Current Events & Trends | December 2019 | Rebecca Rego Barry

Fine Books' Best of 2019

ICYMI: Our top ten most popular posts of 2019. Number one takes a page from our winter issue’s cover feature, pictured above. What can we say? Bob Dylan rules.

1. Collecting Bob Dylan
Music icon Bob Dylan offers collectors several directions: books, manuscripts, photographs, letters, albums, concert tickets, posters, and song lyrics. The winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, Dylan is nothing if not prolific -- and very collectible.

2. Bright Young Librarians: Jesse Erickson
Our signature Q&A with Erickson, coordinator of special collections and digital humanities at the University of Delaware Library, Museums, and Press.

3. Bright Young Librarians: Christine Jacobson
Assistant curator of modern books and manuscripts at the Houghton Library at Harvard University talks Russian avant-garde and Louisa May Alcott.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress

4. Film Prize to Literary Documentary Flannery
The Library of Congress announced the winner of its first annual Lavine/Ken Burns Prize is a film about National Book Award winner Flannery O’Connor.

5. Summer 2019 Books about Books Roundup
Five recently published books about books worth your attention, including Book Collecting Now.

6. Dazzled by Danish Illustrator Kay Nielsen
A peek at fifty dramatic watercolors, drawings, and illustrated books on exhibit in Boston through January 20, 2020.

7. Crowdsourcing the Purchase of a Jane Austen Letter
A call for public donations so that Jane Austen’s House Museum could acquire an 1814 letter written by Jane to her niece Anna. (Update: successful!)

Courtesy of Nicholas Basbanes

8. On Paper Gets a Makeover
Artist Tim Ely made a one-of-a-kind copy of Nick Basbanes' 2013 book, On Paper.

9. Walt Whitman Inspires Book Artists
A fall exhibit at the Center for Book Arts asked contemporary artists to create work based on recurrent themes in Whitman’s work.

10. Cuddly as a Cactus: Four Grinch Storyboards Sold at Auction
Four “uncommon” Chuck Jones storyboards from the 1966 movie, How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, sold for $8,750.

Keep reading our most popular posts: here are last year’s top five.