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Prince Charles has just commissioned a rare book about botanicals but only 150 copies will be made The Prince of Wales will sign each book individually

Source: Country Living Press Release

To coincide with Romania’s centennial anniversary, the talented creatives visited the country for two weeks to observe the wild flowers and diverse countryside that’s currently under threat from changes in farming practice. The focus was on the rare and precious flora of Transylvania.

The hand-bound, limited-edition book will be published in two volumes. But the book is a rare gem as only 150 copies will be made, making the tome a little out of most people’s price range – both volumes together will cost a whopping £12,950.

But the book is set to be a real treasure for fans of the royal family as Prince Charles will sign each book individually. There will also be a preface written by the royal.

A lot of work has gone into the book, taking seven years to complete. Its creation was led by Helen Allen FLS, artist and Principal of The Chelsea School of Botanical Art based at The Chelsea Physic Garden. Text within the volumes consists of expert commentary about the specific plants.

The beautiful hand-marbled cover of the book was created by artist Jemma Lewis, while the binding is made from dark green chieftain goat skin leather. The internal pages are made with specialist paper.

The book is published in association with The Prince of Wales’s Charitable Foundation and The Romanian Cultural Institute. Royalties from the sale will be donated to The Prince of Wales's Charitable Foundation.

An exhibition of the original watercolour paintings from the book will be shown at the Romanian Cultural Institute in Belgrave Square, London, from 21st May until 12th June 2018.

The Transylvania Florilegium (Volume I publication date 3rd July 2018/Volume II publication date May 2019).

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Unique J.K. Rowling book sold at auction for 470 thousand dollars

Source: PressTV

Unique J.K. Rowling book sold at auction

A rare edition of a book written by the author of the Harry Potter saga has sold for nearly 470 thousand dollars.

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Irish Jesuits to dispose of rare book collection worth €2m

Source: The Irish Times
By: Michael Parsons

The Jesuit Order in Ireland is to dispose of its internationally important collection of rare books and medieval manuscripts valued at more than €2 million. Thousands of books from the collection have already been shipped to London and will go under the hammer in a major auction at Sotheby’s next summer.

The international auction house says the “rich collection” – owned for the last 117 years by the Jesuit Community at Milltown Park, Dublin – is “one of the most important of its kind to come to the market” and includes rare printed books from the 15th century, early editions of Shakespeare, English and continental literature and medieval manuscripts.

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Bob Dylan Wins Nobel in Literature

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    Researcher finds evidence that the 'world's most mysterious book' is an elaborate hoax

    Researcher finds evidence that the 'world's most mysterious book' is an elaborate hoax
    The plot thickens.

    BEC CREW The Science Alert 23 SEP 2016

    For hundreds of years, the world’s best cryptographers have dedicated their lives to solving the mystery of the Voynich Manuscript - a 15th century book written in a mysterious coded language that no one has ever managed to crack.

    With an unknown author - and rumours that a young Leonardo da Vinci or even aliens could be behind it - the Voynich Manuscript has become the stuff of legend. But now new research suggests that the whole thing could just be one elaborate hoax.

    Often referred to as the world’s most mysterious book, the Voynich Manuscript is filled with what appears to be an unfamiliar language or a coded text, and is illustrated with grotesque human figures and the tendrils of other-worldly plants blooming from the borders.

    As the text could not be attributed to an author, it’s been named after Lithuanian antiquarian Wilfrid Voynich, who reportedly purchased it in 1912 from a collection of rare books in Italy, and was responsible for bringing it out of obscurity and into the public consciousness.

    Since then, the book has never been replicated, and has been locked away in the vault of Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Because of its age and incredible rarity, very few researchers have actually seen it in person.

    "Touching the Voynich is an experience," Juan Jose Garcia, director of the Spanish publishing house Siloe, told Agence France-Presse. "It’s a book that has such an aura of mystery that when you see it for the first time ... it fills you with an emotion that is very hard to describe."

    As we reported last month, Garcia has finally been given permission to produce the first ever replicas of the Voynich Manuscript.

    The hope is that when 898 exact copies of the manuscript are made available to the public in libraries and academic institutions around the world, someone - anyone - will finally crack the code.

    But are we wasting our time trying?

    Gordon Rugg of Keele University in the UK has spent more than a decade studying the Voynich Manuscript, and argues in a new paper that the elaborate 'language' in the text would have been easy to fake, if the author was familiar with a few simple coding techniques.

    "We have known for years that the syllables are not random. What I’m saying is there are ways of producing gibberish which are not random in a statistical sense," he told Rebecca Boyle from New Scientist.

    "It’s a bit like rolling loaded dice. If you roll dice that are subtly loaded, they would come up with a six more often than you would expect, but not every time."

    The method Rugg proposes for coming up with a language based on gibberish that at least looks genuine is coming up with a whole range of gibberish symbols, and arranging them on a table like so:

    voych-grid

    On his table, he included symbols that appear to be the roots, prefixes, and suffixes of Voynichese words.

    You’ll then have different 'grilles' - a piece of cardboard with holes cut in it - and the holes in these grilles will reveal a set of three gibberish symbols to produce a word.

    If you move across the table, using grilles with different hole positions as you go, you’ll soon come up with many different combinations of syllables to produce whole Voynichese words.

    Once Rugg had his results, he wanted to see if the text followed Zipf’s law, which describes the relative frequencies of words within a real written language.

    As you can see in the graphs below, which compare his Voynichese selection to the Vulgate Latin translation of the Book of Esther and Caesar’s De Bello Gallico, he appears to have gotten his answer:

    voych-grid-2
    voych-grid-2
    Rugg et. al.

    voych-grid-1
    voych-grid-1
    Rugg et. al.

    "If the words within a text are ranked from most common to least common, and their frequencies are then plotted on a histogram, then natural language texts typically show a nonlinear curve with a steep initial descent followed by leveling off to a long tail of words that only occur a few times within the text," he writes in his paper.

    "The text in the Voynich Manuscript shows this pattern and has a very similar curve to some real natural language texts."

    So is the legend dead after all this time? Well, not everyone is convinced by Rugg's evidence.

    Marcelo Montemurro from the University of Manchester in the UK, who wasn't involved in the study, argues that the manuscript does contain meaningful text, based on his own statistical analysis comparing Voynichese words to several classic texts written in various languages.

    He told New Scientist that the Voynich Manuscript text has far too many layers of complexity for a simple hoaxer to produce, and says he's found statistical similarities between the botanical and pharmaceutical sections of the manuscript, and has been able to link the art to corresponding, indecipherable words.

    "That means whoever made the hoax was aware of these subtle layers of structure that are very difficult to find just by looking at the text," he says.

    "We cannot say for certain whether it is a hoax, or hides a message. But we can say, whoever wants to propose that it is a hoax needs to explain how all of this can arise spontaneously without the author planning all these things."

    At this stage, the researchers will have to agree to disagree, because Rugg maintains that he's demonstrated how simple it would be for the Voynich's author to make gibberish look genuine, and the burden of proof now lies on the 'true believers' to demonstrate the veracity of this language.

    But he admits, "I don’t think there will ever be a resolution that everybody will be happy with."

    As the replica publisher Garcia told the AFP last month, the mysterious author might have been a genius, but "could also have been a sadist, as he has us all wrapped up in this mystery".

    Rugg's research has been published in Cryptologia.

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    Tiny Spanish Publisher Clones World’s Most Mysterious Book

    It’s one of the world’s most mysterious books, a centuries-old manuscript written in an unknown or coded language that no one — not even the best cryptographers — has cracked.
    Scholars have spent their lives puzzling over the Voynich Manuscript, whose intriguing mix of elegant writing and drawings of strange plants and naked women has some believing it holds magical powers.

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    ‘Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu’: risking all to save rare manuscripts

    Those of you who read this blog regularly may remember that the crisis regarding the manuscripts of the Timbuktu library which were in danger of being destroyed by an al-Qaeda group has been a concern of mine since I first learned of it a few years ago. Now a new book, just out, tells the story of the rescue of in excess of 377,000 manuscripts (work is currently underway to preserve the manuscripts as they were taken to an area with a wet climate). I have just downloaded the book to my Kindle and I will report back with a review - so check back for that...

    By David Wright
    Special to The Seattle Times

    It has all the elements of a classic adventure novel. An intrepid librarian ventures across deserts and through jungles to unearth ancient manuscripts, building a great library in a legendary city, only to be forced to smuggle it book by book out from under the noses of brutal pillagers bent on destruction.

    Yet despite its sensational title, Joshua Hammer’s “The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu” (Simon & Schuster, 288 pp., $26) provides a sobering look at an ongoing human and cultural tragedy across the Arab world.

    Hammer’s reportage highlights a lesser-known front in the ongoing struggle within Islam between the tolerant majority and fundamentalist jihadis, a situation too often framed as a contest between Islam and the West. It is a story that couldn’t be more timely, and yet the tumultuous history of Timbuktu shows just how far this cyclical struggle predates the Arab Spring.

    In a golden era from the 14th to the 16th centuries, Timbuktu developed from a wealthy trading hub between north and sub-Saharan Africa into a cosmopolitan city renowned for its scholarly culture, preserved and celebrated in thousands of beautifully delineated manuscripts.

    These intellectual treasures have been repeatedly suppressed and destroyed over the years, by repressive warlords and anti-Semitic purges in the 15th century, Moroccan invaders in the 16th century and a Sufi “jihad of the sword” in the 19th century. The colonizing French in 1894 administered the coup de grace, exporting precious manuscripts to European collections, but by that time Timbuktu’s cultural patrimony had largely — and often literally — gone underground.

    Starting in 1984, librarian Abdel Kader Haidara devoted himself to restoring his city’s heritage. Prospecting for books for the Ahmed Baba Institute, Haidara managed to recover a staggering number of manuscripts that had been scattered across the region in private collections, cached away in trunks, and buried in pits and caves. Haidara’s intrepid adventures call to mind the medieval book hunters whose efforts to ferret out the forgotten writings of ancient Greece and Rome helped fuel the Renaissance across Europe, as described in Stephen Greenblatt’s 2011 award-winning book “The Swerve: How the Ancient World Became Modern.” Just as then, clouds of intolerance were gathering on the horizon, and now a new Savonarola was kindling bonfires of the vanities under the banners of al-Qaeda.

    Hammer does a fairly good job of disentangling the complex factors that led up to the jihadi takeover of Northern Mali and Timbuktu in 2012, a chaotic mix of hostage taking, uneasy alliances between Tuareg rebels and Wahhabi extremists, and the law of unintended consequences of the Arab Spring, when al-Qaeda militants plundered Qaddafi’s abandoned armories.

    What is made vividly clear to readers who may be apt to view terrorism as something that happens on U.S. or European soil is the pervasive terror experienced across the Islamic world when “the bearded ones” roll into town to “turn the clocks back fourteen hundred years.” It is against this horrifying backdrop of menacing oppression and summary brutality that Haidara and his associates decide to risk life and limb to save Timbuktu’s libraries from the flames.

    There’s no need to reveal here just how these brave librarians and citizens managed to smuggle 377,000 intact manuscripts out of harm’s way past a brutal totalitarian regime, through lawless wilderness and war zones to Mali’s capital city of Bamako far to the south. Suffice it to say that they earn their “bad ass” sobriquet several times over. Riveting skullduggery, revealing history and current affairs combine in a compelling narrative with a rare happy ending. So far.

    David Wright is a reader services librarian at the Seattle Public Library.

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    World-Class Literary Works Reign At NY Antiquarian Book Fair

    Source: Antiques and The Arts Weekley
    Gate Up 25 Percent Over Last Year’s Event, Says Promoter Sanford Smith

    NEW YORK CITY — Featuring more than 200 international dealers of rare books, maps, illuminated manuscripts, photographs, ephemera and singular items of historical interest, the New York Antiquarian Book Fair returned, perhaps one last time, to the Park Avenue Armory April 7–10. Produced by Sanford L. Smith + Associates, the fair is sponsored by the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America and its parent organization, the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers.

    This is a very good article with a great deal of insight and interest. Please be sure to click the link to read the article in full...

    Click Here

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    Prince Of Tides Author Pat Conroy Dies At 70

    Source: NPR.org
    Published March 5, 2016 12:20 AM ET
    EMMA BOWMAN
    BARBARA CAMPBELL
    Richard Shiro/AP


    "Conroy passed away this evening at his home in Beaufort, S.C., surrounded by family and loved ones. 'The water is wide and he has now passed over,'
    said his wife, novelist Cassandra Conroy. Funeral arrangements are currently being made at this time.

    "Pat has been my beloved friend and author for 35 years, spanning his career from The Prince Of Tides to today," said his longtime editor and publisher, Nan A. Talese of Doubleday. "He will be cherished as one of America's favorite and bestselling writers, and I will miss him terribly," Talese said."

    The Associated Press notes that four of Conway's "novels of troubled relationships and dysfunctional families" were turned into movies, including his best-known books, The Great Santini and The Prince Of Tides.

    "Conroy writes from his own experiences, as a child of a violent father," said NPR's Tom Vitale in a 1986 Morning Edition interview with the author. "Like his Prince Of Tides protagonist, Pat Conroy grappled with his own conflicted sense of identity, particularly as a Southerner", Conroy told Vitale:

    "I'm a military brat. My father was a Marine Corps fighter pilot from Chicago, Ill. I did not live in Southern towns, I lived on bases. I was a Roman Catholic, which is the strangest thing you can be in the South. Not only that, I married a Jewish woman from Bensonhurst. So when people refer to me as a Southerner ... I liked it because I never had a home. It was the first name that was ever associated with me that put me in a place."

    Even 30 years later, Conroy's determination to crack his identity hadn't stopped. In the previously mentioned Facebook post, he added:

    "I celebrated my 70th birthday in October and realized that I've spent my whole writing life trying to find out who I am and I don't believe I've even come close. It was in Beaufort in sight of a river's sinuous turn, and the movements of its dolphin-proud tides that I began to discover myself and where my life began at fifteen."

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