We wrote a piece on book burnings five years ago which holds up well, in it we interviewed bookseller Matt Fishburn, Professor Rebecca Knuth, and Shaun Bythell who is a used bookseller in Scotland who staged their own book burning in 2005.

Achebe wrote novels, poetry and essays, and is most famous for his first novel Things Fall Apart, published in 1958. Things Fall Apart has sold more than 10 million copies and is one of the great novels of the 20th century. The title is taken from a WB Yeats poem and the colonial-themed plot concerns the arrival of white men in a rural village. He wrote the book in English but was widely criticised in Africa for doing so.

Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God are sometimes described as The African Trilogy.

Born in 1930, The author won the Commonwealth poetry prize for his collection Christmas in Biafra. He was a finalist for the 1987 Man Booker prize for Anthills of the Savannah, and he won 2007 Man Booker international prize. In 1975, he famously called Joseph Conrad “a bloody racist.”

Things Fall Apart is the most widely read African book of all time and it has been translated into around 50 languages.

Achebe was a professor of Africana studies at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, until his death. He left Nigeria in 1990 after a car accident left him paralysed from the waist down and moved to the US.

With many of the images focused on the classes, trades, societal roles and occupations of the era, the collection of Sander’s work offers an invaluable insight into the society of the time. Photography enthusiasts or German history buffs would be lucky to get their hands on any of these fascinating volumes.

His defeat in battle and death in 1485 heralded the end of England’s Middle Ages, and he has been the subject of many legends and tales including The Princes in the Tower (which details the long-held suspicion by many that Richard III murdered his two nephews) and of course William Shakespeare’s play about him, titled simply Richard III.

To verify the findings, experts used a combination of carbon dating (which pinpointed the remains’ ages to a certain timeframe), wound examination, skeletal examination (Richard III was known to have been stooped by Scoliosis) and eventually, DNA analysis:

However, a team of enthusiasts and historians managed to trace the likely area – and, crucially, after painstaking genealogical research, they found a 17th-generation descendant of Richard’s sister with whose DNA they could compare any remains.

They claim the findings confirm beyond a reasonable doubt. I still doubt (reasonably!), but DNA is a marvelous and fascinating thing. Imagine identifying the remains of someone who has been dead more than five centuries.

More at the BBC.

No-one knows exactly how many books have been written about Honest Abe but in 2012 Ford’s Theater Centre for Education and Leadership in Washington DC constructed a 34-foot pillar of unique titles about Lincoln and it contained more than 15,000 books.

Books have been written about his childhood, his politics, his wartime leadership, his married life, his death, his speeches, his generals and admirals, his writing, his mental health and his legal career. There are biographies, history books, picture books, children’s books and fictional novels based on his life.

In recent years, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin has received a great deal of attention. In 2008, the then-Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama declared, if elected, he would want “a team of rivals” in his Cabinet. “I don’t want to have people who just agree with me. I want people who are continually pushing me out of my comfort zone,” he told Time Magazine. Obama, a keen reader, acknowledged the influence of Goodwin’s book several times as he campaigned to become president.

Lincoln by David Herbert Donald, published in 1996, is also widely acknowledged as one of the better biographies of the man. Manhunt by James L. Swanson is a very readable book about the murder of the president, the motives of his killer John Wilkes Booth and the desperate manhunt over 12 days.

If you want to completely shake up history, then Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith might appeal (and that’s fiction by the way). Gore Vidal also wrote an historical novel about the man.

The Best Books about Abraham Lincoln

Uncollected Works of Abraham Lincoln
Rufus Wilson

Lincoln: A Photobiography
Russell Freedman

Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America
Garry Wills

Abraham Lincoln (multiple vols/editions)
Carl Sandburg

Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief
James M. McPherson

The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln
CA Tripp & Lewis Gannett

Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness
Joshua Wolf Shenk

Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer
Fred Kaplan

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
Doris Kearns Goodwin

Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer
James L. Swanson

Lincoln
David Herbert Donald

The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America
Mark E. Neely

Willie Speaks Out: The Psychic World of Abraham Lincoln
Elliott V. Fleckles

Abraham Lincoln: The Man Behind the Myths
Stephen B. Oates

Honor’s Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln
Douglas L. Wilson

We Are Lincoln Men: Abraham Lincoln and His Friends
David Herbert Donald

Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President
Harold Holzer

Abraham Lincoln
Lord Charnwood

Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass & Abraham Lincoln
John Stauffer

Mr. Lincoln’s T-Mails: How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War
Tom Wheeler

Lincoln and his Generals
T. Harry Williams

Lincoln and His Admirals
Craig L. Symonds

The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage
Daniel Mark Epstein

Stealing Lincoln’s Body
Thomas J. Craughwell

A treat for the fine booklover, or anyone who enjoys the excellent artistry of bookbinding: The Kelliegram Binding.

Kelliegram bindings often involved intricate leather work, such as leather inlays or onlays to create an image, a scene, or a mosaic effect. It was common for the Kelliegram binders to choose an engraving from the body of the book and recreate it in leather for the cover image.

More from the Brynmawr library:

Kelliegram bindings were one of many innovations of the English commercial binding firm of Kelly & Sons. The Kelly family had one of the longest connections in the history of the binding trade in London, having been founded in 1770 by John Kellie, as the name was then spelled. The binding firm was carried on by successive members of the family into the 1930s. William Henry Kelly significantly developed the company in the first half of the nineteenth century, followed by William Henry, Jr., Henry, and Hubert Kelly, who took control in 1892, taking the firm into the twentieth century.

In the 1880s, Kelly & Sons began to use cloth with the reverse side showing for the sides of half-leather bindings. The reverse cloth had a more interesting and less artificial appearance, with an additional advantage of not being affected by water. The development that came to be known as Kelliegram was one of the bindery’s most notable, and the popularity continues today as demonstrated by the prices Kelliegram bindings command at auction and in the rare book trade.

To see more fine examples of leather inlays, enjoy our article Mosaic in Morocco: Inlaid Leather Bindings. To explore other legendary bookbinders and their bookbinding techniques, check out Bound to Be Beautiful: Best of the Bookbinders.

On this day in 1960, the landmark obscenity case over Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence ended with the acquittal of Penguin Books. The publisher had been sued for publishing Lawrence’s novel, which details the steamy affair between the wife of a wealthy, paralysed landowner and his gamekeeper. All this seems a million miles away from 50 Shades of Grey – easily the biggest book of 2012.

True. But while Churchill had two stints as prime minister and is most famous for his wartime leadership, many people don’t realize that his real passion was writing. That should come as no surprise, really; his oft-quoted, inspiring and impassioned speeches were a clear and obvious indication of his talent for and love of the English language. He was a genius with words.

His books also paid his rather substantial bills. Discover more about a remarkable writing career that began in 1898.

Winston Churchill, author.

It also includes lines from the Pope poem ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, published 200 years before the writing of this letter.

LORD FISHER TO THE RIGHT HON. WINSTON CHURCHILL

MY DEAR WINSTON,
I AM here for a few days longer before rejoining my “Wise men” at Victory House –

“The World forgetting,
By the World forgot!”

but some Headlines in the newspapers have utterly upset me! Terrible!!
“The Germal Fleet to assist the Land operations in the Baltic.”
“Landing the German Army South of Reval.”
We are five times stronger at Sea than our enemies and here is a small Fleet that we could gobble up in a few minutes playing the great vital SDea part of landing an Army in the enemies’ rear and probably capturing the Russian Capital by Sea!
The is “Holding the ring” with a vengeance!
Are we really incapable of a big Enterprise?
I hear that a new order of Knighthood is on the tapis – O.M.G. (Oh! My God!) – Shower it on the Admiralty!!

Yours,
FISHER.
9/9/17

There you have it, ladies and gentlemen – we are perhaps witness to the early origins of LOLspeak. OMG!

…from the always magical Letters of Note, of course.