I’m excited about this week’s historical highlights — lots of fun articles about books!
Wouldn’t it be fun to collect miniature books from all throughout history?
A rare painting by an Old Master recently sold at auction for over $2 million.
Wow — check out the library of the late fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld.
Did you know that an entire book could be woven out of silk?
This University of Oxford exhibit about translation sounds fascinating (includes a notebook in which a teenaged Tolkien experimented with inventing an alphabet).
Do you agree that “[w]ithout libraries we are less human and more profoundly alone”?
Learn a bit about Jerry Merryman, one of the inventors of the handheld calculator, in this obituary.
This would be an exciting find to make: “A 15th-century vellum manuscript of the writing of the revered Persian physician Ibn Sīna, or Avicenna, has been found being used to bind a later book, revealing for the first time that his seminal Canon of Medicine was translated into Irish.”
A short look back at the Dred Scott decision of March 6, 1857.
How much do you know about the history of Daylight Saving Time?
If you love lists as much as I do, you’ll be interested to see that OCLC has put out a list of the top 100 novels of all time based on data from libraries around the world. (I believe I’ve read 48 of them, some so long ago that I can’t quite remember).
Sadly, I’ve only read 17 of those books – but have others on my tbr pile for this year. Your 48 is impressive. [My Goodreads Challenge is 30+ a year.]