Manuscript Digest –July 2019– 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

Lincoln’s Bible
New York Times, June 19, 2019
At an 1864 fundraiser, Lincoln gave 48 copies of the Emancipation Proclamation. He got a Bible. After 150 years, and a road trip in a beach towel, it’s headed to his library.

First Family Ties
Smithsonian.com, June 18, 2019
A little-known manuscript at the Library of Congress shows how George Washington inherited Mount Vernon — and reveals the complex ties to and among its enslaved people.

Revolutionary Forces
Boston Globe, June 18, 2019
By the Declaration of Independence signing, James Melvin had joined the Continental Army, marched to Quebec, and survived a POW camp. Now his wartime journal has surfaced.
• French fighters in the American Revolution

Royal Sendoff
Art Newspaper, June 3, 2019
For visiting heads of state, the queen shows off prime pieces from the Royal Collection. What awaited Donald Trump? A copy of the Declaration of Independence. Is there a message?

Bearing Witness
Northern Echo, June 21, 2019
A lost manuscript, with a woman’s eyewitness account of the English Civil War, has turned up in the Durham Cathedral archives. How it escaped notice all these years.

War of Words
New York Times, June 24, 2019
Nachman Blumental lost everything in the Holocaust. Later, he searched for meaning. What he found was the way the Nazis systematically changed meaning, word by word.

Comfort Food
Gastro Obscura, June 5, 2019
Concentration camps. Labor camps. POW camps. In some of the harshest places on earth, people scrounged scraps of paper and fabric, and wrote. What did they write? Recipes.

The Marks of Time
Hyperallergic, June 7, 2019
From wax tablets to illuminated psalters, Tennyson’s quill to BIC pens, writing runs through human history. A show at the British Library traces its path through time.

Cursive’s Long Tail
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette | WaPo, June 25, 2019
The National Archives has 15 billion pages of handwritten manuscripts, most in cursive. Who can read them? Fewer people every year. Calling “citizen archivists”!
• State mandate for loopy longhand

Archives Surprise
Inquirer.net, June 14, 2019
Historian Ambeth Ocampo went exploring in the Library of Congress and came up with some treasures — just not where he expected to find them. More adventures in the archives.
• Fifth graders and primary sources

Whitman Sampler: Three NY exhibitions celebrating his 200th
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Greetings from …E-postcards at the Newberry Library
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