Manuscript Digest –September 2018– This complimentary e-digest, launched in 2012, covers significant acquisitions and sales, manuscripts lost and found, rare books and ephemera, document conservation, and more.

In the News

Two for the Road
Atlas Obscura, August 24, 2018
An antiques dealer and his partner were making out like a pair of bandits — literally — on a summer road trip through academic libraries. Then they got to the U of I.

Carnegie’s Big Chill
New York Times, August 28, 2018
In the world of rare books and manuscripts, trust is the coin of the realm. But what if someone cashes out? Why the Carnegie Library theft is sending a chill.

Flight from Egypt
Antiques Trade Gazette, August 9, 2018
The 14th-century Islamic manuscript was a treasure of an Egyptian library. Then in the 1970s, poof! Gone. Until it turned up in an auction catalog this year.

For the Record
The Sun, August 15, 2018
The oldest book in the Pennsylvania state archives was a ledger from 1779. It started with page 184. So where were pages 1–183? You know that stack of stuff in the attic …

Courting Kafka
The Atlantic, August 9, 2018
The Trial. The Castle. Amerika. How did the Kafka’s key manuscripts end up where they are? Over his dead body. The Kafkaesque suit for a literary legacy.

Pope’s Plaisance?
The Guardian, August 26, 2018
Did Alexander Pope design the garden of George II’s mistress? A landscape historian thinks she’s found a trace of the poet’s green thumbprint, hiding in plain sight.
• Frederick Law Olmsted’s papers go online at the LOC

Gospel Truth
Daily Beast, August 25, 2018
In 1889 a second-century Gospel was discovered in Egypt. For generations, that was the accepted truth. Then a scholar asked some tough questions.

Out of the Margins
Artsy, August 15, 2018
Once they were dismissed as distracting doodles. But were marginalia of medieval texts something more? The case for illuminated manuscripts as art for art’s sake.
• The beastly meanings lurking in the margins
• The manuscript a rabbi calls “freakin’ amazing”

Notes to File
Daily Mail, August 30, 2018
From young Elizabeth Tudor to the Kray twins’ dad, people who made history also made their way into the correspondence archives at Kew — and into a new book.

No. More. Paper. Records.
FCW, August 24, 2018
On this side of the pond, the National Archives says it will stop taking paper records from agencies in four more years. What does a paperless NARA look like?

Genius
Two more da Vinci notebooks, digitized for you
> Dive in

Priceless
Books of Hours from seven Quebec collections
> Check it out