Britain’s most avid reader, 91, borrows 25,000th library book!

September 2nd, 2009 LONDON - A British-based academic has uncovered a fragment of the world's oldest Bible hiding underneath the binding of an 18th-century book in an Egyptian monastery. According to a report in The Independent, Nikolas Sarris, a Greek student conservator, spotted a previously unseen section of the Codex Sinaiticus, which dates from about 350 AD, as he was trawling through photographs of manuscripts in the library of St Catherine's Monastery in Egypt.

September 1st, 2009 ISLAMABAD - Expelled Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Jaswant Singh's controversial book, Jinnah: India, Partition-Independence, which has created a furore in India, is selling like hot cakes in the twin cities of Rawalpindi and Islamabad. The twin-city booksellers had imported more than 3,000 copies on Saturday and sold them out by Monday morning.

July 15th, 2009 Rare 1502 hymnal given to UK university libraryLONDON — A church is donating a rare 1502 hymnal to a Manchester University library, where church members say it can receive better care. The Latin hymnal was published in London by Wynken de Worde, who was among the first to popularize printed works.

July 7th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A gun found in former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's foxhole when he was seized by Delta Force special troops in 2003 could become the centerpiece of an exhibition at the George W Bush presidential library in Dallas, Texas. According The Telegraph, the 9mm Glock 18C, presented to then-president Bush by Delta Force agents after their triumphant arrest of the Iraqi dictator, has become one of Bush's most prized possessions.

July 6th, 2009 World's oldest Bible digitizedLONDON — The British Library says the surviving pages of the world's oldest Christian Bible have been reunited — digitally. The library says the early work known as the Codex Sinaiticus had been housed in four separate locations across the world for more than 150 years.

July 6th, 2009 World's oldest Christian Bible digitizedLONDON — The British Library says the surviving pages of the world's oldest Christian Bible have been reunited — digitally. The library says the early work known as the Codex Sinaiticus had been housed in four separate locations across the world for more than 150 years.

June 29th, 2009 LONDON - A group of British pensioners have been barred from enjoying a coffee morning at a public library for health and safety reasons. The seven members of the coffee morning for over 50s have met at Eye Library in Eye, near Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, every Tuesday for the last four years without incident.

June 22nd, 2009 WASHINGTON - The US Library of Congress has launched a Sikh Collection Initiative to bring together a wide range of literature and other research material on Sikh history at the prestigious institution. The initiative was launched last week with a two-day international conference on Sikhism at the Library in recognition of the significant place the Sikh-Americans have occupied among the immigrant communities in the US.

June 18th, 2009 LONDON - British newspapers more than 200 years old are now available online, thanks to a new Internet service from the country's national library. Visitors can view news more than two million pages of newspapers dated as early as 1800 from 49 national and regional titles.

May 18th, 2009 LONDON - An American company is gearing up to replace black and white e-book readers with a colour version, expected to be on the market by the end of 2010. E Ink Corporation of Cambridge, Massachusetts, says that it will be demonstrating a colour version of its e-paper at the Society for Information Display conference in San Antonio, Texas, on May 31.

April 28th, 2009 LONDON - It may take several months for an average reader to complete 'Crime and Punishment', but a copy of the book can be printed in just nine minutes, thanks to Britain's first 'book vending machine'. The Daily Telegraph ordered a freshly bound edition of Fyodor Dostoevsky's classic, which was one of the first tomes to drop out of the Espresso Book Machine when it opened for business for the first time yesterday.

April 20th, 2009 WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama has said that it was a nice gesture on the part of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez to gift him a book during the weekend Summit of the Americas. Obama, however, said nothing about the theme of the book, "Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent," by Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano, which blames foreign interests like the United States for exploiting Latin America for centuries.

April 15th, 2009 LONDON - An American library has banned people with 'offensive bodily odours' from using its facilities. Because of an increase in homelessness along with the winter weather, large numbers of people are crowding into libraries during the day to stay warm.

March 24th, 2009 LONDON - After diamonds, it seems, books are girls' BFFs (Best Friend Forever). A new study has found that females are more avid readers of books than men - in fact, they can't put a book down once they begin it.

January 12th, 2009 LONDON - Better known for burning books rather than collecting them, Adolf Hitler owned an estimated 16,000 volumes and was a voracious reader who loved Shakespeare, says a new book. 'It was by any measure an impressive collection: first editions of the works of philosophers, historians, poets, playwrights and novelists,' historian Timothy W.