Anglo-Saxon period is to see it exactly as those who created it in the seventh century would have seen it. The exquisite binding, the pages, even the sewing structure survive intact, offering us a direct connection with our forebears 1300 years ago. Its importance in the history of the book and its association with one of Britain’s foremost saints make it unique, so I am delighted to announce the successful acquisition of the St Cuthbert Gospel by the British Library. This precious item will remain in public hands so that present and future generations can learn from it.

“I would like to pay tribute to the donors who have made this acquisition possible - and particularly the NHMF, who recognised the crucial importance of the St Cuthbert Gospel to our nation’s heritage, and who granted a remarkable £4.5 million - the largest single grant for an acquisition that the Library has ever received,” Dame Lynne added. “We are similarly grateful to the other major donors, and the many hundreds of people who made individual donations. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to secure the Gospel for the nation and we were both grateful and touched that so many people felt moved to support our campaign.”

Having acquired the Gospel, the British Library is now able to invest in its long-term preservation, as well as transforming the possibilities for improved access to the item through digitisation and display.

The acquisition of the St Cuthbert Gospel by the British Library involved a formal partnership between the Library, Durham University and Durham Cathedral and an agreement that the book will be displayed to the public equally in London and the North East. The first display in Durham is anticipated to be in July 2013 in Durham University’s Palace Green Library on the UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The Very Reverend Michael Sadgrove, Dean of Durham, said: "It is the best possible news to know that the Cuthbert Gospel has been saved for the nation. For the people of Durham and North East England, this is a most treasured book. Buried with Cuthbert and retrieved from his coffin, it held a place of great honour in Durham Cathedral Priory. The place in the Cathedral where it was kept in the middle ages is still the home of our unique manuscript collection.

“I want to pay tribute to the heroic efforts of the British Library in achieving this wonderful outcome. It has been a privilege to be associated with this fundraising campaign. I am pleased that the Friends of Durham Cathedral have supported it with a generous gift, and that one of the fund's donors has chosen to channel a major gift through the Cathedral.

“As part of the plan agreed between the World Heritage Site and the British Library for its display, we look forward from time to time to welcoming this precious book back to the peninsula where Cuthbert's remains are honoured. It will be always be loved and cherished here. I am sure Cuthbert shares our delight."

Chris Higgins, Vice-Chancellor of Durham University, said: “This is a rare gem and an extraordinarily precious piece of heritage for the nation. I am delighted that the fund-raising campaign has been so successful. Durham University is proud to partner with the British Library and Durham Cathedral in the conservation, display and interpretation of the St Cuthbert Gospel, the oldest and one of the most important of all western manuscripts, and we look forward to it being displayed on our UNESCO World Heritage Site for the public and for scholarly study and interpretation.

"The University and Cathedral house some of the most important collections of early books and manuscripts, visited by researchers and scholars from around the world. Partnerships such as the one we have with the British Library will enable us to enhance scholarship and the wider appreciation of the important role that Durham and the region have in the development of England’s remarkable written heritage.”

A public event to celebrate the acquisition will take place at the British Library on May 15 - for details, see: www.bl.uk/whatson/events/may12/index.html

MARLBOROUGH, Mass. - April 5, 2012 - Skinner, Inc., a leading full-service auctioneer and appraiser of antiques and fine art, announces Devon Gray as the Director of Fine Books & Manuscripts. Gray brings more than 20 years experience as an expert in early books to her new role at Skinner, and has established herself as a premiere appraiser and cataloguer in the genre.

Gray will be responsible for continuing the growth of the Skinner Fine Books & Manuscripts department. She is also charged with expanding the number of auctions presented by the department, and with developing a program to hold Fine Books & Manuscripts sales in Skinner’s Marlborough gallery.

Gray joins Skinner after more than 20 years as the co-owner and founder of James & Devon Gray Booksellers in Harvard Square. She is a renowned expert in books printed prior to 1700, including those from the Pre-medieval, Medieval, Renaissance, Reformation, Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Restoration periods. She has served as an advisor to both individual and institutional collectors including Harvard University, The Shepard Historical Society, Boston College, and the Cleveland Public Library’s Department of Special Collections.

Gray is also a bookbinder and owner of the Larksfoot Bindery in Princeton, Massachusetts, where in addition to restoring and conserving fine books, she occasionally receives commissions to create “old books” for use as movie props. She has also taught bookbinding to undergraduates at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Gray holds a bachelor’s degree in liberal arts from the Harvard University Extension School, where she was enrolled in the Special Students Program. In addition, she has attended workshops in a variety of disciplines related to bookbinding, including Gilt Tooling with Gavin Dovey at the Center for Book Arts in New York, European Bookbinding from 1500 - 1800 with Nicholas Pickwood at the Rare Book School in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Restoration of Leather Bindings with Bernard Middleton at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

When asked about her role at Skinner, Gray said, “due to the area’s rich history of academia there are many beautiful old books in New England.” She continued, “in addition to retaining the interest of current consignors and buyers, I hope to generate even more excitement around the book department at Skinner and involve new collectors.” Gray also noted, “as someone with an affinity for early books, I certainly hope to revitalize the appeal of these works in my new role.”
 
About Skinner

Skinner, Inc. is one of the world’s leading auction houses for antiques and fine art. With expertise in over 20 specialty collecting areas, Skinner draws the interest of buyers from all over the world and its auctions regularly achieve world record prices. Skinner provides a broad range of auction and appraisal services, and it is widely regarded as one of the most trusted names in the auction business. Skinner’s appraisal experts regularly appear on the PBS-TV series, Antiques Roadshow, and its specialty departments include American Furniture & Decorative Arts, American & European Works of Art, European Furniture & Decorative Arts, 20th Century Design, Fine Ceramics, Fine Silver, Fine Jewelry, Couture, Fine Musical Instruments, Asian Works of Art, Fine Wines, Rare Books & Manuscripts, Oriental Rugs & Carpets, American Indian & Ethnographic Art, Fine Judaica, Antique Motor Vehicles, Toys, Dolls & Collectibles, Discovery and Science, Technology & Clocks.  Skinner galleries are located in Boston and Marlborough, Mass. For more information on upcoming auctions and events, visit Skinner’s web site www.skinnerinc.com.
###

AUSTIN, Texas—Thomas Smith (b. 1938), visual effect producer for such films as "Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back" (1980) and "E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial" (1982), has donated his archive to the Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin. Smith was hired by George Lucas as the first head of Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) and worked on the special effects for such films as "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (1981), "Star Trek III: The Search for Spock" (1984), "Star Wars: Return of the Jedi"(1983), "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" (1984) and "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" (1989).

"Tom Smith's collection will be of tremendous interest to students and scholars studying special effects in film and its impact on our culture," said Steve Wilson, curator of film at the Ransom Center. "His work and the films he helped create will be studied for generations to come, and we're grateful for this generous and important gift."

The Smith collection comprises 22 boxes and documents Smith's professional work through the 1980s and 1990s. Spanning from 1979 to 2003, the collection contains special effects storyboards, screenplay drafts, scripts, pre-production research, production materials, newspaper clippings, photographs and published materials such as fan magazines and cinematography periodicals. The papers also contain material relating to Smith's time at ILM and Lucasfilm.

After graduating from Northwestern University in 1960, Smith studied film in Paris at the Institute of Higher Studies in Film with the help of a Fulbright Scholarship. Following three years in the U.S. Air Force, Smith began his career in film as a writer and producer-director for Encyclopaedia Britannica Educational Corporation (EB), where he directed more than 50 educational films. One of Smith's last projects for EB changed the trajectory of his career to special effects. "Solar System" (1977) not only allowed Smith to experiment with special effects, it also caught the eye of George Lucas, American filmmaker and founder of Lucasfilm.

Smith began working for Lucas's ILM in 1980 and oversaw the visual effects facility through 1986. After that, Smith worked in freelance special effects and produced films for Lucasfilm, Disney, Jim Henson and Turner Broadcasting System. He won a British Academy Award for outstanding visual effects on "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" (1989) and produced several theme park attractions for Disney. Smith went on to work for Disney until 1992. Since then he has worked on several other projects, including his own feature film "The Arrival" (1996).

Highlights of the Smith collection include storyboards from "Return of the Jedi," a copy of the "Dick Tracy" (1990) script with annotations by Warren Beatty and sequential storyboards for "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

"There are few artistic endeavors that call upon so many disciplines as the production of feature films," said Smith. "While the average filmgoer is aware of the actors and some of the crew behind the camera, hundreds of craftsmen and artists put their work into the planning and producing of every large film. Most of the work is either never seen by the audience or remains in the background. Fortunately I saved some of my documents, and that is what makes up the collection I have donated to the Harry Ransom Center."

Smith will visit The University of Texas at Austin to speak publicly on Thursday, April 19, at 7 p.m. in KLRU's Studio 6A in the Communications Center Building B. As part of the Harry Ransom Lecture series, Smith will discuss his life and career. While on campus, Smith will also meet with students in the College of Communication's Department of Radio-Television-Film.

The Thomas G. Smith Endowment has been established at the Ransom Center to support research in the collection. Information about the Ransom Center's fellowships is available online.

Other film collections at the Ransom Center include those of producer David O. Selznick; actor, producer and director Robert De Niro; screenwriters Paul Schrader, Ernest Lehman and Jay Presson Allen; actress Gloria Swanson; and early special effects creator Norman Dawn.

The collection will be made accessible once it is processed and cataloged. 

April 2, 2012--The Library of Congress has acquired the initial portion of the personal papers of the American director, producer, actor and acting teacher Lee Strasberg (1901-1982), internationally known for his development of method acting in the Stanislavsky tradition, which deeply influenced performance in American theater and film. The collection has come to the Library as a generous donation by Strasberg’s widow, Anna Strasberg of New York City, who noted that she joins son Adam Strasberg in making this gift to the Library of Congress.

"I am absolutely delighted that Lee’s collection is coming to the Library of Congress, where it will be preserved, made accessible, and join other great collections related to American theater," said Anna Strasberg. "Our family is unanimous in the opinion that the Library of Congress is the ideal place," she added.

Method acting, a technique which became popular in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, is characterized by actors’ attempts to give their roles greater realism by making connections between those roles and their own emotions from the past.

Lee Strasberg co-founded the legendary Group Theatre, was artistic director of the Actors’ Studio in New York City, and founded the Lee Strasberg Institutes in New York City and Los Angeles.

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said, "The Lee Strasberg Collection is of major significance because it documents a crucial chapter of the nation’s theatrical history. Often referred to as the father of method acting in America, Strasberg trained several generations of our most illustrious talents, including Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Julie Harris, Paul Newman, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and the director Elia Kazan."

The Library of Congress has received approximately 240 archival boxes containing a wide array of material amassed by Strasberg during his long career, including correspondence, rehearsal notes, drafts of publications and lectures, project files, photographs, theatrical drawings and posters, sketches of stage designs, appointment books, address books, press clippings, acting-class rosters, play scripts and playbills. The papers will be housed in the Library’s Manuscript Division.

The Lee Strasberg Collection is a rich addition to other outstanding theatrical holdings of the Library of Congress, such as the papers of Eva LeGallienne, Lillian Gish, Sid Caesar, Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, Rouben Mamoulian and Joshua Logan (all in the Manuscript Division), and the papers of Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Martha Graham, Richard Rodgers, Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon, George and Ira Gershwin, Danny Kaye and Sylvia Fine (in the Music Division).
Researchers, scholars, aspiring actors and other artists will be able to use the Strasberg Collection once it has been fully processed.

The Library of Congress, the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution and the largest library in the world, holds more than 151 million items in various languages, disciplines and formats. The Library serves the U.S. Congress and the nation both on-site in its reading rooms on Capitol Hill and through its award-winning website at www.loc.gov.

New York, NY, March 23, 2012—The Morgan Library & Museum announced today the appointment of Joel Smith as the first curator of photography in the institution's history. Currently curator of photography at Princeton University Art Museum, Mr. Smith will begin his work at the Morgan in September, and will focus his attention on building the collection and organizing related exhibitions and educational programs.
 
The Morgan since its earliest years has had a small collection of photographs, including a few works acquired by Pierpont Morgan in the early twentieth century. Since 1924, when the Morgan became a public institution, further examples have regularly entered the collection as gifts and, less often, by purchase. The Morgan's holdings currently number several thousand photographs, ranging from the work of amateur or unknown photographers to vintage prints by major masters.



Mr. Smith was named the Peter C. Bunnell Curator of Photography at Princeton in 2011. Since arriving there in 2005, he has curated over a dozen exhibitions, including Saul Steinberg: Illuminations, a traveling exhibition that opened in 2006 at the Morgan; Beloved Daughters: Photographs by Fazal Sheikh (2007); Pictures of Pictures (2010); and The Life and Death of Buildings (2011).



"We are delighted that Joel will join our curatorial team at the Morgan, and we are extraordinarily excited about taking a more significant role in the study and exhibition of photography," said William M. Griswold, director of the Morgan." As an institution, the Morgan is committed to identifying ways to enhance its holdings of art, literature, and music. In 2006, we named our first curator of modern and contemporary drawings. Joel's appointment is a further example of our efforts to build a collection that reflects the whole history of works on paper. I very much look forward to working with him in this important area." 



In 2007, the Morgan acquired sixty-seven photographs by Irving Penn portraying notable artists and writers, including Edward Albee, George Balanchine, Alberto Giacometti, and Barnett Newman. The following year, the Morgan purchased fourteen images by Diane Arbus, including portraits of Marcel Duchamp, Agnes Martin, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, and Frank Stella. Morgan Trustee Richard L. Menschel, who through the Charina Endowment Fund has established the endowment that will support the new position, played a crucial role in securing these important works. 



Mr. Smith received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 2001. From 1999 to 2005, he was Fisher Curator at the Frances Loeb Art Center at Vassar College. Among his books are Edward Steichen: The Early Years, Steinberg at the New Yorker, and The Life and Death of Buildings: On Photography and Time.



"It is an honor and a pleasure to begin shaping a greater role for photography at the Morgan and to make its collection better known to the public," Mr. Smith said. "The depth, intelligence, and singularity of the Morgan's holdings in many allied fields—visual art, drama, literature, science, music, the history of the page and of the book—present an opportunity, and even the need, to tell photography's life story differently here from anywhere else."



"Since 1839, the camera has played a part in redefining every facet of life. Emphasizing photography's deep involvement in the modern world, and in the life of the mind, is a logical expansion of the integrated view of human endeavor that one experiences at the Morgan. That will be a consistent keynote, whether the focus of a given show is on an artist, an idea, or a format, such as the photographic book. I look forward to working with my curatorial colleagues, whose work in their respective fields is of the highest quality."



Many, but not all, of the photographs already at the Morgan portray figures whose work is represented in the museum's core holdings of drawings, letters, manuscripts, books, and music. The Morgan's collection includes rare, early daguerreotypes of Edgar Allan Poe (Samuel Masury and S.W. Hartshorn) and Washington Irving (studio of Mathew Brady). It owns a copy of William Henry Fox Talbot's Pencil of Nature and 342 lantern slides by Edward S. Curtis, which it acquired as a consequence of Pierpont Morgan's patronage of the artist. There are also albums of photographs that record the lives and travels of Morgan family members, and three albums by Fernand Lochard documenting the contents of Edouard Manet's studio at the time of his death. 



Historically, photographs have been kept with the collections of several different Morgan departments: Printed Books and Bindings, Literary and Historical Manuscripts, Music Manuscripts and Printed Music, and Drawings and Prints. Although they are routinely incorporated in exhibitions of works in other media, over the years, the Morgan also has mounted a number of exhibitions solely on photography, including Edward S. Curtis and Other Observers of the North American Indian (1971), Fox Talbot and the Earliest Photographs, 1833-1845 (1979), The Golden Age of British Photography (1985-86), Edward Curtis and "The North American Indian" (1988), and Close Encounters: Irving Penn Portraits of Artists and Writers (2008).

The Morgan Library & Museum

The Morgan Library & Museum began as the private library of financier Pierpont Morgan, one of the preeminent collectors and cultural benefactors in the United States. Today, more than a century after its founding in 1906, the Morgan serves as a museum, independent research library, musical venue, architectural landmark, and historic site. In October 2010, the Morgan completed the first-ever restoration of its original McKim building, Pierpont Morgan’s private library, and the core of the institution. In tandem with the 2006 expansion project by architect Renzo Piano, the Morgan now provides visitors unprecedented access to its world-renowned collections of drawings, literary and historical manuscripts, musical scores, medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, printed books, and ancient Near Eastern seals and tablets.



General Information

The Morgan Library & Museum

225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016-3405

212.685.0008

www.themorgan.org


Hours
Tuesday-Thursday, 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.; extended Friday hours, 10:30 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; closed Mondays, Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day, and New Year's Day. The Morgan closes at 4 p.m. on Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve.



Admission

$15 for adults; $10 for students, seniors (65 and over), and children (under 16); free to Members and children 12 and under accompanied by an adult. Admission is free on Fridays from 7 to 9 p.m. Admission is not required to visit the Morgan Shop.

The International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB) has launched an ILAB Mobile App which is now available in the Apple Store and the Android Market. Search for "ILAB rare books" or "International League of Antiquarian Booksellers" to find the free App ready to install on your phone. A Blackberry version will follow soon.

ILAB represents 1,850 of the World's best booksellers dealing in fine, rare, old and collectable books in all fields. Search for them and their books. If you are away on business or pleasure with an hour or two to spare: use the locator to find the nearest dealer to wherever you are and get directions by foot, car or public transport. Use the ILAB App to access the ILAB website and find a veritable goldmine of information for the collector, librarian, dealer or anyone who just loves or is interested in fine and rare books, maps and manuscripts. Find out the dates and locations of upcoming antiquarian book fairs, lectures and exhibitions around the World.

All dealers affiliated with The International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB) abidae by a strict code of ethics and good business practice. Use this App to access them and their stock. Many have open shops. All of them are experienced and are experts who can help and guide you.

Many ILAB dealers also buy books from the public. You may sell your books to an ILAB bookseller with confidence and save up to 40 % in auction commissions. Many of our affiliates also undertake valuations. This App will help you identify the right one for your needs.

If you quickly need an unexpected gift, an old book makes an unusual and popular present. Ask your nearest ILAB dealer for help. If he doesn't have what you want he will help you to find someone who can.

Take your phone, browse the Apple Store or the Android Market and find the World's best booksellers: wherever they are and wherever you are!

IOBA Has a New Home on the Web.

The Independent Online Booksellers Association is proud to introduce its newly updated website. The custom design was created by Foreseeing Solutions.

The Independent Online Booksellers Association is an international trade organization for internet booksellers who seek to preserve traditional bookselling standards and traditions while embracing new technologies.

IOBA offers continuing education, networking and trade opportunities, advocacy, an exclusive online selling venue, and partner benefit programs to its members.

IIOBA is an inclusive organization, and membership is not limited to sellers of rare or antiquarian books. Professional booksellers are invited to apply for membership.

Independent Online Booksellers Association
http://www.ioba.org
Karin Isgur Bergsagel, PR Chair
PRChair@ioba.org

CHICAGO - The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS) has selected five winners for the 2012 Katharine Kyes Leab and Daniel J. Leab “American Book Prices Current” Exhibition Awards.

The awards, funded by an endowment established by Katharine Kyes Leab and Daniel J. Leab, editors of “American Book Prices Current,” recognize outstanding exhibition catalogs issued by American or Canadian institutions in conjunction with library exhibitions, as well as electronic exhibition catalogs of outstanding merit issued within the digital/Web environment. Certificates will be presented to each winner at 4 p.m. on Sunday, June 24, during the RBMS Membership Meeting and Information Exchange at the 2012 ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim.

The Division One (expensive) winner is “Altered and Adorned: Using Renaissance Prints in Daily Life,” submitted by the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago.

“This elegant catalog reconstructs the diverse uses printed text and images in Renaissance life—from early popup books and tarot cards to printed textiles, astrolabes and collaged reliquaries,” states Molly Schwartzburg, chair of the RBMS Exhibition Awards committee and Cline Curator of Literature at the University of Texas-Austin’s Harry Ransom Center. “The result is a visually stunning volume that is also a valuable resource for scholars, librarians and curators who encounter these materials in their work. A truly interdisciplinary study, the volume cogently describes a vast range of materials in a manner that is clear and engaging.”

The Division Two (moderately expensive) winner is the University of Chicago Library for “Adventures in the Soviet Imaginary: Children's Books and Graphic Art.”

“This striking catalog is result of collaboration between students, faculty and librarians at the University of Chicago,” said Schwartzburg. “Despite its brevity, it presents its complex, wide-ranging subject thoroughly and clearly, bringing together the voices of its many authors into a fluid, engaging volume. Its accessible style, balanced page layouts, high-quality reproductions and well-organized checklist are just some of the features that make this an exceptional catalog.”

The Division Three (inexpensive) winner is “One Book, Many Interpretations: Second Edition,” submitted by the Chicago Public Library, Special Collections and Preservation Division.

“This small volume marks the first decade of an annual competition for the design of artists' bindings for books in the One Book, One Chicago city-wide reading project,” Schwartzburg remarked. “Documenting an exhibition of the best of these bindings, this diminutive volume is surprisingly rich in images and information, serving at once as an introduction to contemporary trends in artists' bindings and a survey of the city reading project. The committee was particularly impressed by the way in which the catalog reveals a dialog between the coterie field of fine binding and a citywide initiative.”

The Division Four (brochures) winner is the University of Pennsylvania, Rare Book and Manuscript Library for their brochure entitled “Wharton Esherick and the Birth of the American Modern.”

“This is a beautifully executed guide to this large, multi-venue exhibition,” noted Schwartzburg.  “Perfectly sized to fit in a pocket or bag, it provides a clear, concise overview of the exhibition galleries and schedule of events.  Its high production quality—striking cover design, lovely paper, clear printing and high-quality images—leads to the ideal result for a brochure: it makes the reader want to make her way to every venue and event listed.”

The Division Five (electronic exhibition) winner is the Folger Shakespeare Library for “Manifold Greatness: The Creation and Afterlife of the King James Bible,” available online at http://www.manifoldgreatness.org/.

“With contributions from several scholars and the staff of three major libraries—the Folger, the Bodleian Library at Oxford University and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas—this project achieves an appropriate scale for its epic subject matter,” stated Schwartzburg.  “It provides a great deal of information, but succeeds in doing so without overwhelming its potential audiences. The committee was impressed with the rich content and with the sheer range of access points for audiences to begin thinking about the King James Bible: along with a great deal of traditional ‘exhibition catalog’ content, the site includes a blog, videos, childrens' activities center, timeline and more.”

For more information regarding the ACRL RBMS Katharine Kyes Leab and Daniel J. Leab “American Book Prices Current” Exhibition Awards, including a complete list of past recipients, please visit http://www.ala.org/acrl/awards/publicationawards/leabawards.

##

ACRL is a division of the American Library Association (ALA), representing more than 12,000 academic and research librarians and interested individuals. ACRL is the only individual membership organization in North America that develops programs, products and services to meet the unique needs of academic and research librarians. Its initiatives enable the higher education community to understand the role that academic libraries play in the teaching, learning and research environments. ACRL is on the Web at http://www.acrl.org/, Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/ala.acrl and Twitter at @ala_acrl.

AUSTIN, Texas—The Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin, has acquired the archive of novelist and short-story writer Tom Coraghessan "T.C." Boyle, author of such acclaimed works as "The Tortilla Curtain" (1995) and "World's End" (1987). Spanning more than 30 years from the 1970s through the present, the archive covers the breadth of Boyle's prolific career.

"I am very pleased and honored to have my papers safely ensconced at the Ransom Center so that they may be preserved and made available to scholars," said Boyle. "With such an archive, there is always the danger of damage or even destruction, especially when the papers are stored in filing cabinets and cardboard boxes in the basement of a very old house. I am vastly relieved to know that they are now safe."

Boyle is the author of 22 books of fiction, and his short stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Esquire, Harper's, McSweeney's and The New Yorker. He was awarded the PEN/Faulkner Prize for best novel of the year in 1988 for "World's End" and the PEN/Malamud Prize in 1999 for "T.C. Boyle Stories" (1998). Boyle is currently a professor of English at the University of Southern California.

"T.C. Boyle is one of the most significant and respected authors writing today, and his archive will be a tremendous resource for the scholars who will study his work and career for generations to come," said Ransom Center Director Thomas F. Staley. "Boyle saved and organized all of his papers. Few archives so clearly capture the working life and imagination of an author."

The collection includes manuscripts, correspondence, professional files and teaching material. Nearly every published title is represented by a binder of manuscript notes, research material, drafts and proofs. Also included are about 140 short-story files.

Extensive editorial correspondence and letters to and from such contemporaries as Woody Allen, Russell Banks, Joyce Carol Oates, David Foster Wallace and Tobias Wolff reflect Boyle's meticulous research and generosity in the literary and teaching communities.

Boyle's materials at the Ransom Center will reside alongside the papers of such contemporary writers as Banks, Wallace, Don DeLillo, Denis Johnson, Norman Mailer, Jayne Anne Phillips and Bruce Sterling.

Boyle will appear in Austin at BookPeople on March 19 as part of a book tour for his novel "When the Killing's Done" (2011), recently released in paperback.

The Boyle papers will be accessible once processed and cataloged.

Is there a place in the world apart from the international book fairs where book lovers find rare and beautiful books, manuscripts, autographs, atlases and prints from all parts of the world and offered by some of the world’s best booksellers? Is there an antiquarian bookshop somewhere in the world where you can browse the shelves filled with modern firsts from the United States, incunabula from Europe, woodcut books from Asia, and children’s books, first editions, illustrated books, precious bindings, colour-plates and rare travel accounts from Australia, the United Kingdom, the Americas, Germany, Italy, Spain, Scandinavia, Austria and the Netherlands? Yes, there is such a place - in Tokyo.

The World Antiquarian Book Plaza is located in Tokyo’s city centre, only five minutes away from the central station and from the famous Ginza. The elegant rooms of this very special book shop on the third floor of Maruzen is open to visitors 364 days a year from 10 am to 8 pm. The Plaza is a joint venture of Mitsuo Nitta (Yushodo Ltd.) and Michael Steinbach, both ILAB Members of Honour. Two years ago Mitsuo Nitta had the idea of establishing a place in Tokyo where antiquarian book dealers from all over the world could offer highlights from their stock. He laid the organization into the hands of Michael Steinbach, who is well-known as a rare book dealer on all continents.

22 dealers from 11 countries now participate in this project which crosses all borders, among them colleagues from the US, Australia and Europe. The items for sale cover all subjects and all periods of book and art history, including, for example, a rare Mercator atlas with over 140 woodcuts, an early edition of the Gart der Gesundheit with beautifully coloured woodcut illustrations, autograph manuscripts by Franz Schubert and an early edition of Andreas Vesalius’ groundbreaking work on anatomy. These are only some of the highlights in the Plaza’s showcases at the moment. “You can be sure”, says managing director Michael Steinbach, “that we will be presenting other gems of book printing within the upcoming months. The items for sale change every three or four months so that visitors always see something different in our shop.”

In November 2011 the World Antiquarian Book Plaza celebrated its grand opening with over 300 guests. The response was overwhelming from the beginning. “Visitors drop in every day”, says Michael Steinbach. “They appreciate our efforts to establish this World Antiquarian Book Plaza, which combines Western and Asian arts, culture and history through the cooperation of antiquarian booksellers from all parts of the world. It’s a kind of paradise for book lovers, right in the centre of one of the world’s most fascinating cities.”

World Antiquarian Book Plaza
Nihonbashi 2-3-10, Chuo-ku, Tokyo 103-8245
Opening hours: 10 am - 8 pm (open 364 days per year, closed on 1st January)

In the Internet:
>>> www.antiquariat-steinbach.com
>>> http://www.yushodo.co.jp/english/wabp/index.html
>>> www.ilab.org

For more information please contact:
Michael Steinbach
Freyung 6/4/6
A - 1010 Wien
AUSTRIA
phone +43-1-5320265
email: Michael.Steinbach@antiquariat-steinbach.com

Los Angeles, CA, February 29, 2012 - Spike TV raises the stakes as for the first time ever the networks highest-rated non-scripted original series “Auction Hunters” premieres a special, one hour LIVE auction event.  Showcasing two of the best prospectors in the business, Allen Haff and Ton Jones, the episode will broadcast LIVE from an exclusive storage auction in Los Angeles. Hosted by “Loveline” co-host and former “Dancing with the Stars” contestant Mike Catherwood, “Auction Hunters: Live” premieres Wednesday, March 21 at 9:00 PM, ET, immediately followed by the series premiere of “American Digger.”
 
“Auction Hunters: Live” follows Haff and Jones at a white-glove only auction in Los Angeles, as the duo is challenged to condense a week’s worth of work into one hour of LIVE television.  Haff and Jones will have to hurry to buy a unit, dig through it, and select a few items to present for sale to the assembled group of on-set experts.  The pressure is on as this rare auction could potentially lead to their biggest payday or greatest loss to date.  With the cameras rolling and the stakes higher than ever, Spike’s “Auction Hunters” are primed for the ultimate challenge.

“Auction Hunters: Live” kicks-off season three of the series on its new day and time Wednesday, March 28 (9:00 PM, ET/PT) with back-to-back episodes filmed in Alaska.  Additional locations for the new season include New Orleans, Washington D.C., New York City, Honolulu, Denver and Los Angeles.
 
“Auction Hunters” is produced by Gurney Productions and executive produced by Scott Gurney and Deirdre Gurney. Sharon Levy is Spike TV’s Executive Vice President, Original Series, Tim Duffy is Senior Vice President of Original Programming for Spike TV, and Jeff Savaiano serves as the Executive in Charge of Production.

About “Auction Hunters”
Every year in America, 50,000 storage facilities hold auctions for abandoned storage units and, at these auctions, over $1 billion worth of goods changes hands.  Each unit has the potential to be a goldmine or a bust for those who make their living hunting unclaimed property.  “Auction Hunters” cuts the lock and opens the door into the high stakes, financial risks and potential rewards where the right purchase can bring in serious cash.  The series follows Haff and Jones in their quest to win auctions, dig for abandoned historical treasure and sell them for a profit
 
About Spike TV
Spike TV is available in 99.8 million homes and is a division of Viacom Media Networks.  A unit of Viacom (NASDAQ: VIA, VIAB), Viacom Media Networks is one of the world's leading creators of programming and content across all media platforms.  Spike TV's Internet address is www.spike.com and for up-to-the-minute and archival press information and photographs, visit Spike TV's press site at http://www.spike.com/press.  Follow us on Twitter @spiketvpr for the latest in breaking news updates, behind-the-scenes information and photos.
 
# # #

Chicago, Illinois - February 2012 - Leslie Hindman Auctioneers, one of the nation’s leading fine art auction firms, announces the February opening of a new auction facility in Denver, Colorado. The office is located in Denver’s Golden Triangle, 960 Cherokee Street, situated just blocks away from the Denver Art Museum and the new Clyfford Still Museum. Leslie Hindman Auctioneers has been in expansion mode over the past two years opening salerooms in Naples, Palm Beach, Milwaukee, Denver and coming soon to New Orleans.

“The current market is creating the perfect environment for the expansion of our firm,” says Leslie Hindman, CEO/President of the firm bearing her name.  “People are interested in selling their valuable personal property in an effort to raise capital or retire debt.  Additionally, the influence of the global art market and strong prices realized have resulted in consecutive record years for our company.”  “We are delighted to better serve our clients in the West and Southwest, both buyers and sellers, by being available and in closer proximity” says Jim Sharp, Director of Regional Offices.

The Anne S. and Robert E. Clay Collection of Native American Art is scheduled to go on the block at Leslie Hindman Auctioneers’ Denver saleroom on March 11, 2012. The sale will include over 300 lots of Pueblo pottery, Navajo rugs and Southwestern jewelry.   Mr. and Mrs. Clay were active members of the Douglas Society at the Denver Art Museum.  Over the years the Clays made donations from their collection to the Denver Art Museum, The Wheelwright Museum in Santa Fe and made loans to other institutions in the area.

The Denver office representatives, Maron Hindman and Annie McLagan, both worked previously with Leslie Hindman Auctioneers in Chicago.  Ms. McLagan was a Director of Salvage One in 1984-1995, then the largest antique architectural salvage company in America and owned by Leslie Hindman.  Ms. McLagan relocated to Denver with her family.  She has been involved as the representative for Leslie Hindman Auctioneers since then.  Maron Hindman was the Director of Marketing at Leslie Hindman Auctioneers in Chicago from 1988-1996 before relocating to Denver in 2010.

The Denver facility will be fully supported by Hindman’s specialists in each department including: Fine Art, Jewelry and Timepieces, Books and Manuscripts, Asian Works of Art, Furniture and Decorative Arts and Vintage Couture and Accessories. The saleroom will hold three auctions a year and regular appraisal appointments. To view information on the forthcoming auction and appraisal schedule, please visit www.lesliehindman.com.

About Leslie Hindman Auctioneers
For three decades, Leslie Hindman Auctioneers has been an industry leader combining recognition as one of the nation’s foremost fine art auctioneers with a global base of buyers. Founded in 1982, sold to Sotheby’s in 1997 and reopened in 2003, Leslie Hindman has remained a constant force behind high profile auctions of everything from contemporary paintings and fine jewelry to French furniture and rare books and manuscripts, and always achieves the highest prices while maintaining the highest levels of integrity and 
customer service.

FALLS CHURCH, Va. - In order to meet the demands of Washington, D.C.’s booming market for art and antiques, Quinn’s Auction Galleries has relocated to a more spacious venue in the heart of suburban Falls Church. The new 14,400-sq.-ft. premises at 360 S. Washington St. encompass three floors, with the gallery and reception area at street level, the Fine Arts department on the second floor, and executive/administrative offices on floor three. Goods to be offered in future sales are stored at a secure offsite warehouse.
 
“Having dedicated areas available for each aspect of the business has streamlined our operation. We really need the extra room, because we’ve never been this busy before,” said Quinn’s Vice President Matthew Quinn. In addition to cataloged auctions of fine and decorative art and antiques, Quinn’s conducts regular Wednesday night auctions. Its sister auction company, Waverly Rare Books, is also headquartered at the new location.
 
The South Washington Street gallery is technically Quinn’s third address since opening for business in 1995. Co-founded by Matthew’s father, antique dealer Paul Quinn, and elder brother David, Quinn’s was originally based in a building on Maple Street in Falls Church. Father and son #1 started out hosting monthly auctions but soon progressed to holding weekly sales that attracted both collectors and the trade.
 
Matthew had joined the family business, which was on an upswing when, in 2001, tragedy struck. A 6-alarm electrical fire swept through Quinn’s warehouse premises, leaving the business in total ruin and with losses approaching $3 million.
 
“We refused to be disheartened,” Matthew Quinn said. “We agreed that we had to rebuild, and immediately started drawing up plans for how the new layout should look.”
 
The community of Falls Church loved the local auction house that sold world-class antiques, and supported the reconstruction effort. “Thanks to the understanding people at Jennings - who owned our burned-out building - the City of Falls Church, and Marriott, who allowed us to continue doing business under a tent on a piece of land they owned, Quinn’s Auction Galleries soldiered on,” Quinn said.
 
Six months and three days after the fire, the Quinns returned to their newly rebuilt facility to conduct a grand re-opening and fundraiser benefiting the city’s firefighters and the Community Foundation for the National Capital Region.
 
With a new space, a new look and a renewed sense of confidence, the Quinn triumvirate acquired Waverly’s, a respected auction company specializing in books, maps and manuscripts; and adopted new technology - Internet live bidding - which multiplied their annual revenues to a peak figure of $4 million. At around the same time, Washington lost its century-old auction house Sloan’s, which left a sizable market share open to Quinn’s. Thus began Quinn’s ascent to the next level: national recognition.
 
“Since then, we’ve more than doubled our annual revenue and expanded our very loyal following. The move to the new venue is the next step forward for us and will enable us to keep up with Washington’s demand for an estate-oriented fine art and antiques auction house,” said Quinn. “The nation’s capital is a sweet spot for ‘old money’ estates, diplomats’ residences and the homes of other people with very good taste who are now at a stage of their lives where it makes sense to downsize. The treasures just keep on coming, and we’re ready for them.”
 
Quinn’s Auction Galleries and Waverly Rare Books are located at 360 S. Washington St., Falls Church, VA 22046. Tel. 532-5632, e-mail info@quinnsauction.com. Online: www.quinnsauction.com.
 
#   #   #

DALLAS, TX - Heritage Auctions’ website, HA.com, proved itself the dominant online auction source last month, obliterating its competition with nearly 725,000 unique visitors to Heritage Auctions site in the first month of 2012, according to Compete.com, a website devoted to tracking web traffic. Compete.com ranked HA.com as one of the top 3,000 sites in America (there are over 150,000,000 American web sites) at #2,967.
 
“Our exact number of unique visitors last month was actually 724,931,” said James Halperin, Co-Chairman of Heritage Auctions, “No other major auction house came close to those numbers.”
 
The total number of unique visitors to HA.com is nearly double the combined total number of unique visits the websites of Heritage Auctions’ five closest competitors’ web sites (Christies ranked as #9093, Sothebys #36,342, Bonhams #36,363, Stacks & Bowers #154,997 and Phillips De Pury #244,256) received in the last 12 months. Christies.com, was the closest, with just more than 238,000 unique visitors:
 
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/ha.com/
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/christies.com/
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/sothebys.com/
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/bonhams.com/
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/stacksbowers.com/
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/phillipsdepury.com.com/
 
“We put a tremendous amount of research and time into making our website comprehensive, customer friendly and easily accessible,” said Halperin. “Collectors, historians and art aficionados alike have responded with great enthusiasm. We’re humbled and grateful for that support and will continue to strive to make HA.com one of the most useful sites on the web.”
 
Heritage Auctions, headed by Steve Ivy, Jim Halperin and Greg Rohan, is the world’s third largest auction house, with annual sales more than $800 million, and 700,000+ online bidder members. For more information about Heritage Auctions, and to join and gain access to a complete record of prices realized, along with full-color, enlargeable photos of each lot, please visit HA.com.
 
Want to get the up-to-the-minute updates and breaking news stories about Heritage Auctions? Get them as they happen at: www.Twitter.com/HeritageAuction; Facebook: www.HA.com/Facebook.To view a complete archive of Heritage press releases go to: HA.com/PR. To link to this press release on your blog or Website: HA.com/PR-2163.

NEW YORK (LAPRS) - LiveAuctioneers.com, the Manhattan-based provider of Internet live-bidding services to more than 1,200 auction houses worldwide, wrapped 2011 with robust 4th-quarter results.
 
During the final three months of last year, there were more than 6.8 million visits to LiveAuctioneers’ site - an 11.5% increase over the comparable quarter of 2010. Of those visits, more than half were attributable to unique visitors - 3,596,188 in all.
 
Significantly, the average amount of time spent per visit increased by 19%, and the number of site engagements that exceeded 30 minutes rose by 50.91% when compared to Q4 2010. The number of page views spiked, as well, with 64.8 million recorded in the last quarter of 2011 vis-a-vis 47.8 million page views in Q4 2010.
 
The dramatic increase in the number of people visiting online auction catalogs and placing bids via mobile devices was among the top trends noted in LiveAuctioneers’ Q4 2011 statistics.
 
“Mobile visits to LiveAuctioneers-supported auction catalogs were up nearly 180 percent in comparison to the fourth quarter of 2010. There are several reasons for this,” said LiveAuctioneers.com’s CEO, Julian R. Ellison. “People are much more comfortable with mobile devices, now. That’s one factor. Another is the mainstream acceptance of apps as a reliable and convenient means of conducting transactions via smart phones and tablets.” LiveAuctioneers.com currently offers apps for iPhone and Android; iPad and iPod Touch devices can access LiveAuctioneers through iPhone apps.
 
Another aspect of site visitation that saw a healthy boost was traffic referred from search engines. In the fourth quarter of 2011, visitors forwarded to LiveAuctioneers as a result of searches or click-throughs from Google, Yahoo, Ask and other search engines jumped by 30.54% over the comparable quarter of 2010.
 
“LiveAuctioneers.com is celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2012, and we can already tell from early trending that it’s quite likely to be another record-setting year for us,” said Ellison. “In particular, we’ve noticed that auctioneers are paying much closer attention to our online-marketing products, such as e-newsletters, and they’re investing in professionally produced publicity campaigns from LiveAuctioneers PR Services. There’s definitely a competitive energy in the marketplace.”
 
Online: www.LiveAuctioneers.com

ITHACA, N.Y. (Jan. 31, 2012) - Cornell University Library’s extensive new collection of African-American photographs contains impressive images of iconic leaders of the civil rights movement and world-changing events — but the less momentous moments in black history make up an equally important part of the collection.
 
Among the nearly 2,000 items, recently donated by Beth and Stephan Loewentheil, are images of African Americans going about their regular lives in the 19th and 20th centuries.
 
“Certainly, African Americans were fighting for justice in this country, but at the same time, they were celebrating births and graduations and marriages, mourning deaths, holding family reunions, buying new homes and cars and clothes — the stuff of everyday life,” said Katherine Reagan, curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts. “Those things can be easily overshadowed, but this collection provides a window into the lives of men and women who are so frequently underrepresented in the historical record.”

Images in the collection depict the African-American experience from slavery in the agricultural antebellum South to celebrities of modern media-frenzied America.

“I'm thrilled about the collection for the possibilities it offers for research in African and African American Studies, especially as portraits like those in the new collection are hard to find today in both private and public collections,” said Cheryl Finley, associate professor of art at Cornell. “Images such as these reveal volumes about the social, material, cultural and political lives of the people pictured as well as those who may have lived similar lives or had similar experiences.”

Among the collection’s most memorable images are striking photographs of Martin Luther King Jr. in a jail cell, rare tintypes of freed slaves and personal family photo albums. The photographs also encompass a wide diversity of formats: daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, carte-de-visite photographs, albumen prints, Polaroids and more.

In honor of Black History Month, the Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections will display a sample of the collection in the gallery space between Olin and Kroch libraries on Cornell’s main campus in Ithaca, N.Y. The exhibition will open Wednesday, Feb. 1, and it is free and open to the public.

The collection will soon be open to researchers from all over the world and, Reagan added, “it has a tremendously high research value. It’s a trove of material that will help scholars who are looking for a more comprehensive view of a period that saw enormous changes for people of color in the United States.”

The African-American photographs are the newest component of the Beth and Stephan JD ’75 Loewentheil Family Photographic Collection, a magnificent set of 16,000 historic images that make up a candid cross-section of the early American experience. Many of those photographs are also currently on display on level 2B of the Carl A. Kroch Library as part of the major exhibition, “Dawn’s Early Light: The First 50 Years of American Photography.”

To learn more and see a sampling of the images, visit http://communications.library.cornell.edu/news/afamphotos.

The Library of Congress announced today the acquisition of a rare book to its Thomas Jefferson’s Library. Donated by the United States Naval Observatory, a Latin version of "Sur la Figure de la Terre," written by the 18th-century French mathematician and philosopher Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, will join the more than 6,000 titles already assembled in the collection.

While serving as the American ambassador in Paris in 1789, Jefferson ordered a copy of Maupertuis’ Latin version, "Figura Telluris de Maupertuis," which was published in Leipzig, Germany in 1742. It was one of a number of books he selected from a catalogue issued by bookseller Armand Koenig in Strasburg.

The book was ordered on June 29, 1789, and was sent to Jefferson with a bill from Koenig for £ 2.0.0, dated July 17. Jefferson entered the book without price in his undated manuscript library catalogue.

In 1815, Congress purchased the 6,487 volumes in Jefferson’s collection in order to reestablish the Library of Congress after the burning of the U.S. Capitol by the British during the War of 1812. Of the original volumes that Jefferson had, only about 2,000 remained following another fire on Dec. 24, 1851, that spread through the congressional library housed in the Capitol. These original 2,000 books, plus replacement copies of the other books, constitute a Library exhibition titled "Thomas Jefferson’s Library" (http://myloc.gov/Exhibitions/jeffersonslibrary/Pages/default.aspx). During the past decade, Mark Dimunation, chief of the Library’s Rare Book and Special Collections Division, and his staff have assembled all but about 300 titles that were in Jefferson’s original library.

Over the years, the Library’s own copy of "Figura Telluris de Maupertuis" was lost. The USNO library has two copies of this book - the original French edition printed in 1738 and the Latin version from 1742.

With origins more than 181 years ago, the U.S. Naval Observatory continues to perform an essential operational role for the United States, the Navy and the Department of Defense. Its mission includes determining the positions and motions of the Earth, Sun, Moon, planets, stars and other celestial objects; providing astronomical data; determining precise time; measuring the Earth's rotation; and maintaining the Master Clock for the United States. The USNO’s James M. Gilliss Library was established in 1842. Today it holds more than 80,000 titles and is considered to be one of the world’s premier astronomical libraries.

Founded in 1800, the Library of Congress is the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution and the largest library in the world, with nearly 142 million items in various languages, disciplines and formats. As the world’s largest repository of knowledge and creativity, the Library is a symbol of democracy and the principles on which this nation was founded. The Library serves the U.S. Congress and the nation both on-site, in its reading rooms on Capitol Hill, and through its award-winning website at www.loc.gov.
# # #

PARIS January 2012 - Sandra Hindman, Ph. D. Owner and President of LES ENLUMINURES, specialists in Medieval and Renaissance Illuminated Manuscripts, Miniatures and Art, has announced that she will expand to New York by opening a new gallery in the penthouse of a townhouse at 23 East 73 Street in May.

“For twenty years we have operated from our main gallery at the Louvre des Antiquaires opposite the Louvre in Paris, and from our offices in Chicago.  Now I feel our growing business will benefit from a more regular presence in New York, which attracts the most important museums and private collectors and where so many exhibitions, fairs, and auctions occur.”

“We know from the people we sell to now that they appreciate the opportunity not just to see our latest acquisitions but also to have the face to face contact with me and my staff.  With an additional gallery in New York we can stage three or four important shows in New York each year in addition to the ones we already mount in our Paris gallery and at the most important international fairs.”

Les Enluminures is a featured exhibitor at many prestigious art and antique fairs including the Winter Antiques Show in New York each January, TEFAF Maastricht each March, the New York Antiquarian Book Fair, the Salon du Dessin in Paris, Masterpiece London, and the Biennale Firenze in the fall.

The opening show at Les Enluminures new gallery in New York will be titled “12 Books of Hours for 2012” and will feature important Books of Hours from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries.

Hindman says, “This exhibition gives us an opportunity to display some of our most important Books of Hours which were “best sellers” during a 300-year period when more Books of Hours were made than any other type of book, even the Bible.  From c. 1250, when the first Books of Hours began to appear, to 1571, when during the Counter-Reformation Pope Pius V prohibited the use of all existing Books of Hours, nearly every European family of a certain means owned at least one Book of Hours.”

“Textually interesting, aesthetically beautiful, Books of Hours survive as rich storybooks from the Middle Ages.  Unlike the Bible, whose text was carefully regulated and whose picture cycle was relatively uniform, each Book of Hours is wholly unique. Every Book of Hours reveals a whole world through its stories.”

Dr. Sandra Hindman is Professor Emerita at Northwestern University, where she twice headed the Art History Department.  A specialist in Gothic and Northern Renaissance Art, it was her years spent studying Medieval manuscripts that sparked her interest in acquiring key pieces, which led to her opening her Paris gallery.
 
She says, “When I worked as an expert for other dealers and handled these manuscripts on a daily basis, I gradually came to realize how coupling my academic knowledge with the purchase and sale of medieval art could lead to a shift in my career.  I feel being a dealer and an academic, for me anyway, are two parts of the same thing, my left arm and my right arm, so to speak.  I still write, publish, and teach, at the same time that I help museums and private collectors find important works for their collections.”

As a result, Les Enluminures is known for its ability to use its expert research capabilities to discover new facts about important Manuscripts and Miniatures.  Most recently that resulted in a six figure sale to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art of a Book of Hours composed late in the reign of Francis I, a manuscript that is now considered to be the only extant Book of Hours with contemporary illumination made for and with a portrait of King Francis I.

American museums and libraries that buy from Les Enluminures include The Metropolitan Museum, The Morgan Library, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, Harvard University Library, Newberry Library, Huntington Library, Princeton University Library, and Columbia University, among many.  Overseas Les Enluminures has sold important works to the Musee de Louvre, The British Museum, the Victoria and Albert, the Musee National du Moyen Age (Musee Cluny), Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the British Library, Bibliothèque Royale, Brussels, Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague, Musee National de la Renaissance, and the Museum of the Abegg-Stiftung Foundation in Switzerland, as well as many regional libraries and museums in the US and abroad.

Les Enluminures New York gallery is located in an elegant townhouse at 23 East 73 Street just off Madison Avenue.  The seventh floor penthouse space was previously occupied by Trinity Fine Art.  It comprises three rooms and about 1200 square feet. Hindman is familiar with the building, having staged several important shows at C.G. Boerner gallery (one on Pen to Press in January 2010 and one on France 1500 in January 2011).  C.G. Boerner also has its gallery in the townhouse.

“We are delighted to have found an ideal space to showcase important Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts and Illuminations.”
 
The Les Enluminures web site --- www.lesenluminures.com --- includes video “tours” of the space, where Hindman provides background and history on the collections and special exhibitions.  The site offers a dynamic “turn the page” feature to assist with viewing manuscripts, and four separate sections of areas of specialty to make visits by customers more convenient.

Les Enluminures also produces comprehensive catalogues on subjects related to its collections, most recently for its twentieth anniversary year.  Its “20/20 Les Enluminures 1991-2011” catalogue featured twenty important sales of its first two decades and twenty items now on offer.  Another 2011 publication, “Before the King James Bible” was timed to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the first King James Bible.  Dr. Hindman has authored more than ten books in her field and numerous articles on the history of illuminated manuscripts and early printed books.

Hindman is a member of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America, the Syndicat national de la Librariie Ancienne et Moderne, the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers, and the Syndicat des Antiquaires.  She is also a long-standing member of many professional organizations; including the College Art Association of America, the Medieval Academy of America, the Historians of Netherlandish Art, and the International Center for Medieval Art.
Hindman adds, “Opening a gallery in New York is an important step in our gallery’s development.  New York is an exciting city for art lovers on many levels, not the least of which is the buzz that attends the many important art exhibitions and shows there.  We are delighted that Les Enluminures will now have a greater presence in New York and look forward to seeing many of our clients, and to meeting new ones too.”
 
LES ENLUMINURES  in New York
23 East 73rd Street
7th floor
New York NY 10021
By appointment or 10am - 6pm during exhibitions
 
LES ENLUMINURES
Les Louvre des Antiquaires,
2 Place du Palais-Royal,  75001 Paris (France)
Tel: +33 1 42 60 15 58
info@lesenluminures.com   www.lesenluminures.com

Washington, DC (Updated January 13, 2012)—Following a two-year renovation, the galleries devoted to impressionism and post-impressionism in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art reopen to the public on January 28, 2012. Among the greatest collections in the world of paintings by Manet, Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin, the Gallery's later 19th-century French paintings will return to public view in a freshly conceived installation design.

"The Gallery's French impressionist and post-impressionist holdings, comprising nearly 400 paintings, are among the most prized in the collection, and rightly so," said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art. "While the appearance of these revered rooms has changed very little—preserving the conditions of light, the room proportions, and wall colors that make the Gallery one of the great places to view art in the world—the paintings themselves will be shown in a newly innovative arrangement."

The new installation is organized into thematic, monographic, and art historical groupings. The "new" Paris of the Second Empire and the Third Republic are highlighted through cityscapes by Manet, Renoir, and Pissaro. Showcasing sun-dappled landscapes and scenes of suburban leisure, a gallery of "high impressionism" masterpieces of the 1870s is prominently located off the East Sculpture Hall, including such beloved works as Monet's The Artist's Garden at Vétheuil (1880) and Renoir's Girl with a Hoop (1885). A gallery is devoted to the sophisticated color experiments of late Monet, while Cézanne's genius in landscape, still-life, and figure painting is explored in another. Paintings exemplifying the bold innovations of Van Gogh and Gauguin are displayed along with Degas' later, experimental works in one gallery, followed by a room of canvases by artists such as Delacroix, Renoir, and Matisse celebrating exoticism and the sensual use of color and paint handling. The final gallery is dedicated to the Parisian avant-garde circa 1900: Toulouse-Lautrec, Modigliani, Rousseau, and early Picasso.

The recently acquired Black Rocks at Trouville (1865/1866) by Gustave Courbet will be on view for the first time in the French galleries. Additionally, 13 works have been newly restored. Most of these will be on view in the West Building galleries, including Renoir's sparkling Parisian view of the Pont Neuf (1872), his ever-popular Girl with a Watering Can (1876), Monet's classic Bridge at Argenteuil (1874), and an 1867 portrait of Monet's newborn son Jean in his cradle.

During the two-year period of repair, restoration, and renovation, works normally on view in these galleries were either in storage, on loan, or featured in a special installation—From Impressionism to Modernism: The Chester Dale Collection—in the West Building Ground Floor galleries. Some 50 of the greatest works from this collection were included in major exhibitions shown in Houston, Tokyo, and Kyoto.

"A Collection of Collections"
Opened in 1941, the National Gallery of Art is significantly younger than its nationwide competitors—The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art —in this area of collecting. As the nation's art museum, the National Gallery's collection was formed through generous donations from private citizens and has continued to grow to the present day thanks to contributions by numerous collectors and patrons.

The impressionist and post-impressionist collection begins with the 1942 Widener bequest, and reaches a high point with an extraordinary gift from Chester Dale in 1962, which tripled the size of the Gallery's modern French paintings. These works include major masterpieces, such as Cézanne's The Peppermint Bottle (1893/1895), Gauguin's Self-Portrait (1889), Van Gogh's La Mousmé (1888), Degas's Four Dancers (c. 1899), and two of Monet's celebrated views of Rouen Cathedral (1894). Two of their most spectacular acquisitions, made within nine months of each other, were Manet's early masterpiece, The Old Musician (1862), and Picassos' early masterpiece, Family of Saltimbanques (1905). In particular, the Dales gravitated toward figural works, accruing examples by many of the modern masters of portraiture, as well as marvelous female nudes, such as Renoir's Bather Arranging Her Hair (1893) and Odalisque (1870) and Modilgiani's Nude on a Blue Cushion (1917). In accordance with the deed of gift, these great works may never be loaned.

Paul Mellon—son of the Gallery's founding benefactor Andrew Mellon—also avidly collected 19th-century French paintings, influenced by his second wife, Rachel "Bunny" Mellon. Inspired by Dale's example, Mellon expanded upon the the foundation of French modernism that Dale built for the Gallery. While the Dale collection includes Monet's later landscapes, Mellon collected Monet in all genres and across his career, as well as work by important impressionist painters the Dale did not collect, such as Bazille and Caillebotte. Mellon was a great admirer of Cézanne and gave the Gallery seven paintings spanning the artist's career, including the 1991 gift of Boy in a Red Waistcoat (1888­-1890), one of the Gallery's great masterpieces. Mellon was also a devotee of Degas, and his gift of major paintings and sculptures by the master makes the Gallery's Degas collection one of the best in the world.

Paul Mellon's sister Ailsa Mellon Bruce augmented the Mellon family's dedication to the Gallery through her extensive 1969 bequest of great old master and impressionist paintings, by Renoir in particular. Other important donors to this part of the Gallery's collection include the Havemeyer family, W. Averell Harriman, his second wife Marie Norton Whitney Harriman and his third wife Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman, John Hay and Betsy Cushing Whitney, and Eugene and Agnes Ernst Meyer.

Small French Paintings
The Small French Paintings galleries in the East Building, designed to accommodate the extraordinary gift of French paintings from Ailsa Mellon Bruce, are among the most beloved at the Gallery. The works in these rooms have also been part of reconsidering the 19th-century French collection in the West Building. One gallery will feature an installation of prints together with several paintings by Pierre Bonnard, illuminating the way this artist works across the two media. Other groupings include a selection of circa 1800 landscape sketches, impressionist interiors, realist landscapes, a suite of works by Eugène Boudin, and intimate paintings by the artistic brotherhood known as the Nabis.

General Information
The National Gallery of Art and its Sculpture Garden are at all times free to the public. They are located on the National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW, and are open Monday through Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Sunday from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. The Gallery is closed on December 25 and January 1. For information call (202) 737-4215 or the Telecommunications Device for the Deaf (TDD) at (202) 842-6176, or visit the Gallery's Web site at www.nga.gov. Follow the Gallery on Facebook at www.facebook.com/NationalGalleryofArt and on Twitter at www.twitter.com/ngadc. 

Visitors will be asked to present all carried items for inspection upon entering. Checkrooms are free of charge and located at each entrance. Luggage and other oversized bags must be presented at the 4th Street entrances to the East or West Building to permit x-ray screening and must be deposited in the checkrooms at those entrances. For the safety of visitors and the works of art, nothing may be carried into the Gallery on a visitor's back. Any bag or other items that cannot be carried reasonably and safely in some other manner must be left in the checkrooms. Items larger than 17 by 26 inches cannot be accepted by the Gallery or its checkrooms.

DALLAS, TX - The year 2011 proved to be a great one for Heritage Auctions (HA.com), as the company posted a gross total of more than $806 million, a number that represents the company’s best performance ever.

“The bottom line is that service and value will always sell, and Heritage specializes in the very best of both,” said Greg Rohan, President of Heritage Auctions. “Collectors respond to that. They know us and they know we understand them. The result has been a decade of tremendous growth.”

U.S. Coins continue to be the backbone of the company with the category registering an impressive $196 million auction total, including Weekly US Coin Internet-only auctions, which realized $22 million - a new record for the subset and an 80% increase over 2010 - and Gallery US Coin auctions, which accounted for $5,340,889, another record total for the subset and a 70% increase over 2010.

Heritage’s World Coins category continued to prove itself a juggernaut, with a record total of $39.45 million - an increase of 60% over its 2010 record performance - while the Vintage Comics and Comic Art bore direct witness to the evolution of the category into a true investment quality asset, posting north of $26 million, a 13% improvement over 2010, which had already set the record for any auction house.

“World Coins and Comics are emblematic of Heritage’s continued growth,” said Rohan, “among the several categories that continue to perform well for us. Collectors and investors alike, from some non-traditional corners, are all taking a close look at these categories.”

Heritage Jewelry Auctions continued to see an explosion in sales, ringing up a record $17.4+ million in all (more than double the category’s 2010 record total), Heritage Vintage Sports Collectibles vaulted itself fully double its 2010 total to finish the year at more than $16 million, making it the #1 sports auction house in the U.S.

Fine Wine made its debut at Heritage in 2011 and quickly proved to be a profitable force to be reckoned with as it brought in nearly $11.4 million in total prices realized. Heritage’s continued dominance in Illustration Art was re-asserted by an $11.1 million total, the category’s second best year.

Heritage made the decision in 2010 to spin off its musical instrument auctions from its Music & Entertainment auctions to create a brand new category, which proved to be a smart decision, as collectors lined up for a variety of stringed and other instruments to give the category a $10.5 million debut. The decision also proved a good one for Heritage Music & Entertainment auctions, which, even without Guitars in its total, realized $8.6 million all told, the best year the category’s seen and more than double what it saw in 2010.

One of the year’s most significant changes at Heritage was the acquiring of the assets of Greg Martin Auctions of San Francisco, creating a separate Arms & Armor category for Heritage for the first time. With $9+ million realized in just three auctions, Arms & Armor proved itself a category to watch.

Decorative Arts & Silver also posted its best year ever, with $7.43 million sold at auction, the category’s best year yet by almost double, while Heritage Movie Posters auctions posted an in impressive $6.2+ million total, including $1.8 million in Weekly Internet auctions, a new record for the Web-only offerings and a 15% increase over 2010’s record total. The amount pushed the category lifetime total for Heritage Movie Posters past the $50 million mark since it started in November 2001.

Books have been ranked as number 8 in our 2011 list of the world's most popular collecting categories.

Wikicollecting.org has released its annual list of the most popular collecting related hobbies.

The data is based on the collecting interests of 150,000 collectors in 160 countries around the world.

The 20 most popular collecting areas of 2011 are listed as:

1. Postage stamps
2. Antiques
3. Autographs
4. Memorabilia
                    a. Sports memorabilia
                    b. Music memorabilia
                    c. Space memorabilia
                    d. Film memorabilia
                    e. Royal memorabilia                  
5. Coins
6. Trading cards
7. Art
8. Books
9. Classic cars
10. Comic books
11. Medals
12. Watches
13. Breweriana
14. Furniture
15. Silver
16. Records
17. Photography
18. Figurines
19. Cigarette cards
20. Toy soldiers

The full list comprises 75 collecting categories and is available to view at www.wikicollecting.org

-- About Wikicollecting --
Wikicollecting.org is an open-source encyclopaedia covering all areas of antiques and collectibles.

The site features pages contributed by collectors, experts, and professional dealers, as well as collecting clubs and societies. It currently has readers and contributors in more than 160 countries around the world.

Wikicollecting.org welcomes anyone with an interest in collecting, with the common goal of building a free reference tool for future generations of collectors.
 
The site also offers a free listing service to collecting related dealers and businesses, which allows them to maintain and update their own pages, free of charge.

For further information, please contact:
Info@wikicollecting.org

ORANGE, Calif. - Southern California auctioneer and estate specialist Don Presley is in expansion mode. The floor and storage space at his Orange County gallery will soon increase by 18,000 square feet with the incorporation of recently vacated retail space next door.

“Our previous neighbor needed more room and moved to a larger venue. This worked out great for both of us. My company was also in need of additional space for photography, cataloging and storage, so we annexed the 18,000 square feet available right next door to us. It worked out perfectly,” Presley said.

The Presley facility, located in the city of Orange at 1319 W. Katella Ave., is currently being painted and remodeled. All refurbishments should be completed very shortly.

“This expansion is going to streamline our operation, enable us to accept a larger volume of merchandise and allow my team to work on a timetable that’s two months ahead of each sale,” said Presley. “We’ll also have plenty of room for our new series of monthly Discovery sales, which we will launch on January 21st. These sales will provide an auction outlet for new and used estate furniture, office furnishings and other items that aren’t suitable for our antiques and fine art auctions,” Presley said.

Typically, there will be 500 to 1,000 lots in each of Presley’s Saturday Discovery sales. A live preview will precede each of the sales, and absentee and phone bids will be accepted. “We won’t have Internet live bidding for these sales only because of the nature of the merchandise. Some of the items, like appliances, would be difficult to ship.”

Many box lots will be included in Presley’s new monthly sales. “That’s where you make your discoveries, digging through boxes to see what someone else overlooked. We think bidders and bargain hunters will find these sales interesting and exciting,” Presley said.

For additional information, call Don Presley at 714-633-2437 or e-mail info@donpresleyauction.com. Visit the company online at www.donpresleyauction.com.

PASADENA, CA; January 4, 2012 - PBS today unveiled a new competition series from the producers of ANTIQUES ROADSHOW: MARKET WARS (w.t.), a 20-episode series, airing summer/fall 2012, that gives audiences a lesson in the bare-knuckles business of scoring a bargain. In each one-hour episode, professional antiques dealers put their reputations on the line — as they’re pitted against the clock, a budget and each other — and embark on nationwide treasure hunts, scouring flea markets and antiques shops for vintage valuables. The goal: to score the biggest profit in each show’s final auction segment.
 
“ANTIQUES ROADSHOW has been the leader in the popular antiques and collectibles genre for a long time,” said Marsha Bemko, ANTIQUES ROADSHOW executive producer. “MARKET WARS turns its lens on the antiques experts themselves and the real, rough-and-tumble competition they face in the marketplace.”

In each episode, four antiques professionals compete head-to-head, foraging for items and taking them to auction. MARKET WARS follows the experts on their pursuits, highlighting the marvels that different areas of the country can offer the intrepid antiques hunter. The expert who makes the highest total profit at auction in each episode is named the winner, earning bragging rights for toppling his peers. With affectionate humor, MARKET WARS follows the combatants, gleaning the best tactics from the battlefield and arming viewers to pursue their own successful treasure hunts.

“PBS continues to implement our primetime strategy to bring viewers new shows paired with other like-minded content,” said John F. Wilson, senior vice president & chief TV programming executive. “We’ve had great success pairing natural history and science programming on Wednesday nights. We’re confident that pairing MARKET WARS and ANTIQUES ROADSHOW will even more firmly anchor Monday nights as a popular viewing destination for exploration and history.”

About WGBH

WGBH Boston is the largest producer of PBS content for TV and the Web, including Antiques Roadshow (PBS’s most-watched program), Masterpiece, Nova, Frontline, American Experience, Arthur, Curious George (the No. 1 show on TV for preschoolers), Martha Speaks and other signature programs “produced in Boston, shared with the world” and enjoyed on platforms from televisions to tablets to mobile devices. WGBH also is a major source of programs for public radio (including The World), a leader in educational multimedia (including PBS LearningMedia, a free online service providing the nation’s educators with curriculum-based digital content to meet 21st-century learners’ needs), and a pioneer in technologies and services that make media accessible to the 36 million Americans who are deaf, hard of hearing, blind or visually impaired. WGBH has been recognized with hundreds of honors: Emmys, Peabodys, duPont-Columbia Awards…even two Oscars. Find more information at www.wgbh.org.

About PBS

PBS, with its nearly 360 member stations, offers all Americans the opportunity to explore new ideas and new worlds through television and online content. Each month, PBS reaches 124 million people through television and 20 million people online, inviting them to experience the worlds of science, history, nature and public affairs; to hear diverse viewpoints; and to take front row seats to world-class drama and performances. PBS’ broad array of programs has been consistently honored by the industry’s most coveted award competitions. Teachers of children from pre-K through 12th grade turn to PBS for digital content and services that help bring classroom lessons to life. PBS’ premier children’s TV programming and its website, pbskids.org, are parents’ and teachers’ most trusted partners in inspiring and nurturing curiosity and love of learning in children. More information about PBS is available at www.pbs.org, one of the leading dot-org websites on the Internet, or by following PBS on Twitter, Facebook or through our apps for mobile devices.

Specific program information and updates for press are available at pbs.org/pressroom or by following PBS Pressroom on Twitter.
Contacts: 
Judy Matthews, WGBH Boston
617-300-5343
judy_matthews@wgbh.org
Carrie Johnson, PBS
703-739-5129
cjohnson@pbs.org





LOS ANGELES—The Getty Research Institute (GRI) announced today two complementary acquisitions concerning the artist and photographer Man Ray (b. Emmanuel Radnitzky, American, 1890-1976). 



“These archival materials, photographs, and published works are important additions to the collections at the Getty Research Institute,” said Thomas Gaehtgens, director of the Getty Research Institute. “Taken together with the substantial holdings of the artist’s work in the Getty Museum’s Department of Photographs, they make the Getty the premier North American repository for collections on Man Ray.”



Adding to the GRI’s already significant Man Ray holdings, these two acquisitions, from different private sources, unearth unique and rarely studied material on the artist. One comprises an archive of manuscripts, correspondence, publications, photographs, ephemera, and art works concerning the artist and his wife, Juliet Man Ray, which were assembled by their longtime friends Michael and Elsa Combe-Martin. The agendas from 27 years of the artist’s career, covering 1923-40, 1951-58, and 1971, are the highlight of this collection. The illustrated agendas or calendar books that were kept by the expatriate artist during the 1920s and 1930s in Paris, when he was associated with the Dada and Surrealist groups, document his near-daily encounters and appointments with friends and colleagues such as Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, André Breton, and Lee Miller. Including professional appointments, tasks, details of shoots, and circumstances of printing, they offer a fascinating view of Man Ray’s prolific activities as a photographer as well as intriguing glimpses of his personal life.



“Nearly every day Man Ray met with interesting people, made observations about the world around him and created art,” said Marcia Reed, chief curator at the Getty Research Institute. “The personal diaries, ephemera, and photographs in these collections span four decades of his artistic life, creating an unrivaled opportunity to learn more about Man Ray and his circle.

”

The agendas are joined by 51 vintage and modern photographic prints by Man Ray, dating from the 1920s to the 1970s, of prominent people including T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Elsa Schiaparelli, Virginia Woolf, Paul Eluard, and Marcel Duchamp on his death bed, as well as photographs of Man Ray alone or with Juliet, and with artists such as Max Ernst and Pablo Picasso. The collection also includes objects made by Man Ray, such as a wooden cigar box with a drawing of a bird, given to the Combe-Martins on New Year’s 1969; a miniature portrait of a lady with a moustache added by Man Ray; and a brass seal of embossed lips. Disembodied lips appear as a motif in Man Ray’s paintings, and the agendas also include drawings of lips.



The second acquisition is a special-edition portfolio of photographs, La Traversée du Grand Verre, by the Italian photographer Gianfranco Baruchello (b. Rome, 1924). Created by Baruchello in 1995, the faux-bois and embossed leather portfolio designed by Jean-Luc Mercié holds eight black and white photographs of Man Ray’s close friend, artist Marcel Duchamp, inspecting his monumental work, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1966. This portfolio is accompanied by a unique illustrated Pepys Westminster diary that Man Ray purchased in London in 1953 and used until 1959.



The diary includes handwritten comments in which the artist speculates on various aspects of the art world, with highly pertinent and revealing remarks about his great friend Duchamp. Baruchello’s portfolio holds an additional photograph of Duchamp dedicated to the collector Daniel Filipacchi.



Man Ray used the diary to jot down notes and thoughts, including many aphoristic texts that showcase his wit and his musings on life and art. For example, Man Ray wrote, “there are two reasons for disliking a work—first because it is not understood, second because it is understood.” He also once mused, “I shall always oppose the cauliflower with the artichoke. The cauliflower is like a brain. The artichoke is a green rose—with a heart.

”

These acquisitions join a significant number of Man Ray’s letters, manuscripts, and other materials already in the GRI’s collection as well as more than 300 photographs, including rayographs and solarized prints, from the 1910s through the 1960s by Man Ray in the Getty Museum’s collection—one of the most significant collections of Man Ray’s photography outside France and a core element of the Getty’s first photography acquisitions.




About Man Ray


Man Ray was an American photographer, painter and filmmaker who lived and worked in France for much of his life. He was born Emmanuel Radnitsky in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1890 and grew up in New Jersey, becoming a commercial artist in New York in the 1910s. He began to sign his name Man Ray in 1912, although his family did not change its surname to Ray until the 1920s. He initially taught himself photography in order to reproduce his own works of art, which included paintings and mixed media. In 1921 he moved to Paris and set up a photography studio to support himself. There he began to make photograms, which he called "Rayographs." In the 1920s, he also began making moving pictures. Man Ray's four completed films—Return to Reason, Emak Bakia, Starfish, and Mystery of the Chateau of Dice—were all highly creative, non-narrative explorations of the possibilities of the medium.



After the onset of World War II, Man Ray returned to the United States and lived in Los Angeles from 1940 until 1951. He was disappointed that he was recognized only for his photography in America and not for the filmmaking, painting, sculpture, and other media in which he worked. In 1951 Man Ray returned to Paris, where he concentrated primarily on painting until his death in 1976.

Amy Hood
Getty Communications
(310) 440-6427
ahood@getty.edu

Asheville, NC--December 14, 2011. Biblio.com, one of the world's leading marketplaces for new, used and rare books, announced today that it has launched a new tool to help booksellers and customers negotiate prices on select fine and collectible books.

The new program is called Make-an-Offer. With hundreds of booksellers already participating in the launch of this new tool, customers can browse several thousand books listed on Biblio.com and engage in a direct negotiation without the pressure or crowd of an online auction.

“Biblio was inspired to create this new tool by the way the negotiations occur between customers and booksellers in brick and mortar shops and antiquarian book shows," says Stephen Bakes, Director of Biblio's Bookseller Relations. "The ability for a bookseller to offer special pricing on a book for that particular customer is often the difference between a potential customer silently walking away from a book and a bookseller earning the trust of a new customer."

The process is designed with customer usability in mind. Customers click on the "Make An Offer" button where applicable, and can name their price and a time-frame in which the bookseller can then accept, reject or counter the offer. Both the customer and the bookseller are notified by email throughout the transaction. Biblio.com can offer support and assistance when necessary, but, Bakes notes, this is rarely an issue. The bookseller and customer can quickly come to an agreement or walk away.

"Biblio's Make-an-Offer brings internet book sales one step closer to face-to-face transactions," says Stephen Bakes, Director of Biblio's Bookseller Relations.

Biblio.com

Biblio.com is one of the world's leading sources for used, new and rare books. Established in 2003, Biblio.com has grown to become one of the largest global book marketplaces, with over 60 million books for sale from 6000 bookstores and booksellers in countries around the world. Biblio.com is wholly owned and operated by Biblio, Inc., a privately held company with a commitment to a triple bottom line. For more information, please visit http://www.biblio.com.
###

Syracuse University Library is pleased to announce the acquisition of the personal papers of the flamboyant and trend-setting architect Morris Lapidus. Lapidus, who died in 2001, is perhaps best known for hotels like the Fontainebleau, Americana, and Eden Roc in Miami Beach, buildings which embodied the growth of leisure in American life during the 1950s and 1960s. The Fontainebleau has served as a backdrop for variety of iconic scenes in American film, including the James Bond thriller "Goldfinger" (1964). Most of Lapidus’ buildings exhibited a mélange of historical styles—French provincial, Italian, and Baroque—and anticipated the post-modernism of later architects.

Lapidus was born in Odessa, Russia in 1902, but his family immigrated to the United States soon thereafter. As a wide-eyed youth, he marveled at the splendor of Coney Island and he would later impart a similar spirit of excess to his work as an architect. That spirit would place him at odds with his function-minded modernist peers. However, contrary to the editor’s choice of title for his 1996 autobiography, Too Much is Never Enough, Lapidus was interested less in hedonism than he was in a “quest for emotion and motion in architecture.”

Frustrated by his sometimes antagonistic relationship with the architectural establishment, Lapidus destroyed many of his firm’s records when he retired in 1984. However, he retained a core collection of especially valuable papers that he entrusted with his last collaborator and confidant, architect Deborah Desilets.  The archive includes a large collection of photographs dating to the 1920s, conceptual drawings, manuscript drafts of his written works, and correspondence with his long-time friend, mystery writer Ellery Queen.

Desilets approached Syracuse, which has held a small Lapidus collection since 1967, and a gift of the material was finalized in December. Speaking of her decision to place the archive with Syracuse, Desilets says, "The archive is an extremely important missing link in the discourse on Lapidus’ influence on twentieth century architecture. I am thrilled to place it in such a distinguished research institution, where it will be available for use by generations of students and scholars."

In Syracuse’s Special Collections Research Center, the Lapidus archive will reside in one of the most important mid-century modern collections in the country. Among the other architects represented are Marcel Breuer, William Lescaze, and Richard Neutra, as well as designers like Russel Wright and Walter Dorwin Teague.

The university is also home to a top-ranked School of Architecture. Faculty member Jon Yoder offered this assessment of the Lapidus archive’s value for teaching and research: “The recent proliferation of architect-designed boutique hotels, coupled with the pervasive disciplinary focus on architectural effects, suggests that Lapidus was indeed one of the most influential architects of the twentieth century.  This acquisition of his personal archive comes as welcome news to designers and scholars who are finally beginning to reassess the lavish contributions of this much-maligned architect across a surprisingly broad spectrum of design disciplines.”

For more information, please contact Sean Quimby, Senior Director of Special Collections at 315.443.9759 or smquimby@syr.edu.

NEW YORK, NY--Nine institutions in New York City and Westchester have been awarded grant funding to support a range of digitization projects designed to expand access to important collections of historical and rare materials. Recipients of the 2011 Digital METRO New York (DMNY) grants, totaling over $78,000, were announced today by the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO).
 
Libraries, archives, and other research organizations selected to receive METRO digitization grants this year include the American Jewish Historical Society, the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Center for Jewish History, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Frick Art Reference Library, Brooklyn Museum, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and the New York Botanical Garden. Awardees were chosen based on a rigorous application and review process designed to identify initiatives that would have the strongest impact on research and access to vital materials from important collections in the New York area.
 
“This year’s digitization grant recipients truly represent the diversity of METRO’s membership, and I am confident that their collaborative projects will enhance the growing collection of online resources in our area,” said Jason Kucsma, METRO’s Executive Director.
 
DMNY funding is available to eligible members of METRO through a competitive application and project review process. The projects selected for the 2011/2012 grant cycle reflect the breadth and depth of special collections in the metropolitan New York region. Following are the libraries and projects selected for 2011 METRO collaborative digitization grants:
 
    •    Early New York Synagogue Archives; the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, American Jewish Historical Society, Center for Jewish History
    •    Art Resources from the Mid-20th Century: Digitized Highlights from the Libraries of Hilla Rebay and Juliana Force; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art
    •    Documenting the Gilded Age: New York City Exhibitions at the Turn of the 20th Century (Phase 2); Frick Art Reference Library, Brooklyn Museum
    •    Views of Bronx Park: Collaborative Project to Digitize the Postcards of the Bronx Zoo and the New York Botanical Garden; Wildlife Conservation Society, New York Botanical Garden
 
“With METRO’s support, the Guggenheim and Whitney Museums will be able to make unique historical resources held by both of our institutions widely available for the first time,” said Francine Snyder, Project Manager for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum collaboration with the Whitney Museum of American Art.
 
“Providing online access to these historically significant materials will allow scholars, theologians, sociologists, urban demographers, genealogists and historians to study synagogue life and the life of the Jewish community in New York City before and during a key time period of great Jewish immigration to the United States and in modern American history,” said Naomi Steinberger, Project Manager for the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary’s collaboration with the American Jewish Historical Society and the Center for Jewish History.
 
Since 2005, METRO’s DMNY program has distributed over $530,000 to help fund 37 projects at more than 49 METRO member institutions. Managed by METRO, Digital Metro New York supports the implementation of digitization projects among METRO member libraries and archives. METRO lends vital additional support for digitization projects through specialized education and training programs and opportunities for “digitally ready” libraries to share expertise and best-practice digitization strategies.
 
METRO’s digitization program is supported by funds from the New York State Regional Bibliographic Database Program. For more information about METRO’s involvement in digitization projects, visit http://bit.ly/dkbS1k.
 
About METRO
 
The Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) is a non-profit organization working to develop and maintain essential library services throughout New York City and Westchester County. METRO's service is developed and delivered with broad input and support from an experienced staff of library professionals, the organization's member libraries, an active board of trustees, government representatives and other experts in research and library operations.
 
As the largest reference and research resources (3Rs) library council in New York State, METRO members reflect a wide range of special, academic, archival and public library organizations. In addition to training programs and support services, METRO also works to bring members of the New York City and Westchester County library communities together to promote ongoing exchanges of information and ideas.

PARIS Nov 23 - When Medieval and Renaissance art dealer Sandra Hindman of Galerie Les Enluminures in Paris purchased the “Hours of King Francis I” at the widely publicized July 7, 2010 sale of illuminated manuscripts and printed books forming part of the Arcana Collection (Part I) at Christie’s in London she was convinced that the manuscript was much more important than the auction catalogue or previous articles acknowledged.  Her instincts were right and now the Paris and Chicago-based gallery has sold the manuscript for an undisclosed price to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

At the Christie’s auction, the Hours of King Francis I, previously on deposit at the British Library, fetched £337,250 (about $540,000), against a low estimate of £ 300,000.
 
Hindman says, “King Francis I, the patron of the royal manuscript, was the quintessential Renaissance monarch, the founder of the Louvre, and the patron of Leonardo da Vinci.   My colleague Ariane Bergeron-Foote (archiviste-paléographe) and I knew that by virtue of its art and patronage this lavishly illustrated Book of Hours ranked high among the great treasures of illumination.”

“Auction houses do their best to understand each piece of art they sell but no one had really applied the weeks and months of research needed to expand on the corpus of knowledge about this particular Book of Hours. We decided we would do that and we launched a full-scale investigation.”

In Latin, the Hours of Francis I (Book of Rome) is an illuminated manuscript on parchment that includes 18 large miniatures and one historical initial by the Master of Francois de Rohan (Paris, active c1525-1546).

“Early on we confirmed that this was the only extant Book of Hours with a contemporary illumination actually made for King Francis I - an element not stressed in the auction catalogue,” Hindman says.

Hindman and Bergeron-Foote next set out to explain more fully why the King’s portrait faces such a rare text, the prayers to an unusual saint, Saint Marcoulf.  Veneration before Saint Marcoulf enabled the King to cure a rare skin disease among his subjects.  Hindman and Bergeron-Foote found that the prayers were probably written specifically for the King and appear only for the second time in this manuscript.  They further uncovered records of the King exercising these miraculous powers in his public appearances just around the time that the manuscript was illuminated.

“Most extraordinary, however,” Hindman says, “Is that as we combed the published literature and the archives, we discovered a key document that records that the “escripvain du roy” (or “king’s scribe) Jean Mallard was paid for writing a Book of Hours for Francis I at the end of 1538, when he delivered it to the king to be illuminated.  Following a disagreement with King Francis I, Mallard left France shortly thereafter to join the employ of King Henry VIII of England.  Scrupulous comparison between Mallard’s signed Psalter of Henry VIII, dated 1540, and the Hours of Francis I reveals close similarities in script, decoration, and even layout. The Hours of Francis I thus turns out to be a sort of sister manuscript of the celebrated royal Psalter of Henry VIII, penned by the same hand.”

Hindman adds that, “For the twenty years I have been in business I have always sought to apply the best expertise I can to unearth new information about the prized artworks I acquire.  I’m trained as an art historian and worked all my life as a professor, after all, and that’s what we do:  thoroughgoing research.  Now I apply the same principles to my business.  My willingness to invest my staff’s time, and to retain outside experts when  needed, truly adds to the relationships I have built with major museums, libraries, universities and private clients.  We rarely sell a work of art before ‘getting to the bottom of the story’ as it were.”

Photographs from the Francis I Book of Hours are currently available using the technology of “Turning the Pages” on the website of Les Enluminures:  http://www.medievalbooksofhours.com.

The Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change (The King Center) and Syracuse University announce The King Center Audio and Visual Digitization Project, a collaboration that will ensure that the slain civil rights leader’s legacy will be preserved for generations to come. Working with the Atlanta-based King Center, SU will preserve and digitize some 3,500 hours of audio and video footage of King.

“I am pleased to announce that The King Center has joined with Syracuse University for The King Center Audio and Visual Digitization Project,” says Martin Luther King III, president and CEO of the center. “This endeavor will enable people to see and hear my father deliver his message as he did more than 50 years ago, and preserve it for generations to come. With the generous support and encouragement of my dear friends Sam and Carol Nappi, and the technical expertise of the University, we are continuing to fulfill the mission of The King Center as the official living memorial to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and ensuring that his work toward freedom, justice and equality is as relevant today as ever.”

The King Center archive is the largest repository of primary source material on King and America’s civil rights movement in the world. Its collections include footage that few, including some members of the King family, have ever seen or heard. The center houses a number of unique holdings, like raw footage from various productions over the years. A 16 mm film of King speaking in Syracuse in July 1961 was also discovered. The speech explores many of the themes that would emerge in his landmark 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. The film at The King Center appears to be the only extant copy. There are also a large number of unlabeled reels and canisters that may contain undiscovered footage.

To execute the project with the technical expertise of the Syracuse University Library, SU trustee Sam Nappi and his wife, Carol, have given their financial support to realize this venture.  “This project is very special to me and Carol. It is a humbling experience to help preserve the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and empower The King Center to extend its mission to a new generation. It is also gratifying to join with my friend, Martin Luther King III, and Syracuse University to exclusively digitize and preserve historic audio and film of Dr. and Mrs. King,” says Sam Nappi, who is also a King Center trustee.

Challenges always present themselves in the preservation of historical media of the kind housed at The King Center, established by King's widow, Coretta Scott King, in 1968. At almost 50 years old, even under the best care, excessive exposure to light, humidity and inconsistent temperature levels can be factors that contribute to the degradation of original media materials. The SU campus is home to the Belfer Audio Archive, now the fourth largest sound archive in the United States. The specially designed, climate-controlled facility makes SU a leader in the preservation of historical recorded sound.

The partnership was set in motion during an April meeting when Martin Luther King III and U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young visited the SU campus. It was then that Suzanne Thorin, dean of libraries and University librarian, and Sean Quimby, senior director of the Special Collections Research Center, introduced the guests to some of the library’s most valued possessions, including letters written by
Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington and Malcolm X. They also played an audio file of veteran journalist Mike Wallace interviewing King. The conversation shifted very quickly to the world of media preservation.

The Nappis’ gift will be used to construct and staff a moving-image preservation laboratory in SU Library. Quimby will lead the three-year project and supervise a team that includes a media archivist, digitization technicians and student interns. According to Quimby, “We intend to build upon our existing expertise in preserving and digitizing historical sound recordings.” The library’s Belfer Audio
Archive is among the nation’s pre-eminent sound archives and pioneered the preservation and digitization of Edison wax cylinders. The library team will catalog, repair and digitize a wide array of media, including reel-to-reel audiotape, 16 and 35 mm film, and a variety of obsolete video formats, for listening and viewing at The King Center.

"There is a proud tradition of inclusiveness and social justice at Syracuse University," says Thorin. "Our partnership with The King Center honors that tradition. I am excited that our library has been selected for such an important task."

The Special Collections Research Center of Syracuse University Library collects primary source material in a variety of media, including manuscript, print, illustration, photography, recorded sound and moving image, which support and enhance research and scholarship. Collections range in date from cuneiform tablets dating to 2000 BC to the “born-digital.”

The King Center envisions a world where the teachings of Martin Luther King Jr., are embraced by men and women of all colors and creeds, and regardless of culture or political philosophy. It is devoted to ensuring that his work toward freedom, justice and equality continues in the 21st century. Realizing that dream will require a new generation of change makers devoted to principles of nonviolence and personal empowerment, as well leaders from across sectors who believe, as King did, that poverty, injustice and war must be rendered
obsolete.

Sean M. Quimby
Senior Director of Special Collections
Special Collections Research Center │ Belfer Audio Archive
Syracuse University Library
t. 315.443.9759 │w. scrc@syr.edu

Philadelphia, PA October 26, 2011. Erica Armstrong Dunbar, an associate professor of history at the University of Delaware, has been named the first Director of the Library Company's Program in African American History. Professor Dunbar specializes in African American life and culture from 1619 to1865. She received a bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1994 and a doctoral degree from Columbia University in 2000. Professor Dunbar's book A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City (Yale University Press) is based in part on research she conducted in the Library Company's collections as a fellow. Says Library Company Director John Van Horne, "We are genuinely excited to have a distinguished scholar with strong ties to this institution providing leadership for this important Program."

The Program in African American History, established in 2007 with a grant from The Albert M. Greenfield Foundation, brings together scholars and interested members of the public to explore every aspect of the experience of people of African descent in the Americas from the beginnings of European colonization through 1900. Professor Dunbar will provide direction for the fellowships, conferences, exhibitions, publications, public programming, teacher training, and acquisitions through which the Library Company advances scholarship in African American History and shares this knowledge with the broader public. A new website for the Program that has detailed information about these initiatives is at http://www.librarycompany.org/paah/.

The Program's Director is supported by an Advisory Council whose distinguished members include the Rev. David M. Brown, Murray Dubin, Robert F. Engs, Oliver St. Clair Franklin, Annette Gordon-Reed, Autumn Adkins Graves, Tanya Hall, Emma Lapsansky-Werner, Louis Massiah, Randall M. Miller, Barbara Savage, Arthur Sudler, Diane D. Turner, Linn Washington, and William Earl Williams.

Afro-Americana Collection at the Library Company The Library Company houses one of the nation's most important collections of African American literature and history before 1900. Comprising more than 13,500 titles and 1,200 images from the mid-16th to the late-19th centuries, the Afro-Americana holdings include books, pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, broadsides, and graphics documenting slavery and abolitionism in the New World; the printed works of Black individuals and organizations; descriptions of African American life throughout the Americas; and the exploration and colonization of Africa.

For more than forty years, the Afro-Americana collections of the Library Company have helped nurture and sustain rich scholarship that has added dramatically to our knowledge and understanding of that experience. In the late 1960s as scholars and researchers, inspired by the civil rights movement, began to foreground the significant roles played by African Americans in the country's founding and development, they discovered a trea-sure trove of material in the stacks of the Library Company. Beginning as an organic response to the reading interests of the Library Company's earliest patrons-such as members of the Abolitionist Society who wanted to keep up with current anti-slavery discourse the Afro-Americana collections have become an institutional priority for acquisition, conservation, exhibition, and research support.

Curator of African American History Phil Lapsansky, who has served in that capacity since 1971, has made significant contributions to the development of the larger discipline over that time, as well as helping to shape the Library Company's acquisitions, exhibitions, and programming. Mr. Lapsansky will retire in 2012.

Library Company Partnership with the University of Georgia Press
In a significant enhancement to the Program in African American History, the Library Company has formed a partnership with the University of Georgia Press to support Race in the Atlantic World, 1700-1900, a series of books focused on racial aspects of transatlantic history. The first book under the new partnership will be Eva Sheppard Wolf's Almost Free: A Story about Family and Race in Antebellum Virginia, to be published in spring 2012. Professor Dunbar, who will serve on the editorial advisory board for the series, believes that "this partnership provides a critical platform for disseminating the research that will be conducted at the Library Company by our Fellows, and we are very pleased to be associated with such a distinguished press and well-established series."

The Race in the Atlantic World, 1700-1900 series was created by the University of Georgia Press in 2006 and is edited by Richard Newman, Patrick Rael, and Manisha Sinha. Nine books already have been published in the series, including work by established authors such as Philip Morgan, Marcus Wood, Afua Cooper, and Vincent Carretta. The series also has featured first books by an international cohort of emerging scholars including Gale Kenny, Jeannette Jones, and Mischa Honeck.

About the Library Company of Philadelphia
The Library Company of Philadelphia is an independent research library concentrating on American history and culture from the 17th through 19th centuries. Free and open to the public, the Library Company houses an extensive non-circulating collection of rare books, manuscripts, broadsides, ephemera and works of art. The mission of the Library Company is to preserve, interpret, make available, and augment the valuable materials within our care. We serve a diverse constituency throughout Philadelphia and the nation, offering comprehensive reader services, an internationally renowned fellowship program, an online public access catalog, and regular exhibitions and public programs. Located at 1314 Locust Street, Philadelphia, it is open to the public free of charge from 9:00 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. Monday through Friday. The Library Company can be found online at www.librarycompany.org.

AUSTIN, Texas — The personal archive of publisher, author and artist Fleur Cowles has been donated to the Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin.

In 1950, Cowles published Flair magazine, a work known for its provocative design, enlightened articles and sophisticated advertising layouts. Published from February 1950 to January 1951, the magazine’s one-year run left an indelible mark on publishing history.

Cowles (1908-2009) and her husband, Tom Meyer, had a longstanding relationship with the Ransom Center, which led to the creation of the Fleur Cowles Endowment in 1992. The endowment supports a graduate internship program, the biennial Fleur Cowles Flair Symposium, research fellowships and a replica of Cowles’s study from her Albany residence in London.

The archive contains Cowles’s correspondence, manuscripts, galleys, research material, albums, books, press clippings and photographs.

With Flair, Cowles prescribed a rich mix of works from writers, artists, critics and other notables, including Tennessee Williams, W.H. Auden, Simone de Beauvoir, Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau, Rufino Tamayo and Gypsy Rose Lee. The heart of Flair was its success in pulling together the new, the controversial, the innovative and the creative.

“Fleur was very interested in the Ransom Center and our aim to bring together literary and artistic achievements of the 20th century,” said Thomas F. Staley, director of the Center. “Fleur’s archive documents many of her efforts to merge literature and art through her wide-ranging relationships and creative endeavors.”

In addition to her work in publishing, Cowles was an author and artist. She wrote more than 15 books, including collections of autobiographical anecdotes such as “Friends & Memories” and “All Too True,” and an authorized biography of Dalí.

Cowles’s paintings, filled with animals and flowers, first received international recognition at the São Paulo Biennale in 1965. She exhibited her artwork more than 40 times in galleries and museums around the world. The Ransom Center already held some of Cowles’s artwork, which is on display in the Center’s Fleur Cowles Room.

The materials will be accessible once processed and cataloged. High-resolution press images are available.
###

REYKJAVIK, ICELAND - (19.10.2011) - Last week, the City of Reykjavik was introduced as UNESCO City of Literature at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2011 where Iceland was the Guest of Honour. The program took place in the Icelandic pavilion, where Icelandic readers were featured on large video screens accompanied by images of Icelandic nature.

Jon Gnarr, The Mayor of Reykjavik, spoke about his own belief in the importance of literature, explaining that it is the mirror in which we can see our souls. After his speech, writer Petur Gunnarsson talked about his newly published book Mein Reykjavik, where he guides the reader through his literary Reykjavik, giving examples from poems and other texts by Icelandic authors.

In addition, both Gnarr and Gunnarsson joined Einar Orn Benediktsson, Chair of Reykjavik City Committee of Culture and Tourism, in reciting German translations of famous Icelandic poems, to which they received great feedback from the audience.  

Furthermore, Gnarr and Peter Ripken of ICORN (International Cities of Refuge Network) signed an agreement making Reykjavik a City of Refuge for persecuted writers; the first writer is expected to arrive in Reykjavik in November.

Helge Lunde, the Director of ICORN, said, “This is a great achievement and a major breakthrough for our organisation. The acclaimed writer and President of Icelandic PEN Sjon took the initiative, and the municipality actively embraced the idea of becoming an ICORN city of refuge. We believe that Reykjavik will play an important role in the future development of ICORN.”

More information about Reykjavik UNESCO City of Literature can be found at www.cityofliterature.is.

Washington, DC—Following a two-year renovation, the galleries devoted to impressionism and post-impressionism in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art will reopen to the public on January 29, 2012. Among the greatest collections in the world of paintings by Manet, Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin, the Gallery's later 19th-century French paintings will return to public view in a freshly conceived installation design.

"The Gallery's French impressionist and post-impressionist holdings, comprising nearly 400 paintings, are among the most prized in the Gallery, and rightly so," said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art. "A world-class collection of this caliber results from the generosity of many donors, from the 1942 Widener bequest that brought the Gallery its first impressionist paintings to other treasured works of art, received primarily through gifts large and small."

The installation is organized into thematic, monographic, and art historical themes, including the "new" Paris of the Second Empire and the Third Republic; "high impressionism" of the 1870s marked by sun-dappled landscapes and scenes of suburban leisure; the fantastic, sophisticated color experiments of late Monet; Cézanne's genius in landscape, still-life, and figure painting; the bold innovations of Van Gogh and Gauguin; and the Parisian avant-garde circa 1900: Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, Modigliani, and Rousseau. Text panels in many of the galleries will suggest the ideas behind these groupings, and new audio-tour stops will further help orient the visitor.

Opened in 1941, the National Gallery of Art is significantly younger than its competitors in this collecting area (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Musée d'Orsay, Paris). The Gallery boasts major masterpieces from the Chester Dale Collection, which in accordance with the deed of gift in 1962 may never be loaned. These include Manet's Old Musician, Cézanne's The Peppermint Bottle, Gauguin's Self-Portrait, Van Gogh's La Mousmé, Degas's Four Dancers, two of Monet's celebrated views of Rouen Cathedral, and Picasso's Family of Saltimbanques. They join other great works of French art, given to the Gallery by the Mellon family and other donors, including Manet's The Railway and Plum Brandy, Renoir's Dancer, Cézanne's Boy in a Red Waistcoat and Harlequin, and Van Gogh's Self-Portrait and Roses.

Thirteen works have been newly restored, including Renoir's sparkling Parisian view of the Pont Neuf, his ever-popular Girl with a Watering Can, Monet's classic Bridge at Argenteuil, and a portrait of Monet's newborn son Jean in his cradle.
 
During the two-year period of repair, restoration, and renovation, works normally on view in these galleries were either in storage, on loan, or featured in a special installation—From Impressionism to Modernism: The Chester Dale Collection—in the West Building Ground Floor galleries. Some fifty of the greatest works from this collection were included in major exhibitions shown in Houston, Tokyo, and Kyoto.

General Information
The National Gallery of Art and its Sculpture Garden are at all times free to the public. They are located on the National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW, and are open Monday through Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Sunday from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. The Gallery is closed on December 25 and January 1. For information call (202) 737-4215 or the Telecommunications Device for the Deaf (TDD) at (202) 842-6176, or visit the Gallery's Web site at www.nga.gov. Follow the Gallery on Facebook at www.facebook.com/NationalGalleryofArt and on Twitter at www.twitter.com/ngadc.

The Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America is delighted to announce the winners of the National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest!

First Prize: Mitch Fraas, Duke University, Anglo-American Legal Printing 1702 to the Present

Second Prize: Maggie Murray, Johns Hopkins, Literature of the Little Review: In Which Margaret Anderson Enters an Antiquarian Bookstore

Third Prize: Sarah McCormick, University of California-Riverside, Desert Dreams: The History of California’s Coachella Valley

Essay Prize: Emily Brodman, Stanford University, Sourcing the Sanctuary Movement

After a two year hiatus, the contest was reinstated last year under the joint leadership of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America, the Fellowship of American Bibliophilic Societies, the Center for the Book, and the Rare Books and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress, with major support from the Jay I. Kislak Foundation.

Students who entered the contest were top prize winners of book collecting contests at their respective institutions.  Judges were once again impressed by the scope and genres represented among the collections.  Jean Kislak, a trustee of the Jay I. Kislak Foundation and lifelong collector, served as a member of the competition judging panel. “It was very exciting to see such a diverse array of book collections. These young collectors have shown such skill and creativity in assembling their outstanding collections.”

Mr. Fraas’ collection began when he was studying the legal history of the British Empire and became particularly interested in briefs from the King’s Privy Council.  After he serendipitously obtained a 1791 Privy Council brief from Bombay, he began actively pursuing Anglo-American appellate briefs and ephemeral legal printing.

Ms. Murray’s collection revolves around Margaret Anderson and the literature of The Little Review, but also includes works by “pioneering female literary figures” such as Aphra Behn and Gertrude Stein.  A highlight of her collection is a first edition copy of The Little Review Anthology signed by Anderson in 1953.

Ms. McCormick collects books, documents, and related items that focus on the history of the Coachella Valley and, more specifically, Indio, CA, where she was raised.  An area of concentration within Ms. McCormick’s collection is the date industry in the deserts of the Coachella Valley.

Ms. Brodman, essay prize winner, submitted a collection on the Sanctuary Movement.  In regard to assembling her collection, Ms. Brodman wrote:

I learned as much from the process of collecting as I did from the sources themselves, and now read archives and collections (their materials, their order and structure, and the materials or stories the lack) as closely and critically as I read the discrete sources that comprise them.

Prizes will be awarded to both the winning students and the libraries of the institutions from which they hail.  The awards ceremony will take place on October 21, 2011 at 5:30pm at the Library of Congress, West Dining Room, Madison Building, 6th floor and will include a lecture by Michael Dirda, a noted bibliophile and journalist. The lecture is free and open to the public; no tickets are required.

The Fellowship of American Bibliophilic Societies is an association of collecting organizations whose mission is to communicate, share, and support bibliocentric activities, experience, and ideas among member clubs for mutual benefit and pleasure.

In 1815, the Library of Congress acquired the personal library of Thomas Jefferson. Later collectors such as Lessing J. Rosenwald, John Boyd Thacher and Otto H. Vollbehr, among many others, conveyed their book collections to the Library, where they continue to be conserved by the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. More recently, the Library received the gift of the Jay I. Kislak Collection of rare books, manuscripts and other early American materials. Selections from the Kislak Collection are on view in the “Exploring the Early Americas” exhibition in the Thomas Jefferson Building, as well as online.

The Center for the Book was established by Congress in 1977 “to use the resources and prestige of the Library of Congress to promote books, reading, literacy and libraries.” With its many educational programs that reach readers of all ages, through its support of the National Book Festival and through its dynamic state centers in the 50 states, the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Center for the Book has developed a nationwide network of organizational partners dedicated to promoting the wonders and benefits of reading. The center also oversees the Read.gov website.

The Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA) is a trade association of over 450 demonstrated professionals who specialize in fine and rare books, maps, documents, autographs, illuminated manuscripts, ephemera, and prints that span the economic spectrum.  Our members are united in a passion for books and related material, and are bound by a Code of Ethics.  We sponsor three antiquarian book fairs each year.

For further information, please contact Susan Benne at sbenne@abaa.org or 212.944.8291, or visit our contest website at contest.abaa.org.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s first and until now unpublished novel, The Narrative of John Smith, is to be released by the British Library on 26 September 2011. The novel, written between 1883 and 1884, gives a fascinating insight into this early period of the author’s creative development, only a few years before his creation of Sherlock Holmes would earn him an enduring place in the history of English literature. The British Library has also produced an unabridged audiobook read by Robert Lindsay and is holding a display of the manuscript and other early works in the Library’s Sir John Ritblat Treasures Gallery.

The manuscript of The Narrative of John Smith was lost in the post on the way to the publishers and then rewritten by Conan Doyle from memory. Although he continued to revise the text and drew on various passages from it in subsequent writings, Conan Doyle never re-submitted the novel for publication, later claiming in jest: "my shock at its disappearance would be as nothing to my horror if it were suddenly to appear again - in print." Therefore, the text has been known only to a handful of scholars up to this point, but will now be published for the first time and serve as a rare insight into the author’s creative development and apprenticeship as a writer.
 
By the time Conan Doyle came to write the novel, he had had some success with publishing short stories in literary magazines. Increasingly frustrated, however, by the practice of many nineteenth century journals of publishing contributions anonymously, he decided that the only way to establish a literary reputation was, as he wrote to his mother, “get your name on the back of a volume”. The Narrative of John Smith represents Conan Doyle's first attempt to make the transition from short story writer to novelist and, as such, bridges the gap between his earlier work and the first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, published just a few years later. Semi-autobiographical in nature, the story focuses on John Smith’s period of confinement in his room during an attack of gout, and the work is essentially a series of reflections and conversations with his doctor, friends and other visitors concerning a range of contemporary debates on literature, science, religion, war and politics, which occupies the young Conan Doyle. Several ideas and incidents in the novel anticipate the Sherlock Holmes stories; for example Smith’s garrulous landlady, Mrs Rundle, is a precursor of Martha Hudson, Sherlock Holmes’s housekeeper at Baker Street.

The display in the Treasures Gallery showcases one of the four notebooks that comprise the manuscript of The Narrative of John Smith. Other items on display include letters to his mother describing his financial struggles and losing the novel in the post, and his ‘scientific and monthly magazine’ created in his final year at school at the age of 16.

Rachel Foss, Lead Curator of Modern Literary Manuscripts and co-editor of The Narrative of John Smith, comments: “Even almost a hundred years after Conan Doyle's death and with all of the fascination that surrounds his life and work, this publication and exhibition show that there are still new things to discover about this iconic literary figure. It's a testament to the richness of the Conan Doyle’s life and the archive he left behind him, of which this manuscript is a part, that we can still unearth such little known gems. We are indebted to the generous support and enthusiasm of the Conan Doyle Estate and I'm delighted that, through the British Library's publication and exhibition, we have been able to make this intriguing early work available to a wider audience.”

Jon Lellenberg, representative of the Conan Doyle Estate Ltd and co-editor of The Narrative of John Smith, says: “Dr. Conan Doyle, the struggling physician and writer, was fortunate his first attempt at a novel was unpublished in the 1880s. Today's readers are fortunate that he kept the manuscript, and provided us with a unique window into the mind, thinking, and often emphatic opinions of a young man who in just another year or so would create literature's best known character, Sherlock Holmes.”

Stephen Fry comments: “The breadth, depth and scope of Conan Doyle's knowledge and curiosity is often overlooked. He was the first popular writer to tell the wider reading public about narcotics, the Ku Klux Klan, the mafia, the Mormons, American crime gangs, corrupt union bosses and much else besides. His boundless energy, enthusiasm and wide-ranging mind, not to mention the pitch-perfect, muscular and memorable prose is all on display here in a work whose publication is very, very welcome indeed.”

Items drawn from the British Library’s extensive Conan Doyle collection, acquired in 2004, are on display in the Library’s Sir John Ritblat Treasures Gallery from 9 September 2011 until 5 January 2012.

As part of the activities surrounding the publication of The Narrative of John Smith, the British Library will also present a public event with best selling author, Anthony Horowitz, who has been commissioned to write a new Sherlock Holmes novel by the Conan Doyle Estate Ltd. The House of Silk will be published in November. At this event Horowitz will talk about the book, the characters of Holmes and Watson, and Conan Doyle’s achievement, with Roger Johnson, editor of the Sherlock Holmes Journal. The event will take place Sunday 27 November, 14.30-16.00, in The British Library Conference Centre, £7.50 (£5 concessions).
 
British Library Publishing
Book £9.95 (ISBN 978-0-7123-5841-5) / CD £20 inc. VAT
British Library Publishing’s publication of The Narrative of John Smith and audio CD, recorded with Robert Lindsay, will be 26 September 2011. Both will be available from www.bl.uk/shop (T +44 (0)20 7412 7735 / email bl-bookshop@bl.uk.

Arthur Conan Doyle: The Unknown Novel is open from 9 September 2011 until 5 January 2012 in the Sir John Ritblat Gallery at the British Library. Admission is free.

Exhibition opening hours
Monday, Wednesday-Friday 10.00 - 18.00, Tuesday 10.00 - 20.00, Saturday 10.00 - 17.00, Sunday and Bank Holidays 11.00 - 17.00. For further information about the British Library and its exhibitions please see: www.bl.uk/whatson
With thanks to Conan Doyle Estate Ltd.
 
For more information contact:
 
Evie Jeffreys
British Library
t:+ 44 (0) 20 7412 7105
m:+44 (0) 79 0803 4175
e:evie.jeffreys@bl.uk
 

 

ITHACA, N.Y. (Sept. 13, 2011) - Cornell University Library's rich Human Sexuality Collection just got even richer, with the addition of more than 10,000 gay-themed photographs dating back to the 1860s.

The Harry H. Weintraub Collection of Gay-Related Photography and Historical Documentation includes 150 years of photographs, books, magazines, pornography, ephemera and more. The photographs range from formal 19th-century portraits to Hollywood stars' studio portraits and from 1950s physique photos to candid snapshots.

Weintraub, a New York City labor lawyer who has been amassing the collection for three decades, visited the Library's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections to make the donation in early August.

"I began this collection in earnest because of the AIDS crisis," he said. "Men were dying all around me, and their things were being thrown away because their families were embarrassed. So I was intent on trying to preserve not only their histories but that of those who came before."

As Weintraub amassed more and more photographs, he and his collection became well known, and families would sometimes contact him to donate their gay relatives' materials. Many of the photographs are deeply personal. He also added steadily to the collection through purchases from dealers all over the country.

"This is an amazing gift to Cornell, with a tremendous historical value, and it enhances our sexuality, visual, and photographic collections in exciting ways," said Katherine Reagan, Ernest L. Stern curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts.

The collection even contains a few Cornell-specific items, including a 1940s photo of a young man posed in the arms of the A.D. White statue on the Arts Quad, and it will assist the teaching and research of many scholars.

"The new collection being donated by Harry Weintraub is a trove of rich and provocative images and related materials. It will provide an invaluable resource to many scholars, especially those of queer life and performance in the 20th century," said Nicholas Salvato, assistant professor of theater, film and dance at Cornell. "I'm looking forward to bringing my students to see a number of intriguing photographs when I teach 'Introduction to LGBT Studies' in the spring."

Brenda Marston, curator of Cornell's Human Sexuality Collection, said she is "delighted to have such a big boost to the collection's visual documentation" and looks forward to welcoming the researchers to use it. Noting the role of personal collectors in preserving our cultural heritage, she added, "Mr. Weintraub has made a significant contribution by looking high and low for pictures that show traces of gay history."

Weintraub noted that the collection "deals with the history of a substantial U.S. population" and belongs in Cornell's Human Sexuality Collection.

"I knew the collection would have a good home here, that it would be well taken care of," Weintraub said. "We're a country of diversity, and the documentary record of the different parts of that diversity deserves to be collected and understood."

About Cornell University Library
To learn more, visit the Human Sexuality Collection's website<http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/HSC/> or the Library online at library.cornell.edu<http://library.cornell.edu/>.

LOS ANGELES—The J. Paul Getty Museum today announced the acquisition of the Abbey Bible, an Italian illuminated manuscript that exemplifies the highest achievements of the Gothic era. The Bible is named for a previous owner, who was a celebrated collector of Italian manuscripts.



Produced for the use of a Dominican monastery, the Abbey Bible is one of the earliest and finest in a distinguished group of north Italian Bibles from the second half of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, most of which have come to be associated with Bologna, one of the major centers for the production of Gothic illuminated Bibles. Its illumination is a superb example of the Byzantine style of the eastern Mediterranean that played such a dominant role in Italian painting and manuscript illumination in the second half of the thirteenth century.

"

It is extremely rare for a complete Italian volume of this splendid quality to come onto the market. The Abbey Bible is set apart by its unusually lavish illumination that spills into the margins, often activating the entire page with whimsical figures, Biblical narratives, and images of Dominicans and Franciscans in prayer," said Thomas Kren, acting associate director for collections at the J. Paul Getty Museum.



The marginal vignettes of the Abbey Bible are remarkable for their liveliness and delicacy. Sensitively depicted facial expressions, rare among thirteenth-century Bibles, reveal the artist to be a skilled storyteller, and the pages brim with incident and event.



"There is a restrained elegance and emotional tension within the enclosed initials that works together with the physical exuberance in the margins," adds Elizabeth Morrison, acting senior curator of manuscripts. "There's a vitality in these finely painted tiny figures that gloriously flow across the page but are also exceptionally refined."



Filled with drolleries, grotesques and dynamic pen flourishes, the Bible was nevertheless intended for serious use and study, as evidenced by the many edits, corrections, and amendments to the text, which suggest a university origin for the manuscript. The book appears to be made for a Dominican monastery and devout Dominicans and Franciscans appear prominently in its imagery.



The Bible adds to the growing strength of the Getty Museum's Italian manuscript holdings, which include important illuminated works by Niccolò da Bologna, Taddeo Crivelli, and Giovanni di Paolo. It also complements the Museum's Italian paintings collection, specifically Madonna and Child by the Master of Saint Cecilia, ca. 1290-95 and splendid works by fourteenth-century masters including Bernardo Daddi, Simone Martini, and Pacino di Bonaguida.



The Bible will go on view on December 13, 2011, at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, as part of the exhibition Gothic Grandeur: Manuscript Illumination, 1200-1350.




# # #
MEDIA CONTACT:


Alexandria Sivak

Getty Communications

(310) 440-6473

asivak@getty.edu

About the Getty:
The J. Paul Getty Trust is an international cultural and philanthropic institution devoted to the visual arts that features the Getty Conservation Institute, the Getty Foundation, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Getty Research Institute. The J. Paul Getty Trust and Getty programs serve a varied audience from two locations: the Getty Center in Los Angeles and the Getty Villa in Malibu. 



Sign up for e-Getty at www.getty.edu/subscribe/ to receive free monthly highlights of events at the Getty Center and the Getty Villa via e-mail, or visit our event calendar for a complete calendar of public programs.

The J. Paul Getty Museum collects in seven distinct areas, including Greek and Roman antiquities, European paintings, drawings, manuscripts, sculpture, and decorative arts, and European and American photographs. The Museum's mission is to make the collection meaningful and attractive to a broad audience by presenting and interpreting the works of art through educational programs, special exhibitions, publications, conservation, and research.

Visiting the Getty Center: The Getty Center is open Tuesday through Friday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. It is closed Monday and major holidays. Admission to the Getty Center is always free. Parking is $15 per car, but free after 5pm on Saturdays and for evening events throughout the week. No reservation is required for parking or general admission. Reservations are required for event seating and groups of 15 or more. Please call 310-440-7300 (English or Spanish) for reservations and information. The TTY line for callers who are deaf or hearing impaired is 310-440-7305. The Getty Center is at 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles, California.

(Boston, Massachusetts, August 16, 2011) Thanks to a generous gift from Trustee Emeritus Caleb Loring, Jr., the Boston Athenæum will conserve, catalogue, photograph, digitize, and release on the Internet important selections from its world-renowned Confederate Imprints Collection.

The collection, with more than 12,000 items, is one of the largest and most important of its kind in existence. It includes books, pamphlets, broadsides, newspapers, stamps, paper currency, government bonds, and maps printed in the Confederate States of American (CSA) during the American Civil War.

 “The Confederate Imprints Collection is a great example of the kind of primary source collection the Athenæum was able to create when others did not,” commented Paula D. Matthews, Stanford Calderwood Director and Librarian.

“Thanks to the remarkable foresight of our Librarian and members a century and a half ago, these rare and perishable printed items have survived to the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Civil War. They have long been a key resource for scholars. Now, new technology and this wonderful gift will make a significant portion of the collection available as never before.”

“The Confederate Imprints Project is a great example of how the internet makes new kinds of access to special or hidden resources available to everyone, world-wide,” said James Reid-Cunningham, Associate Director for Preservation and Digitization. “It is also a leading first project for our ‘seamless method’ of collection preservation and access, which begins with the physical object and unites conservation, cataloguing, digitization, and distribution in a single, continuous process.”

The Athenæum began to assemble its Confederate Imprints Collection immediately following the end of hostilities in 1865.

Francis Parkman, the famous historian and an Athenæum Trustee, traveled the war-ravaged southern states with Athenaeum funds to purchase Confederate printed material before it was lost to history. Athenaeum Librarian William F. Poole continued the search by actively advertising in the region and buying heavily. His goal was to acquire “everything printed in the South during the war that goes to illustrate the state and action of the Southern mind”

The original collection was enlarged in 1944, with the purchase of 1500 additional Confederate imprints from Judge Raymond S. Wilkins. In 1969, the Honorable George W. Ball, former U.S. Undersecretary of State and Ambassador to the United Nations, and his son, Douglas Ball, gave the Athenæum an extraordinary collection of Confederate currency, including about 6,200 examples of paper money and 500 CSA bonds and treasury certificates to the Athenaeum.
 
The Ball gift contained many rarities and fine examples of the various types of engraved and lithographed designs used for bills issued by the individual states and the government.  Like much of the rest of the collection, it has never been completely catalogued and is consequently largely unavailable, even to scholars.
The Loring gift will allow the Athenæum to hire a full-time rare materials cataloguer to work with the Confederate materials for a year, in addition to the Athenæum staff working on the project. The gift will also cover conservation and digitization of significant selections of the collection.

As an independent library, not a government agency or part of a university or college, the Boston Athenæum developed its collections to suit the needs and interests of its own members, often acquiring items, like the Confederate material, long before their significance became clear to others. Thus many of its holdings are especially rare or unique examples of their kind.

The Athenæum recently set up a new webpage, “Digital Collections at the Boston Athenæum,” http://cdm.bostonathenaeum.org/cdm, as a public access point for its digital collections via the internet. In 2012, digitized portions of the Confederate Imprints Collection will join them.

***
Founded in 1807, the Boston Athenæum is Boston’s first cultural institution. It combines an art museum, with a public exhibition gallery and collections of paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, photographs, and decorative arts; a leading research and membership library; and a civic forum including lectures, readings, panel discussions, and other events. An innovator and catalyst for more than two centuries, the Athenæum was one of the three founders of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the inspiration for the Boston Public Library, the first municipally supported library in North America.

#