Gone fishing: the Hemingway edition
A recently concluded auction at Nate D. Sanders Auctions saw the sale of 1935 letter penned by Ernest Hemingway describing the vicious battle for a blue marlin at sea that… Read more »
These marginalia in a sixteenth-century Hamlet may be Shakespeare’s own
“I saw these faint marks, and my eyes popped out of my head,” Shakespeare scholar John Casson told Alison Flood at the Guardian. Casson was perusing the British Library’s copy of… Read more »
Back to the future: A DIY history of nerd-strife in the University of Iowa’s Helevin Collection
Librarians, archivists, and garden-variety nerds are working together to digitize the trove of science fiction “pulps, fanzines, fan convention materials, books, and art” in the University of Iowa Library’s Helevin… Read more »
CNN’s Jake Tapper moonlights as a cartoonist for MAD
CNN anchor Jake Tapper has been getting a lot of attention recently for his coverage of the Trump administration. (He’s also been called “fake news” more times than can be… Read more »
Oliver Sacks wrote to understand, describe, explain, share, recollect, relate, narrate, define, categorize, generalize, seduce, evoke, and “fix” his thoughts in words, his extensive notes reveal
They called me Inky as a boy, and I still seem to get as ink stained as I did seventy years ago. I started keeping journals when I was fourteen… Read more »
Philip Roth is donating his private book collection to the Newark Public Library
Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award–winning author Philip Roth is donating his collection of 4,000 books to Newark Public Library, the writer’s “other home” while he was a student at… Read more »
Is the Voynich Manuscript just high-concept bullshit?
Ah, the Voynich manuscript! It’s old, it’s weird, and nobody knows who wrote it or what it means. Every few years somebody claims to have made a breakthrough, but it still continues to baffle linguists and… Read more »
Recycling has been cool since at least the fifteenth century
When Johannes Gutenberg emerged on the scene of fifteenth-century Europe with the invention for which he is remembered, the printing press (or, more exactly, movable type), two things happened: the manuscript copying that had… Read more »
Coloring outside the lines: Because adult doesn’t have to mean boring…
Adult coloring books have been a massive phenomenon over the last few years, causing grown-ups to reach for their crayons and carefully color with a vengeance, all in the name… Read more »
Poultry in margin: how a chicken wearing trousers stormed the internet