Manuscripts

eBooks: 1998 – The Electronic Beowulf Project

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The British Library began offering digitized versions of its treasures, for example Beowulf, the earliest known narrative poem in English and one of the most famous works of Anglo-Saxon poetry. The British Library holds the only known manuscript of Beowulf, dated circa 1000. The poem itself is much older than the manuscript  — some historians […]

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Amazon.com Novel Writing Contest

Amazon is getting into the author-writing contest arena, launching the first Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award today in cooperation with Penguin and Hewlett-Packard. Amazon will accept submissions through November 5 and the winner will have his or her novel published by Penguin, which is also offering a $25,000 advance. PW will serve as preliminary judges of […]

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Einstein’s “Most Important Decision”

Einstein said that the most important decision you ever make is whether you live in a friendly universe or a hostile universe– in a positive universe or a negative universe. This relates very strongly to what is perhaps the greatest idea I came up with in all my college years, which was that you make […]

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Word for Word

Electronic publishing is replacing print, changing reading as well as society. Cavemen used charcoal to write on walls. Ancient Egyptians scrawled hieroglyphics on papyrus scrolls. Medieval monks penned illuminated manuscripts on parchment. Then Johannes Gutenberg changed the world with movable type, making writing available to all. Now a revolution is under way that is rapidly […]

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New Mozart Work Premiere

A recently discovered 18th-Century keyboard work believed to be one of the earliest by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has been performed in Austria. The piece – about two minutes long – was played by Florian Birsak on a harpsichord in the Salzburg Residenz. The discovery came in the 250th anniversary year of Mozart’s birth, which was […]

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