This week, the Folger Shakespeare Library announced that it may have located an authentic signature by William Shakespeare in their collection. You might wonder how such a thing might have gone overlooked for so long....until you know that the Folger houses some 256,000 volumes of Renaissance works. There are millions of pages in these thousands…
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My grandparents had them. They lined the den in their modest Indiana home. In the garage, outdated sets were stacked neatly in boxes. Every year, salesmen came to the doors of homes and schools peddling their wares. But all that is over. Encyclopedia Brittanica has announced that they will no longer offer their product in…
Recently, Laura McKenna, reporter for the Atlantic, wrote about her frustrations in trying to find scholarly articles without the access afforded to people with university affiliations. If you do not possess a college identification card, the hundreds of thousands of full-text articles from databases like JSTOR are either very expensive or inaccessible (McKenna shelled out…
Read More "Free the Research! Make Academic Journals Accessible to All"
The masterful short story author Flannery O'Connor once gave a lecture at Wesleyan College. Afterwards, during a question and answer session, O'Connor recalls that one of the young teachers there...an earnest type, started asking the questions. “Miss O’Connor,” he said, “why was the Misfit’s hat black?” I said most countrymen in Georgia wore black hats.…
"Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people." ~ George Bernard Shaw. On September 6, the literary world lost a true pioneer. Michael S. Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, died of a heart attack in his home in Urbana, Illinois.…
Read More "Goodbye to a Modern Pioneer: Michael S. Hart, Project Gutenberg"
In the cut-throat world of lexicography... Wait... what? When you think of industries laying traps for potential predatory and purloining practices, it's unlikely you would assume the people who compile dictionaries are on the lookout for thieves. But they are. Just like any form of plagiarism, taking an idea that is not your own and…
Read More "Don’t Mess With the New Oxford American Dictionary"
Henry Clay Folger was a man with a mission. His goal was to obtain every possible copy of William Shakespeare's venerated "First Folio" in existence. Folger began his obsessive quest in 1893 and over the next 35 years, he acquired 82 of the manuscripts. The most recent sale of a Folio in 2001 went for…
Read More "The Fate of the Folios: A Tale of Intrigue at the Folger"
Recently, Rachel Walsh, an illustration student at the Cardiff School of Art and Design, was given the following project: "Explain something modern/internet based to someone who lived and died before 1900." Cardiff chose the Kindle and to explain it to Charles Dickens. She took forty books Dickens either wrote, were among his noted favorites, and…
