Who killed the famous painter Caravaggio? Or what killed him? These questions have plagued art scholars for decades. Scientists want to finally put the nail in the coffin about Caravaggio's demise. Big Think discusses the new project, spurred on by the discovery of a slip of paper left in a book four centuries ago.

From the piece...

Assuming that that paper is true, the experts expect that Caravaggio's body was laid to rest in a nearby cemetery. The thirty bodies in that cemetery were moved in 1956 to another cite. All the team of anthropologists need to do is examine those thirty skulls, create computer models for each one to determine what the original owner may have looked like, and then compare those models against the self-portraits that Caravaggio painted...

Read more about what seems to be CSI: Renaissance Italy, here.

Image above: Caravaggio, painted by Ottavio Leoni, 1621.

This summer, as part of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Lilly Library of Indiana University, Bloomington, the Library will present a short course on "Reference Sources for Rare Books."  This class, which will meet in the Ellison Room of the Library from Monday, July 12, through Friday, July 16, will be taught by Joel Silver, Associate Director and Curator of Books. The course will present a systematic introduction to approximately 350 printed and electronic reference sources for rare books, with emphasis on sources in the fields of early printed books; British and American literature; historical Americana; voyages and travels; maps and atlases; science and medicine; and the book arts.

The Dean of American Crime writers, the prolific Massachusetts novelist Robert B. Parker, died unexpectedly at his home in Cambridge today, reportedly at his desk, presumably working on another Spenser novel; he was 77, and one of the really great ones.

Bob Parker was about as squared-away an author as I have ever had the privilege to interview. I will have to check my files, but I am guessing we got together no fewer that eight times over a twenty year period to talk about his latest release, which more often than not was a Spenser novel, but on one occasion, I remember, we met to discuss the Jesse Stone series he had just introduced, another time to talk about his female detective, Sunny Randall, and yet another get-together to talk about Poodle Spring, an unfinished Raymond Chandler novel he had completed.

Some years ago, when I was working as an archivist at Drew University in Madison, NJ, I had the honor of tracking down something really wonderful. Of course, archivists, librarians, and book dealers are always locating wonderful things, but this was truly special. It was the original audio of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "American Dream" speech, which he gave at Drew on Feb. 5, 1964.

A history professor had called the University Archives to ask about the audio; rumors had circulated for years that such a recording existed. There was an unofficial audio archivist -- a nonagenarian who had been on campus for 40+ years recording every lecture or event he could get to. But our Archives, like many Archives, was an accumulation of 150 years worth of stuff without one fully funded archivist. By whatever stroke of luck, after determining the date of the historic event using the student newspaper, that audio archivist and I unearthed the reel-to-reel. He transferred it to audio tape. The story was written up in the local paper, and the university celebrated a proud moment in its history.

Coincidentally, a graduate student who worked with me in the Drew Archives is now an archivist working on a very important civil rights collection. Archives from Atlanta, the Cradle of the Civil Rights Movement is a Council on Library and Information Resources funded collaboration between Emory University and the Auburn Avenue Research Library to process and make available the records of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Atlanta Chapter of the NAACP, and the personal papers of Andrew J. Young.

The Auburn Avenue Research Library is hosting a number of events that will be of interest to collectors of African Americana, specifically the program on Feb. 6: Save Our African American Treasures: A National Collections Initiative of Discovery and Preservation.

Only in New York is something so totally bookish like Bibliography Week possible, certainly on the scale of this event, which is mounted each year during the last week of January when the major national organizations devoted to book history have their annual meetings in the Big Apple, and get together at a number of related events, many of which are free and open to the public. (Image at right: Broadway Under Snow, by Rudolph Ruzicka, The Grolier Club, 1915.)

The week kicks off on Tuesday, January 26, with the Sixteenth Annual Bibliography Week Lecture, to be given this year by Michael Suarez, SJ, noted book historian and recently appointed director of Rare Book School, at Columbia University. His talk, scheduled for 6 p.m. in the Faculty Room of Low Library (116th St. at Broadway), is titled "Learned Virtuosity, Virtuously Displayed: Cultural Elits and Deep Purses in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Illustrated Books."

A talk at the Grolier Club (47 East 60th St.) on Wednesday, January 27 by Milton McC. Gatch titled "Bibliotheca Parisina 1791: A Tale of Two Cities, or An Auction in Revolutionary Times," 2 p.m., is free, and public. A reception later that evening to mark the opening of an exhibition at the Grolier, "Mary Webb: Neglected Genius," featuring materials from the collection of Mary Crawford, is for members, but the show is open the public from January 12 to March 12.

Thursday, January 28: In Brooklyn, the latest works of book artists will be on display at the Open Salon, 37 Greenpoint Avenue, 4th floor, hours 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. The shop, founded in 1999, describes itself as an "artist-run, non-profit, consensus-governed, artist and bookmakers organization located in the up-and-coming neighborhood of Geenpoint." Sounds like fun, and very definitely worth checking out.

On Friday, January 29, again at the Grolier Club, the Bibliographical Society of America holds its annual meeting, with papers being presented by new scholars. Eric Holzenberg, director of the Grolier Club, will speak on "The Bibliophile as Bibliographer." The event is open to the public.

Saturday, January 30: The annual meeting of the American Printing History Association, to be held at the New York Public Library (Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street), 2 p.m. For those who have never visited the Center for the Book Arts (28 West 27th St., 3rd floor), a Winter Open House is on from 2 to 5 p.m. Demonstrations, tours, exhibits are on tap. All in all, a great week for bibliophiles, and a nice warm-up for those planning to attend the 43rd annual California International Book Fair in Los Angeles, Feb. 12-14.

Everett Wilkie confirms that convicted map thief E. Forbes Smiley was released from prison on 15 January, 2010.

The Times Literary Supplement, published monthly in the UK, comes out in late November with its Books of the Year edition.  I don't subscribe to the publication because I enjoy eating so much and the U.S. subscription price of $189 would mean several meals per year would probably have to be exchanged for some form of protein originally intended for cats.

But a friend of mine was kind enough to share his copy with me. (Thank you, Gary!)

In it, 57 authors of world-renown are asked to write about some of their favorite reading experiences of the preceding year.  Among the 57 writers this year were Julian Barnes, A.S. Byatt, Margaret Drabble, Nadine Gordimer, Seamus Heaney, etc.  Opening this annual issue is akin to a circus car arriving in your mailbox that opens up and, instead of clowns, deposits some of the greatest writers into your living room all in a tumble where they proceed to hold a grand salon.

A consistent theme runs through many of the entries: everyone seems a bit pea-green with envy over Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall.  They complain about its intelligence, the hype, about the Man Booker Prize - but everyone eventually manages to get over themselves and it seems to have been cited most often by this august group of 57, who have the good manners to refrain from wishing they'd written it themselves.

Another favorite seems to be The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940.  (There are three more volumes to come.)

Julian Barnes devotes his two paragraphs to a gracious salute to John Updike, who died in 2009.  Barnes feels that Updike's final works, My Father's Tears and Endpoint were grotesquely misunderstood. "Death afforded him no courtesy, and the stories received several reviews of impudent stupidity."  He reminds us all of Updike's Herculean contribution to letters by noting that Everyman has published Updike's final reworking of the Rabbit quartet as Rabbit Angstrom and calls it "the greatest American novel of the second half of the twentieth century.

Reading the TLS Books of the Year edition is not for the faint of heart, because whatever books you've read this year suddenly seem like Miss Piggly Wiggly.

Marjorie Perloff would like you to try out a 700-page bilingual edition of The Poetry of Rilke, translated by Edward Snow. David Wooten urges you to pick up the 13 lb. (yes, 13 lb.) The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. Also be prepared to thank Michael Hofman for suggesting a novel from 1970 (Metropole), which has just been translated into English from the Finnish.

The TLS year-end summary may be the most satisfying and the most challenging of the "Best Books of the Year" genre.  It will inspire you to stretch your reading habits; to read harder. It's the literary equivalent of feeling compelled to go to the gym. I am perfectly willing to have these 57 writers serve as my personal coaches. I look so much better sitting on a sofa than I do on the treadmill.

Last Saturday, an earthquake hit Eureka, California, home to two independent booksellers. Eureka Books, co-owned by Scott Brown, former editor of Fine Books & Collections, is faring well after the 6.5 magnitude quake. On Sunday, they updated their Facebook status with the following report: "Everything is back to normal at Eureka Books, and we even have an earthquake display in our window, as an offering to the earthquake gods. Booklegger down the street was closed today for cleanup but will be back in business tomorrow."

Pictured above is the interior of Eureka Books after last week's quake, photo by Amy Stewart. This picture was tweeted with the following caption: "The bookcases that were not bolted to the wall came down at the store--fortunately not many." More photos by Stewart are posted on Mashable.

Social media (as you call tell from all the links) played a significant role in disseminating images of the quake quickly. Scott Brown also points out, "It's funny in this digital age that bookstores are the iconic images of this quake." The LA Times and the San Francisco Chronicle both featured bookshops in their coverage of the earthquake, and the local TV station ran a piece focusing on Booklegger.

Why the focus on books? A bibliophile's answer: books are the pillars of civilization, when they fall down, we take notice.

The University of Texas at Austin's famed Harry Ransom Center (surprisingly?) has an excellent YouTube channel I just stumbled across. They've been posting a few short videos a month for about a year, and the results are - for bibliophiles at least - eminently watchable. As expected, many of the videos highlight important or interesting collections, such as the Robert DeNiro or Harry Houdini Collections, or focus on the history of the Center itself. But my favorite clips are the brief interviews with scholars who have actually used the collections at the Ransom. From academics studying 80's blockbuster script doctors to others working with Samuel Beckett's manuscripts, these shorts are a testament to the enduring importance of the book as object.

1) What year was Zane Grey's The Man of the Forest a bestseller?
2) In 1957, the Book of the Month Club featured this title by Winston Churchill...
3) Who wrote 1976's #1 fiction bestseller and what was it?

Why the pop quiz on this Tuesday morning? Because Daniel Immerwahr, a grad student at the University of California, Berkeley collated all this information about twentieth-century books on his new website, Books of the Century. You can search by year or by decade for bestsellers (as recorded by Publishers Weekly), BOMC selections, and other historically significant titles.

Immerwahr wrote about this cool new resource: "I hope that it will be useful to those interested in the history of publishing as well as those interested in the intellectual and cultural history of the United States."

And thanks for playing!
Answers:
1) 1920; 2) The Age of Revolution; 3) Leon Uris, Trinity