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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.
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.
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.
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."
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