The DMMmap - The Digitized Medieval Manuscripts map

The DMMmap - The Digitized Medieval Manuscripts map

Direct link

A resource to hundreds of libraries with free online medieval manuscripts - each one has a link to the site.  There are filters for names and locations.

Surrealist journals from Argentina, Chile and Spain

Direct link

In Spanish.  Like too many library digitization projects the interface is clumsy and there's no download (unless it's well hidden) but this is still some nice material.  Wonder if anybody's written a history of self- and alternative publishing from pamphlets, broadsides, pirated editions up to little magazines and then zines?

The David W. Niven Collection of Early Jazz Legends, 1921-1991

The David W. Niven Collection of Early Jazz Legends, 1921-1991

Archive.org link

I've just started dipping into this and so far it's pretty astonishing.  Niven was a high school teacher and record collector who made tapes of what are basically narrated histories of particular jazz musicians.  They're sometimes quite detailed - Ellington runs to 90 tapes with an additional 7 for sidemen.  (Which may sound odd to non-jazz people but I have some CD collections of only Ellington sidemen and it's great stuff.)  This is very much a fan's project, one reason that somebody like Bud Freeman gets more tapes than Charlie Parker - a longer career sure but still.  

The Titanotheres of Ancient Wyoming, Dakota, and Nebraska

Henry Fairfield Osborn - The Titanotheres of Ancient Wyoming, Dakota, and Nebraska (1929)


Archive.org direct link (volume 1)
Archive.org direct link (volume 2)
Open Library main page

Do we ever really leave behind a love of dinosaurs?  And yes titanopheres weren't actually dinosaurs but they were very large prehistoric animals so our inner 8-year-olds won't make a distinction.  This book is more technical than most of us will want but is nicely illustrated and even in a brief look shows how much work goes into this.

Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857-1935) was an early figure in the development of paleontology - he named the Tyrannosaurus rex and the Velociraptor among others.  Some of his work apparently hasn't aged well since even his own biographer called him "a third-rate scientist".  He became president of the American Museum of Natural History.

More to come & Neglected Books blog

The blog hasn't gone anywhere - just a long break.  It will be back at the start of April at the latest (first two weeks of posts are ready to go).

The Neglected Books Page

In the meantime check out this blog which I think anybody coming here will like.  I had seen it years ago but didn't notice that it had grown so much since then.  He covers mostly fiction and at much greater length.  Plus most of this is fairly recent and still copyrighted so you'll have to hit libraries or used book dealers to read them.  (And I guess it's from doing my own blog that I consider things from the 1940s onward as "recent".)

He is already covering Dorothy Richardson who I had planned to post about as soon as I finished her first book.

There's a nice profile in The New Yorker.