The penultimate tragedy for completist collectors

The New York Post:

LOS ANGELES — Mystery writer Sue Grafton has died in Santa Barbara, California. She was 77. 

Her daughter, Jamie Clark, posted news of her mother’s death on Grafton’s web page Friday. She says her mother passed away Thursday night after a two-year battle with cancer and was surrounded by family, including Grafton’s husband, Steve. 

Grafton was the author of the so-called Kinsey Millhone Alphabet Series in which each book title begins with a letter from the alphabet. The last was “Y is for Yesterday.” 

Her daughter concluded her posting by saying, “the alphabet now ends at Y.”

BookWeek: the December 28, 2017 annotated script

A Hebrew Bible expected to sell for at least $3m was snatched from the bids of Sotheby’s bidders last week by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Hailing from the renowned collection of Jaqui E. Safra, the illuminated Bible was produced in Castile during the first half of the 14th century and stands as a remarkable testament to the cross-cultural influences in the Golden Age of medieval Spain.

This distinguished illuminated Hebrew Bible is an exceptionally important exemplar of medieval book arts and literary culture. The tradition of Hebrew Bible production which flourished in Castile beginning in the 1230s, began to decline due to the deteriorating political and economic situation of Spanish Jewry, persecutions connected with the Black Plague of 1348-1349, and the anti-Jewish riots of 1391. Thus, only three illuminated Hebrew Bibles from 14th-century Castile have survived, making the present manuscript incredibly unique. The high quality of its parchment, the generous quantity of its carpet pages, and the lavishness of their design, as well as the formal repertoire of the micrographic decoration, make this volume an exceptional witness to the glorious tradition of medieval Hebrew manuscript illumination.

The tradition of illuminated Hebrew Bibles first began to flourish during the reign of Ferdinand III (1217–1252) and continued until the expulsions of the Jews from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1496-1497. While the production of these Bibles can be ascribed to different artistic schools located in Castile, Navarre, Catalonia and Portugal, the present manuscript’s lavish decoration, both painted and micrographic (an embellishment whereby a specialized scribe fashions minute script into ornamental patterns) suggest that it was produced in Castile during the first half of the 14th-century.

When the first embellished Hebrew Bibles began to appear in Castile during the early 13th-century, their patterns of decoration were based almost exclusively on an Islamic artistic repertoire, as seen in the present volume with its geometrically planned micrographic carpet pages at the end of the codex and micrographic frames with interlaced designs placed around significant biblical texts. Some of these patterns share commonalities in format and composition with illuminations in Qur’ans, as well as tooled patterns in book bindings that were produced in Spain by Muslim, Jewish, and Christian craftsmen into the 16th-century. It was only gradually– during the 14th -century– that the adornment of Hebrew Bibles in Spain began to reflect some of the motifs common in Gothic art, which was dominant in Iberian Christian culture of the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries. The Bible’s decoration notably reflects these artistic interactions among the three coexisting religions, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, a phenomenon referred to as convivencia.

Police are appealing for help in locating some rare books which were stolen during a theft which occurred in Norwich around on Tuesday 5th December.

It happened around 4.30pm when a delivery driver stopped at an address in Aylesbury Close in the city.

The driver left the vehicle and a male, described as being white, aged between 25 and 35 years-old, then stole the white Ford Transit van, with the number plate of YE60 TTZ, and drove off.

The books are a set of Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary dating back from the 1830s with an unusual floral design on the covers. They were recently purchased at auction and were en-route to their new owner when they were stolen.     

PC Jamie Willetts said "These books may be unique and not the sort of thing you see every day. The owner is keen to get them back so I would ask people, especially those working in specialist bookshops, to be vigilant in case they are offered for sale.”

Anyone with information should contact PC Jamie Willetts at Hurricane Way Police Station on 101.

Woman pleads guilty in fatal shooting of boyfriend in failed YouTube stunt

HALSTAD, Minn. — A Minnesota woman has pleaded guilty to fatally shooting her boyfriend in a videotaped stunt they planned to post on YouTube.

The Star Tribune reports that 20-year-old Monalisa Perez pleaded guilty last week to second-degree manslaughter in the June death of 22-year-old Pedro Ruiz III.

Court records say Perez told investigators that Ruiz wanted to make a video of her shooting a bullet into a book he was holding against his chest.

Perez says she fired from about a foot away. Ruiz died from a single gunshot wound to the chest.

he criminal complaint said Ruiz had been inspired to do a stunt that would help make their online following grow. In a tweet sent by Perez on June 26, she said the "dangerous" plan was "HIS idea not MINE."

The couple set up a GoPro camera on the back of a car and put another camera on a nearby ladder, police said. Once they were filming, Perez picked up the Desert Eagle .50 caliber handgun and fired into the book.

Perez then called 911 to report that she had accidentally shot Ruiz, according to court documents. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

Ruiz had practiced shooting books and showed off one that a bullet did not penetrate in order to convince Perez, authorities said.

According to the YouTube videos the couple made together, they have a 3-year-old daughter and Perez is pregnant with their second.

Perez's plea agreement calls for her to serve six months in jail and 10 years' supervised probation. She'll be sentenced in February.

Repeated inquiries to determine the title of the fatal book- some accounts say it was a dictionary, others an encyclopedia- have been ignored by local authorities.

-James Patterson, one of the world’s wealthiest authors, has announced his third annual Christmas Bonuses for bookstore employees in America. Begun in 2015 with $250,000, this year Patterson awarded $350,000 to over three hundred American bookstore workers, including these from the catchment for the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair:

Josh Niesse Underground Books Carrollton, GA

Megan Bell Underground Books Carrollton, GA

A full list is here.

-Dan Brown’s recent act of philanthropy, a donation of €300,000 to Amsterdam’s Ritman Library, also known as the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica House of Living Books, will enable the Ritman to digitize thousands of “pre-1900 texts on alchemy, astrology, magic, and theosophy,” reports Thu-Huong Ha at Quartz, including the Corpus Hermeticum (1472), “the source work on Hermetic wisdom”; Giordano Bruno’s Spaccio de la bestia trionfante (1584); and “the first printed version of the tree of life (1516): A graphic representation of the sefirot, the 10 virtues of God according to the Kabbalah.”

Brown, the Ritman notes, “is a great admirer of the library and visited on several occasions while writing his novels The Lost Symbol and Inferno.” Now he's giving back. Some of the revenue generated by his bestselling novels, along with a €15,000 contribution from the Dutch Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds, will allow the library’s core collection, “some 3,500 ancient books,” to come online soon in an archive called “Hermetically Open.”

-Electric Lit has a thoughtful- and thought-provoking- roundup of the literary year in 2017. It’s worth a read.

BookWeek is a weekly live news program on the BookWeek Facebook page. It runs live, every Thursday, at noon, EST.

#BookWeek #Money #Crime #Lust #First Editions

Book Week's Christmas Week script, annotated, is up!

Hello. Today is December 21, 2017, and this is BookWeek: money, crime, lust and first editions. I’m Lin Thompson, reporting from Charlotte.

Auction News

The Irish Times: Tuesday (December 12th) Sotheby’s, London. English Literature, History, Children’s Books & Illustrations auction...a first edition copy of The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde £27,500 (£6,000-£8,000). A copy of the first edition of Ulysses by James Joyce estimated at £150,000-£250,000 failed to sell.

Hyperallergic: The Guardian reports that government officials declared the original manuscript a national treasure and banned its export from France, just as it was about to go up on the block at the Aguttes auction house. The manuscript was part of a cache of historic documents owned by the French company Aristophil, which had amassed a massive collection of French literary and historical manuscripts before police identified it as a pyramid scheme two years ago and arrested its owner, Gérard Lhéritier, who was known for selling rare books at stupendous profits.

As an example of the Marquis’ doctrine of absolute freedom, The 120 Days of Sodom, more than two centuries later, retains all its powers of shock, titillation, horror, and wit. Also declared a national treasure and pulled from the auction was André Breton’s “Surrealist Manifesto.”

One imagines Breton would be pleased. A great admirer of the Marquis, he praised him effusively throughout his life, writing in the “Second Surrealist Manifesto” of the “impeccable integrity of Sade’s life and thought, and the heroic need that was his to create an order of things which was not …dependent on everything which had come before him.”

So vast was the Aristophil collection, Reuters reports, that its disposition has to be controlled in order to avoid a panic: “The entire collection is now being liquidated, a process that is expected to take six years spread over more than 200 auctions, partly to avoid saturating the market and suppressing prices.”

De Sade’s manuscript was written on 33 pieces of scroll while he was imprisoned in 1785.

“It’s a book written on a 12-metre (yard) long roll which if it’s rolled up tightly can be hidden in your hand,” said Claude Aguttes, the chief auctioneer. “Sade used to hide it every night behind a stone in the Bastille.”

Sade wrote the controversial work about four rich libertines in search of the ultimate form of sexual gratification on a roll made from bits of parchment he had smuggled into his cell in the Bastille.

When the Paris prison was stormed at the beginning of the French revolution on 14 July 1789, the famously philandering aristocrat was freed, but he was swept out by the mob without his manuscript.

Sade believed it had been lost to the looters and wept “tears of blood” over it, but the unfinished manuscript turned up decades later.

Even so, the book remained unpublished for more than a century and was banned in Britain until the 1950s. It was expected to sell for between 4 million and 6 million euros ($4.75-$7.10 million).

Art Daily: This book of hours (prayer book), a manuscript bound in gold and precious stones, is an unparalleled treasure of French precious metalwork. It was presented by King François I to his niece Jeanne d’Albret, who was raised under his guardianship at the French court. Small prayers books were everyday objects, but this one is remarkably elaborate. Its later owners included King Henri IV and Cardinal Mazarin.

King François I’s Book of Hours is a unique vestige of the treasures of the House of Valois, dispersed in their entirety over the centuries. The book became the property of collectors in England in the early 18th century; its acquisition by the Louvre, for a total of around 10 million euros, would bring this Renaissance masterpiece back to France.

Thanks to the exceptional generosity of LVMH Moët Hennessy— Louis Vuitton, half of the required sum has already been obtained. On October 15, the Musée du Louvre launched a major crowdfunding campaign aimed at individuals and companies in the hope of raising 1 million euros before February 15.

The book of hours is presented within the framework of the exhibition François I and Dutch Art (October 18, 2017–January 15, 2018).

This unique masterpiece, listed as a French National Treasure, has been put up for sale by its London owner. In order to add it to the French national collections, the Louvre must raise 8 million pounds (about 10 million euros).

The museum is therefore appealing to public generosity with a new Become a Patron! crowdfunding campaign intended to raise 1 million euros before February 15, 2018.

The collections of museums both in France and abroad have no equivalent of King François I’s Book of Hours. Apart from the Benvenuto Cellini’s salt cellar in Vienna, it is the only piece of precious metalwork directly associated with this king and is, to date, the only known precious French book binding from the reigns of François I and the last Valois kings.

This tiny handwritten prayer book (8.5 x 6.5 cm) is decorated with sixteen full-page painted illustrations and numerous illuminated initials. It can be dated thanks to the date 1532 that appears in its ornamentation. With its enameled gold binding, embellished with precious stones and two large, intaglio-engraved, oval carnelian plaques, it is also a monument to the jeweler’s art.

Fine Books & Collections:

“I don’t think of myself as a completist, although I certainly have many thousands of Doyle things,” said collector Dan Posnansky in Nick Basbanes’ book hunting guide, Among the Gently Mad. Still, Posnansky spent over sixty years sleuthing out book stores and estate sales in search of materials relating to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) and his literary detective, Sherlock Holmes. By his own account, Posnansky estimated he was in possession of roughy ten thousand volumes of all things Sherlockian.

On December 19, most of that collection is heading to auction at Calabasas-based Profiles in History and is billed as the largest single Sherlock Holmes collection to go to market. Photographs, letters, pamphlets, advertisements, commemorative objects and more will all be available at the no-reserve sale.

Perhaps the most exciting high points includes the collection of pirated editions from the late 19th century--books printed in the United States that flouted nascent and inconsistent copyright laws. At the time, American copyright stretched for 28 years with possible renewal for another 28, while English copyright extended for the life of the author plus fifty years. This loophole placed Doyle’s work in the American public domain, meaning publishers could print his books without paying him any royalties. Over the course of his collecting career, Posnansky identified no less than one hundred publishing pirateers, mostly based in New York and Chicago, and his quest yielded a trove of over 1,200 pirate editions.

Of those pirated editions, one stands out: a signed copy of The Sign of the Four. This particular volume was owned by Eugene Field, a Chicago poet, bibliophile, and surprisingly, an outspoken critic of pirated editions. Yet, during Doyle’s 1894 visit to Chicago, Field had the chutzpah to present his own pirated book to the author for an inscription. Recognizing the unauthorized volume for what it was, Doyle nevertheless obliged with an abrasive ditty:

This bloody pirate stole my sloop
And holds her in his wicked ward.
Lord send that walking on my poop
I see him kick at my main-yard.

BBC News: Hundreds of books, once owned by Watership Down author Richard Adams, have been sold for more than £250,000.

Among them were first editions of work by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and George Eliot, a 1638 Bible and a Shakespeare Second Folio.

About 1,500 books were sold on behalf of the writer's family, at Dominic Winter Auctions in Cirencester.

Adams, who was born in 1920, in Newbury, Berkshire, died last Christmas Eve aged 96.

The complete set of Austen first editions fetched £78,870, including buyer's fees.

It was bought by an anonymous private buyer from southern England, the auctioneers said.

Shakespeare's Second Folio sold for £47,800, a first edition Samuel Johnson dictionary made £10,994, and the 1638 Bible, bound for King Charles II, made £5,019.

Also going under the hammer were Thomas Hardy and Anthony Trollope first editions, a signed copy of Laurie Lee's Cider with Rosie, and a signed copy of William Golding's Lord of the Flies, which went for £9,560.

The books were divided into 134 lots.

Auctioneer Nathan Winter described the sale as "incredible".

"The family were there to see it go. I think they were thoroughly satisfied," he said.

He said some of the texts had fetched high prices due to them being "antiquarian rarities".

"Richard Adams, when he came into proceeds from his own books, had the means to buy rare titles and became quite a bibliophile. They always were, and are still, rare.

"Also, with the added association with his own ownership, of a famous writer, something intangible but important is added to the value, and that is reflected in the prices we got."

New publications:

Apollo: Previously, when you typed ‘Chippendale’ into an art-historical database, you would have received basic information, which may or may not have been entirely correct. Now there is a new resource, British and Irish Furniture Makers Online just launched and available to all online, which will not only tell you about Thomas Chippendale, but which will give you access to all his connections in the furniture trade, to his patrons, to the influence he had on furniture design, and to his materials and workshop practice.

The entry on Chippendale himself dates back to 1986, and was written by Christopher Gilbert, whose two-volume study of the great cabinet-maker was published in 1978. Scholarship has moved on considerably since then, and the aim of the new database is to build the world’s most authoritative and comprehensive database on its subject. Recent publications such as Judith Goodison’s book on the elder Chippendale’s son and associate, The Life and Work of Thomas Chippendale Junior (Philip Wilson Publishers), will inspire new entries online.

What is the background to this new endeavour? In September 2016, the Furniture History Society, which was founded in 1964 to promote the international study of furniture and historic interiors (and of which I am the current chairman), began collaborating with the University of London’s Institute of Historical Research to produce a freely accessible online resource – the initial phase of which is now live.

The next challenge is to develop and expand the database, so that BIFMO will become the world’s first port of call for the history of British and Irish furniture. Its foundation is the society’s 1,000-page Dictionary of English Furniture Makers 1660–1840 (1986), which was the product of numerous volunteer contributors under the editorial direction of the late Geoffrey Beard and Christopher Gilbert. The Dictionary remains the bible for the study of the English furniture trade, but it requires revision and the incorporation of both published and unpublished material, as well as new research to locate and document undiscovered furniture makers and expand the date range from before 1660  to the present day.

Variety reports an American icon of the corporatization of American music has been saved by another corporation.

Penske Media Corporation has acquired a controlling interest in Wenner Media, parent company of the iconic magazine Rolling Stone, the company announced Wednesday.

PMC will invest in Wenner Media at a valuation just over $100 million, according to sources close to the transaction. BandLab, a Singapore-based company that acquired a 49% share of the magazine, will retain its stake.

Jann Wenner, who co-founded Rolling Stone in 1967 as a countercultural voice that went on to transcend the world of rock ‘n’ roll, will remain with Rolling Stone as editorial director, continuing to guide strategy for the brand.

As part of the deal, Wenner Media will retain “majority control and editorial oversight” of Rolling Stone, according to the press release.

“We have such a unique and special product in Rolling Stone, and we are excited to build on its strong foundation and invest in its future through this partnership,” said Gus Wenner, who will stay on as well as president/COO of Wenner Media.

The investment has been finalized and the transition to the Penske Media platform is expected to occur over the next six months.

But the magazine brand has faced challenges in recent years as Wenner Media was overladen with debt after buying back a stake in Us Weekly for $300 million in 2006. That brand has since been sold off, as well as other Wenner titles including Men’s Journal, paving the way for the Wenner family and PMC to reinvest in the brand.

PMC will look to revitalize everything from Rolling Stone’s digital operations to its event business. The Wenner stake represents the largest acquisition yet for PMC founder and CEO Jay Penske, who has rapidly grown a portfolio in recent years that includes Robb Report, Conde Nast’s Fairchild Fashion Media unit (the parent company of business-to-business brands including Women’s Wear Daily) and Indiewire. PMC is the parent company of Variety, which Penske acquired in 2012.

The purchase continues PMC’s expansion in the entertainment content and news businesses. Rolling Stone will continue to be based in New York, but is expected to move out of its current home to PMC’s Manhattan headquarters sometime next year. The story is not yet up on Rolling Stone’s own page.

That’s this week’s Book Week. I’ll be back next week, live at noon, for another edition, produced with the tolerance of the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair. The next Fair is April 20-22 in St Petersburg. An annotated, illustrated script is up on the BookWeek Facebook page.

You can see me later today on the Henry Bemis Books page for Gallimaufry, a weekly-ish look at books, authors and other arts; and tomorrow for LGBookT, the Friday look at lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender authors and collecting as we enter Year 2 of our tribe’s current siege.

I welcome your comments, tips, and corrections. All of our programs are showing robust growth, which you make possible. As Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams, “I cannot live without books.”

British editor and writer Diana Athill is 100 years old today!

Book Week, annotated: the script for December 14, 2017

Hello. It’s December 14, 2017. I’m Lin Thompson, and this is Book Week- Money. Crime. Lust. And First Editions, coming to you from our new Facebook home, the Book Week page. We’ve already welcomed 145 friends to the page, and we’d love to add you as a Friend of Book Week, too!

Let’s crack open the news:

(The bees and balloon move around as you read)

Winnie the Pooh gets a right celebration at a 90th birthday show opening this week at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and running through April. A report in The Guardian says, “The exhibition will open this week featuring close to a century’s worth of Winnie-the-Pooh merchandise, including toys, books of the wisdom of Pooh on subjects as arcane as Taoism and management theory, a Russian bear created by a designer who had clearly never seen the original, and a hand-painted Christopher Robin and Friends china tea set presented to the baby Princess Elizabeth in 1926 – either she did not like it and never played with it, or more probably was just a very careful child.

“The walls of the exhibition, the most comprehensive on some of the best-loved children’s books of all time, are lined with scores of ink and pencil drawings of the characters and settings by EH Shepard.”

In a fascinating aside, the show notes that “Although another illustrator worked on the first Winnie-the-Pooh story – a Christmas special printed by a newspaper in 1925 – Bilclough said that after the first book Milne knew he had the perfect partner in Shepard. He negotiated a 20% share of the royalties for Shepard, instead of the flat fee more common for illustrators.”

“His first book illustrating AA Milne’s deceptively simple stories about his son and his toys was published in 1926. Though the author had long since moved on to other subjects before his death in 1956, and the real Christopher Robin had come to loathe the books and worldwide fame that made him an involuntary celebrity, Shepard continued to draw the small inhabitants of Hundred Acre Wood, giving away scores of drawings and working on hand-coloured versions of the illustrations to within months of his death in 1976, aged 96.”

Art Daily.com reports,

“The Gala & Salvador Dali Foundation has announced the online publishing of the fifth and last section of the Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings by Salvador Dalí, presenting a new design. A catalogue that represents 17 years of intensive research and analysis.

“The catalogue encompasses the years from 1965 until his last year of production, 1983. It includes 233 paintings. The total amount of catalogued paintings is 1000.

One of the world’s largest collections of literary works, The Harry Ransom Center in the University of Texas, has announced a new online tool for scholars.

“More than 50,000 images in the Ransom Center’s digital collections portal are now available via the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF). IIIF offers new ways to view, compare and engage with images.

“IIIF (pronounced “triple eye eff”) is an international collaborative effort across archives, libraries, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions to define standards for describing and delivering images across the web.

“The Center’s adoption of IIIF means that its images and descriptive metadata are now instantly shareable with other IIIF-enabled digital image collections such as the British Library, the Getty Museum, and the Yale Center for British Art, to name just a few.

“The interoperability inherent to IIIF allows for digital image repositories to share image content across (formerly) incompatible or proprietary systems. This facilitates the viewing and study of hundreds of thousands of books, manuscripts, works of art, and other cultural heritage materials from around the world within a single, familiar interface.

“In other words, researchers can bring together and examine materials virtually that are held by institutions that are often geographically remote from one another.

“Along with IIIF, the Center has implemented the Mirador image viewer for the display of IIIF image resources. You can use Mirador to study a single image or compare multiple images side-by-side, including those from other IIIF-enabled institutions, within a single browser window. You can also view metadata, zoom deeply into an image, rotate images, or change contrast and brightness.

“You have two options to view Ransom Center collection materials in Mirador. The IIIF icon appears on every digital collection landing page and the IIIF icon appears alongside every digitized image.

“Ransom Center Curator of Art Tracy Bonfitto appreciates that Mirador allows users to zoom in closely to get a better sense for a work’s details, medium, and process, and to compare images from different institutions.

“Ransom Center Pforzheimer Curator of Early Books and Manuscripts Aaron Pratt says that as more institutions digitize their copies and make them available via IIIF, “it will be possible for textual editors to compare even more copies simultaneously in Mirador, greatly facilitating what has historically been difficult—and tedious—work.”

In other media news, the famous Brattle Bookshop in Vermont has launched a new series of iTunes podcasts about books titled Brattlecasts.

From Open Culture, news that The University of Edinburgh and Napier University have teamed up to create Litlong, a website and mobile app that lets you explore Edinburgh and its rich literary tradition:

“From Sir Walter Scott to Dame Muriel Spark, Ian Rankin and many others, the city of Edinburgh has inspired countless writers over the centuries.

“Now students, visitors and readers around the world will be able to explore the capital’s literary highlights via a free interactive app containing a staggering 50,000 book excerpts.

“The app guides users to 1,600 locations in the city made famous by writers from Robert Louis Stevenson to Irvine Welsh, then highlights what they wrote about these parts of the city.

“The resource, called LitLong, has excerpts from classic and contemporary texts so users can experience the Unesco City of Literature’s attractions.

“Made with "natural language processing technology informed by literary scholars’ input," Litlong draws on digital collections from across the world, including the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, and Project Gutenberg.

From the criminal docket, Willamette Week in Oregon reports on a novel defense to three murder charges against a man who lost it on a light-rail train last spring:

“Call it the Comic Book Defense.

“A psychiatric evaluation of MAX train killer Jeremy Christian of behalf of his defense team pushes back on the description of Christian as a white supremacist—instead painting a portrait a conspiracy theorist with few social skills, who hoarded comic books and got a thrill out of blurting politically and racially offensive statements.

“The evaluation was uncovered by the Portland Tribune. In it, Seattle psychologist Mark Cunningham argues that Christian was emotionally crippled by eight years in prison, and reverted to prison-yard "fight or flight" rules when three men confronted him on the train.

“He told the psychologist that he was "on autopilot" during the attack, and when he watched the video of the incident he was surprised to see that the events did not unfold how he remembered them.

“Cunningham recorded Christian's memory of the attack: "Mr. Christian recalled that he was barely conscious of his actions until he heard people yelling: 'He's stabbing them! He's killing them!' He recalled then realizing that there was no immediate threat – 'snapping out of a fight or flight response.'"

“The evaluation suggests the clearest picture yet of the defense team's strategy to avoid the death penalty in Christian's trial. Cunningham leaves a formal diagnosis pending, but suggests that Christian does suffer from some level of socialization disorder and a hoarding disorder.

"In many important respects, he did not 'grow up,'" writes Cunningham. "Consistent with this observation, one of his female friends characterized that Mr. Christian was like a 'big kid'—still focused on 'comic books and superheroes.'"

“In fact, writes Cunningham, one of the biggest stresses facing Christian the day of the May 26 attacks was his mother's plan to remove his 15,000 comic books from her house.”

Since a 2016 coup against the dictator of Turkey, his government has discovered over 150,000 citizens were in on it and managed to keep it a secret; since then, the nation’s courts, schools, newspapers and media have been depopulated and a prison building boom launched.

Now locked hand in hand with terrorist attack fears, the coup plotters campaign has opened a new front, Deutsche Welle reports:

“Following the coup attempt, a state of emergency was declared in Turkey. According to Turkish publishers, a total of 30 publishing houses have since been closed by decree, while more than 670 books have been confiscated for allegedly serving as "propaganda of a terror organization."

“Another 135,000 books have been banned from public libraries on the same or similar grounds. Some works by Louis Althusser, Server Tanilli and Nazım Hikmet have even been considered as evidence for criminal actions. Baruch Spinoza, one of the most renowned philosophers of the 17th century, as well as 20th century French writer and philosopher Albert Camus, have been accused of having been members of terror organizations. A farmer was arrested for owning their works, even though he himself is illiterate.

“According to numerous advocates, these actions violate the freedom of expression protected by the country's constitution, in addition to limiting freedom of information. But it's not just courts making the life of authors difficult. A few years ago, critic Ihsan Eliacik was verbally and physically threatened to such an extent that he was unable to attend a book fair. A similar situation occurred during the recent International Istanbul Book Fair, which ended on Sunday, when author Sabahattin Onkibar was attacked by a group of 10 aggressors as he signed his books.”

The Texas prison system, long faulted as a book censor, is back in the news as Israel’s consul general for the southwestern US, Gilead Katz, has asked why Mein Kampf is NOT on the list of over 15,000 titles felons cannot read:

The Texas Tribune writes:

Katz hadn’t even arrived at his Houston office last week when, scanning the headlines in Israeli media, he learned that Adolf Hitler’s infamous manifesto Mein Kampf is permitted in Texas prisons. Meanwhile, a slate of uncontroversial classics — including titles like Where’s Waldo? Santa Spectacular and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Color Purple — are among the books banned in Texas lockups.

“I thought, ‘I have to do something,’” Katz said.

On Tuesday, he penned a letter to Texas Board of Criminal Justice Chairman Dale Wainwright expressing his deep concern.

“We feel it is inappropriate to include a book from such [a] notorious leader of one of the most murderous regimes in history,” Katz wrote.

He hasn't yet heard back. Jason Clark, the Department of Criminal Justice's deputy chief of staff, would not comment on the letter Wednesday, noting only that "offenders have access to thousands of publications."

Texas' policies on prison reading have long been criticized as arbitrary, even bordering on censorship. When a list of the prison system's banned books was released last month, Texas free speech and criminal justice advocates called out the department for its seemingly subjective decisions.

Books may be banned from Texas prisons for containing certain sexual content, information about the manufacturing of various weapons or material that could be used to execute a criminal scheme, among other reasons.

Clark told The Dallas Morning News last month that "Mein Kampf is on the approved list because it does not violate our rules."

Mein Kampf, which translates to “my struggle,” was written while Hitler himself was in prison and forecasts the murderous dictator’s plans for the Holocaust. The manifesto’s place in public dialogue has long been disputed. Along with a pair of books authored by former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, it is one of the most controversial titles allowed in Texas prisons.

Katz said that although the policy governs Texas inmates, it is "very, very disturbing" to Israelis.

“Letting [prison inmates] read Mein Kampf is not moral. It’s just not moral,” Katz told the Tribune on Wednesday.

Katz said he hopes to meet with Wainwright to discuss a potential policy change, but isn’t sure what steps he’ll take beyond that.

See a full list of banned books in The Dallas Morning News.

Next week: The 18thC author Jeremy Bentham plans a trip to New York. Who paid $450m for that Leonardo has emerged. And The Louvre’s campaign to acquire King Francis I’s prayer book.

That’s this week’s Book Week. Join us again next Thursday at noon for this live look at the gentle madness of books and collecting.

And join us all through the week for news of the world or rare and collectible books at our new Book Week Facebook page.

Our program is associated with the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair, just 125 days from today, starting April 20 in St Petersburg, Florida at the fabulous Art Deco Coliseum.

Join us Saturday on the Rare Book Cafe page, live, at 2.30 eastern time, for the Book Fair’s show, Rare Book Cafe. It’s our visit with Sherif Afifi, head of book conservation at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt.

I’ll see you next week. Till then, as author P.J. O’Rourke reminds us, "Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it."