UK libraries and museums unite to save ‘astonishing’ lost library from private buyers - wouldn't it be nice, though, if the people who can afford to buy up this sort of thing would do so to give them to publicly available collections?
And, talking of fun things found in public collections, this is an amazing Twitter thread about an astonishing find ( Read more... )

Charles Darwin: Notebooks worth millions lost for 20 years: The notebooks were last seen in November 2000 after "an internal request" to remove them from a special manuscripts storeroom to be photographed. They were taken to a temporary studio, which at the time was in a temporary building in the grounds of the university library because building ( Read more... )

I encountered this article this morning via Twitter:
I can’t stand the earnest worship of books as objects - it’s literary posturing of the first degree.
I mean, there is some 'sharp young columnist' posturing itself going on there -
- but I really don't think that one can jump from what she's actually saying, which is, more or less, mostly ( Read more... )

Last night I succeeded in foregathering with
( Read more... )

Dept of, Point Thahr, Misst:
How feminism sold out by becoming cool. It's a review of a book which sounds like a meritorious diatribe against the commodification of feminism into a consumer item: and then the reviewer says: 'I wish Zeisler had tried harder to reconcile feminism and capitalism.' WOT.
***
Dept of, What Does 'Recent' Mean Here?
The ( Read more... )

O, Jonathan Jones, the ponceyness that never stops giving: Oxford’s online Bodleian archive: illumination for all.
Yes, okay, these digital initatives are a great thing, but this isn't even one of the pioneering efforts. But it raises the question of what great libraries are for: is the research they make possible just for PhD students assembling ( Read more... )

I didn't realise it was a mystery, but this sad story of Constance Wilde, retrospective diagnosis, and medical malpractice looks like a classic case of 'anything wrong with a woman must be down to something in her reproductive organs'.
Crowdfunding saved Timbuktu’s manuscripts: [T]he woman behind T160K is relaunching it with a bigger team and ( Read more... )

(And still open to suggestions...)

This question/prompt came from
( Read more... )

Cool Thing I discovered - glancing through an auction catalogue at work and riffling fast through the section on medieval illuminated manuscripts, my eye caught a woman's name and she was the person to whom this particular ms was attributed and A Known Artist. Apparently this was not entirely unknown in ye medievalz: women were making books in the ( Read more... )

I will cop to getting a massive sense of accomplishment out of beating into submission and some kind of order processing a substantial collection of archives, but it falls with the category of pleasure involving a significant degree of delayed gratification, getting to the point where it's done and dusted, the catalogue is available, the boxes are ( Read more... )