LISNews: Librarian News

The dispute between Southern Methodist University and condominium owners over land for the George W. Bush presidential library is over.

From the NY Times: When the library for George W. Bush opens in 2013 on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, visitors will most likely get to see one of the former President's most treasured items: Saddam Hussein’s pistol.

The gun, a 9 millimeter Glock 18C, was found in the spider hole where the Iraqi leader was captured in December 2003 by Delta Force soldiers, four of whom later presented the pistol to Mr. Bush. Among the thousands of gifts Mr. Bush received as president, the gun became a favorite, a reminder of the pinnacle moment of the Iraq war, according to friends and long-time associates.

Douglas Brinkley, an author and history professor at Rice University, said the pistol opened a psychological window into Mr. Bush’s view of his presidency.

“It represents this Texas notion of the white hats taking out the black hats and keeping the trophy,” Mr. Brinkley said. “It’s a True West magazine kind of pulp western mentality. For President Bush, this pistol represents his greatest moment of triumph, like the F.B.I. keeping Dillinger’s gun. He wants people generations from now to see the gun and say, ‘He got the bad guy.’ ”

From the AP: A document with Abraham Lincoln’s signature and dated Sept. 22, 1862, has been found in the Hawaii State Archives, but no one seems to know how it got there. A project of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Illinois has confirmed its authenticity. It orders the secretary of state to affix the seal of the United States to his “proclamation of this date.” The Emancipation Proclamation was issued on that date. The document appears to have been at the archives since at least 1935. In the 1860s, Hawaii was an independent kingdom.

Anyone care to suggest how the document arrived at the Hawaii State Archives?

The New Yorker has a nice piece on the bygone days when a president's widow wrote letters to her librarian requesting books:

About a year and a half ago, Harriet Shapiro, who is the head of exhibitions at the New York Society Library, was, in the manner of modern-day researchers everywhere, randomly Googling—looking for information about Marion King, the institution’s longtime librarian, who died in 1976. To Shapiro’s surprise, a link came up to Harvard’s Theodore Roosevelt collection, in which lay a cache of nearly six hundred letters written to King by Edith Kermit Roosevelt. ...

The letters spanned the period of Mrs. Roosevelt’s widowhood, beginning in 1920, the year after Theodore Roosevelt died. In them, she requested books to be sent to her home, Sagamore Hill, near Oyster Bay.