Turning numbers into pictures that tell important stories and reveal the meaning held within is an essential part of what it means to be a scientist. This is as true in today's era of genome sequencing and climate models as it was in the nineteenth century.

Beautiful Science, a new free exhbition at the British Library, explores how our understanding of ourselves and our planet has evolved alongside our ability to represent, graph and map the mass data of the time. From John Snow's plotting of the 1854 London cholera infections on a map to colourful depictions of the tree of life, discover how picturing scientific data provides new insight into our lives.

For a personal preview from Laurence Worms (Ash Rare Books) see the ABA Blog - or visit the British Library What's On website. 

20 February - 26 May 2014: Folio Society Gallery, British Library

Edinburgh Book Fair - 7th & 8th March 2014

The 2014 Edinburgh PBFA & ABA joint Book Fair is looming and marked in every bibliophile’s calendar we are sure. You can view the list of ABA Booksellers who will be exhibiting at this year's fair via this link. The Edinburgh Book Fair represents an important union between the two pre-eminent national bookseller associations and this two-day event provides an excellent opportunity to see and buy a wide selection of rare, antiquarian and secondhand books, manuscripts, ephemera and artwork from some of the country's leading bookdealers.

Venue: Radisson Blu Hotel, 80 High Street, Royal Mile, Edinburgh, EH1 1TH

Official Website

John Henry said to the captain, 
“A man ain’t nothin’ but a man, 
But before I let your algo beat me down, 
I’ll die with a pencil in my hand
Lord, Lord
I’ll die with a pencil in my hand”.

Back in September the issue of algorithmic pricing surfaced in one of the ABA email Bulletins. It came in response to a letter sent by a member to myself and the ABA office seeking an explanation for a strange phenomenon he had recently observed: out-of-print text books on sites like Amazon and AbeBooks were being listed at absurd prices, in some cases reaching into six figures.  He wondered if this might possibly be evidence of a new scam devised to fleece careless librarians who used automated ordering systems and may not be noticing the prices that they pay.  I suggested, instead, that the most likely explanation was that software, rather than human intelligence, was being used to price the books.

It was seeing one of our American colleagues recently describing them as “a group of bootlegged Thomas Pynchon chapbooks printed in the UK” that brought back to mind a delightful piece of original research carried out by Florina Kostulias for a London Rare Books School essay.  To set the record straight, here is a pared-down version of her findings. 

~~~~~ 

In Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Maas, starting with a pirated paperback ...

The March 2014 seminar in the book-collecting series organised jointly by the Institute of English Studies (London University) and the Rare Book Society will be given by Jim Hinck, bookseller, but also the founder and coder of vialibri.net, a website created to help bibliophiles find books the internet.

Make a note in your diary: 6pm on Tuesday 11 March 2014 – Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU. All are welcome.

The seminars are aimed at a broad audience including book-collectors, book-dealers, historians of all kinds, librarians, indeed at anyone with an interest in collecting any sort of text from the sixth-former to the retired professor. The atmosphere will be informal, as will the presentations. They are held in the University of London’s Senate House and run from 6.00 to 7.30 pm on the second Tuesday of each month.

41st ILAB Congress and 25th International Antiquarian Book Fair

SLAM and ILAB are proud and pleased to announce that the 41st ILAB Congress will run in Paris from the 13th to 16th April, 2014, to coincide with the 100th anniversary of SLAM. The Paris Congress will immediately follow the International Antiquarian Book Fair at the Grand Palais scheduled from 10th to 13th of April 2014.

The very special Congress Program will certainly attract numerous visitors from all over the world who are looking forward to meeting new colleagues and welcoming old friends.

Register Now 

The British Library will be hosting the largest exhibition of comics ever held in the UK, opening on 2 May and running until 19 August 2014.

Comic Unmasked: Art and Anarchy will feature more than 200 comic books from 1825 to the modern day, including some of the field's biggest names: Neil Gaiman, Kick-Ass writer Mark Millar and Batman writer Grant Morrison. Also included in the exhibition is Dave Gibbons' 1970s work focusing on the obscenity trial of the magazine Nasty Tales, charged over its graphic content. 

The Library's 2014 season will later feature an exhibition of Gothic literature and the archives of Suburbia author Hanif Kureishi.

Read More: http://www.bl.uk/whatson/exhibitions/comics-unmasked/

Help us unlock one of the world's most important and beautiful map collections.

King George III’s personal map and views collection contains over 1,000 maps and views of London. Our challenge is to raise £10,000 so we can start to catalogue, conserve and create digital access. This means we will be able to share the collection with scholars, researchers or anyone passionate about maps.

A series of five-day, intensive courses on a variety of book-related subjects. The courses are taught in small groups by internationally renowned scholars using the unrivalled library and museum resources of London, including the British Museum, the British Library, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and Senate House Library. Each course consists of thirteen seminars amounting in all to twenty hours of teaching time spread between Monday lunchtime and Friday afternoon. All courses stress the materiality of the book so you can expect to have close encounters with remarkable books and other artefacts from some of the world's greatest collections.

Organised by the Institute of English Studies in the University of London at Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU. 

Website: http://www.senatehouselibrary.ac.uk/

Learn about the antiquarian book trade from the best booksellers in the country.

About Y.A.B.S.

York Antiquarian Book Seminar provides an opportunity for leading specialists to share their expertise and experience with booksellers, librarians and collectors in a comprehensive survey of the out-of-print, antiquarian, rare and used book markets. Basic procedures and problems are discussed both formally and informally through a series of lectures, discussions, demonstrations and practical hands-on workshops with emphasis on cataloguing, pricing, and bookselling in the electronic age.

The seminar is designed for people of all levels of expertise, from beginners to those with years of experience who want to hone their skills in this rapidly changing field.

Paranoid ideologues have burned books and records throughout human history to try to squelch dissenting visions that they view as heretical, and to anyone who worships the great God Economy monotheistically, environmental science is heresy."

Post Media News has obtained a document stamped "SECRET" which exposes the closure or destruction of more than half a dozen world famous science libraries and countless scientific documents that they contain. The destruction and burning of documents has little if anything to do with digitizing the books and documents for cost savings as claimed by the Harper government.

by Pakalolo for The Daily Kos 

1. 
It has been a busy winter for talking about rare book crime, mostly thanks to one man: Massimo De Caro. The dismantling of his short-livedtheft empire has been fodder for news outlets the world over, while the story of his excellent forgery of a Galileo book was just the subject of a long New Yorker piece. Separately, the United States was recently treated to its own rare book news-making event, though not of the illicit sort: the crown jewel of American printing, the Bay Psalm Book, earned some $14 million at a November auction. This all put me in the mind of an earlier tale that combined forgery, theft, and the earliest American imprint in one stranger-than-fiction saga.

by Travis McDade for The Millions