The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland in now available for the bargain price of $180 per volume on Amazon. (Ahem.) It sounds fascinating, though, especially for those of us who practice a certain slant of book history. Peter Hoare, the general editor, described it thusly on SHARP-L:

This is the first scholarly history of libraries in these islands to cover the whole period up to the present day. It aims to include libraries of all types (institutional and private), as well as the development of library buildings and furnishing, their user communities - and not least librarians and their colleagues in related areas of endeavour, the evolution of today's profession.

The Vatican comes out of the closet and embraces Oscar Wilde.

Dangers of the "Book of Nature" metaphor.

I want to be a Culinary Philologist in my next life: The Cookbook as Literature, an excerpt from Aguecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections: literature, culture, and food among the early moderns.

Preserve the serial comma!

An Estonian site entirely devoted to bookclasps. If this is your bag, be sure to click around — there’s much more here than first meets the eye. (via Bibliodyssey.)