In one of his portraits of the convivial octogenarian turf journalist Colonel John R. Stingo, A. J. Liebling writes, Like most people of pronounced seniority he reads the obituary pages with attention, and had a morning of quiet triumph last winter when two insurance shamans, a past president of the Actuarial Society of America and the vice-president of a major company, died on the same day, aged sixty-two and fifty-four respectively. 'I bet they avoided excitement, late hours, high blood pressure, tasty food and intoxicating liquors and had themselves periodically examined with stethoscopes, fluoroscopes, spectroscopes and high-powered lenses,' the Colonel said. 'The result was inevitable and to be expected, the result of morbid preoccupation. The anxious fielder drops the ball.' Most antiquarian booksellers of my acquaintance shun morbid preoccupation. At book fairs and other venues where booksellers gather, one often finds colleagues gathered around the groaning board or even on occasion congregated in rooms where one may conveniently rest a foot upon a brass rail. Despite my own best efforts, a bit of the morbid preoccupation will on occasion creep in upon me; to combat the cumulative effects of the collegial life I will lace up my running shoes and set off at a lumbering trot of self-improvement through the streets of Ann Arbor. And when the cankering cares of business seem especially grim, I make certain my route takes me up through Ann Arbor's Forest Hill Cemetery. It ... [more The Perils of a Morbid Preoccupation.]

The stretch from 1833 up through early 1834 was a pretty good run for the Chester County (Penna.) Cabinet of Natural Science. The museum published its seventh report in April 1834, and while its pages note some of the natural phenomena sprung upon the community in the previous year—like the “copious 'meteoric shower'” observed on the night of November 12, 1833—the report also devotes a good chunk of space to what museum annual reports have continued to do up through the present day: thanking its donors. The Chester County (Penna.) Cabinet of Natural Science by the spring of 1834 could boast that it possessed the head and bill of an albatross (with the jawbone of a dolphin thrown in for good measure) given to them by Captain Thomas Dixey, while Philip Sharpless had made a gift of his small collection of lead and iron musket balls gathered from the Brandywine battlefield. An adventuresome Dr. Carrey had wandered even further afield and such stony fruits of his travels as he carried back were of sufficient merit to prompt the museum to thank him for his “valuable collection of minerals from Arkansaw Territory.” My copy of the 1834 report now reposes on the shelves of a private collection. Those impelled to delve with greater attention into the doings of the Chester County (Penna.) Cabinet of Natural Science might consult a run of the institution's reports from 1828 through 1849 at Yale's Beinecke Library (itself no mean cabinet of printed wonders). The history of suc... [more Articles of Great Value in Small Compass]

The Library Company of Philadelphia, “America's oldest cultural institution,” traces its history back to the good offices of Benjamin Franklin, who was instrumental in establishing the Library Company in 1731. The Library Company has a storied history of course—it served as the first Library to Congress, was for years the largest public library in the United States, and today houses a first-rate collection with a number of notable strengths. It also seems to inspire a certain amount of devotion. I recently paid a visit to the Library Company and as we waited in the lobby to meet with the Curator of Printed Books, Rachel D'Agostino, I noticed the attractive and--to my untrained eye--evidently funerary marble slab over next to the reception desk. Rachel later explained that this slab in fact marks the graves of library benefactors James Rush (1786-1869) and his wife Phoebe Ridgway Rush (1799-1837). After his death in 1869, the childless and one might say eccentric James Rush gave his library and papers to the Library Company, and made a “generous bequest” that included provision for the purchase of land and the funds to construct a new library building—as well as restrictions that included such stipulations as Let it not keep cushioned seats for time-wasting and lounging readers, nor place for every-day novels, mind-tainting reviews, controversial politics, scribblings of poetry and prose, biographies of unknown names, nor for those teachers of disjointed thinking, ... [more Friends of the Library]

For the past five years the New Bedford Whaling Museum has been sponsoring a scrimshaw show in conjunction with their annual Scrimshaw Symposium. This year they opened the show up to include a wider range of maritime antiques and books, and I figured “Why not?” I thought there was a fair chance that the show, which was taking place in the lobby of the museum, would be clogged with clueless tourists, but since the event only lasted for a day I knew my suffering would be limited. Happily no suffering was involved. The show was crowded most of the day with a niche audience, knowledgeable and highly focused. I met many old friends from the whaling world, Alan Granby, in repose and made a few new ones. Most importantly, I met new customers. Their purchases were relatively modest, but their interest was deep and they were well informed. I see a happy future for us. I'm always talking about getting out of the rut and exploring new venues, and this was a perfect example of what a brilliant idea it is – when it works. (Don't even ask me about the last Nantucket Antiques show I did, an event crawling with dandies in pink pants and neck knotted cashmere sweaters escorting pudgy ladies clutching lightship baskets. The reading habits of that crowd maxed out at 50 Shades of Grey.) It was a good whale week for other reasons as well. On my way to the show I bought a book I've always wanted and never before managed to own. But that's kind a of a “watch what you wish for” situation, ... [more Watching What I’m Wishing For]

This past April, the biggest news to hit the antiquarian book trade in roughly 400 years became public: my colleagues Dan Wechsler and George Koppelman, booksellers in New York City, unveiled a copy of a sixteenth century dictionary which could, quite plausibly, have once belonged to William Shakespeare — complete with annotations possibly in the bard's hand and many tantalizing, if ultimately circumstantial, linguistic and stylistic links to his plays. I'll leave it to better minds than mine to make a final determination regarding the dictionary's provenance. Wechsler and Koppelman have laid out an entire volume of compelling evidence in their just-published book, Shakespeare's Beehive (a copy of which I've just ordered); the Folger Shakespeare Library, the New Yorker, and numerous book bloggers have already begun weighing in, and I'm sure many more scholarly voices will be added to the fray over the coming months and years. I hope it's years, not months. I hope it's real, real enough at least to merit many years of scholarship – I really, really do. But regardless what this volume turns out to be, whether the hundreds of annotations on its 400-year-old pages turn out to be the long-sought mainline to Shakespeare's creative process or just a host of happy coincidences, the whole wonderful escapade serves to remind me that this pursuit my colleagues and I are engaged in, which so many days feels like little more than a glorified exercise in rag-picking, has resonances far... [more What My Friends Think I Do (Part 1 in a Series)]

Last week the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin announced its acquisition of writer Ian McEwan's archive. The archive is comprised of a broad range of materials, from childhood items to his earliest stories to drafts of all McEwan's published works to correspondence with other notable literary figures. In addition to the spectrum of content represented in the archive, there is also a range of mediums-- manuscripts, photographs, audio and video recordings, and digital material like emails and typed manuscripts of novels. Stephen Enniss, Director of the Ransom Center, said that the "acquisition represents a rare opportunity to share the work of a living, internationally acclaimed author whose works are of strong interest to readers everywhere." When writing, McEwan composed parts of his novels in longhand, usually in green, spiral-bound notebooks, and wrote the rest using a computer. Once a preliminary draft was completed he would enter everything onto the computer and print out multiple copies, which he would edit by hand. "The writer tends to forget rapidly the routes he or she discarded along the way," McEwan said about his manuscripts and his own process. "Sometimes the path towards a finished novel takes surprising twists. It's rarely an even development. For example, my novel Atonement started out as a science fiction story set two or three centuries into the future." The McEwan archive will be accessible once it is fully processed and catalogued. M... [more Ian McEwan Archive Acquired by Harry Ransom Center]

A contest held by the University of Chicago's Special Collections Research Center has cracked the code of handwritten marginalia in a 1504 Venetian edition of Homer's Odyssey. Collector M.C. Lang donated his collection of Homer's works to the University of Chicago Library in 2007 so that it could be used by students and researchers. The 1504 edition of the Odyssey was included in the donation and the book contained handwritten annotations in an cryptic script that the library was unable to identify. Lang and the library decided to hold a contest and invited linguists, scholars, and students to decipher the writing. Lang agreed to furnish a prize of $1,000 to the first person to identify the script, provide evidence for his or her conclusion, and to translate selected portions of the marginalia. Daniele Metilli, an Italian computer engineer currently working toward a career in libraries and archives, won the contest by identifying the script as a French shorthand system developed by Jean Coulon de Thévénot in the late 18th century. A mix of French words and a legible date led Metilli, who worked with a colleague fluent in French, to the conclusion that the script was a system of French stenography. Once Metilli ascertained that it was indeed Thévénot's system he was able to begin translating. The annotations are largely French translations of Greek words and phrases. Metilli will continue to work on completing the translation in hopes to discover who the author may be. Met... [more Contest Identifies Enigmatic Annotations in 1504 Edition of Homer’s ‘Odyssey’]

The literary world has been buzzing all week about ABAA members George Koppelman and Dan Wechsler's possession of a dictionary, John Baret's Alvearie, they believe was owned and annotated by William Shakespeare. There has been considerable press on Shakespeare's Beehive, and Dan has had the opportunity to chat about their scholarship with a number of outlets. Dan Wechsler sat down with Amy Eddings of WNYC yesterday& ​ …and chatted with fellow ABAA member Dan Dwyer this afternoon. ABAA member Garrett Scott is keeping an updated list of news and information on this thrilling news on his blog, Bibliophagist. [more More Buzz on Shakespeare’s Beehive]

ABAA Member Marc Selvaggio recently spoke at the opening of an exhibition he curated at Southern Methodist University's DeGolyer Library on Parables of Promise: American Advertising Fiction, 1856-2014. The exhibit aims to cover how American companies have used fiction and storytelling in this genre to sell "material goods, whether plows, windows, patent medicines, cereals, the telephone, bicycles, railroad travel, or insurance". The exhibit will be on view until May 23, 2014. More highlights are here. [more Marc Selvaggio Curates Exhibit on Advertising Fiction at SMU’s DeGolyer Library]

We were excited to see Catherine Opie name Andrew Cahan as one of the un-sung heroes of the photography world in Aperture's Photography As You Don't Know It series. As a monograph collector, Ms. Opie was struck by Cahan's focus on Japanese monographs from the 1970's. From that point onward, she was hooked and they became fast friends. Cahan has moved back to his hometown of Akron, Ohio and still seeks out the best in books by and for photographers. More on their relationship here. [more Andrew Cahan Featured in Aperture’s Winter Issue]