Virginia bookseller Carol Troxell, "whose New Dominion Bookshop on Charlottesville's Downtown Mall survived as a seller of new books despite competition from online and big-box booksellers," died Wednesday, the Daily Progress reported. Troxell was 68 and had purchased the bookstore, which opened in 1924, from former owner C.C. Wells in the mid-1980s.
"It's a shock. We can't believe it, really," said Mitzi Ware, events coordinator at the bookstore. "The staff is carrying on because we are in the middle of a lot of events that have been scheduled, but it's hard. We have no idea what the future will bring."
Sandy McAdams, the owner of Daedalus Bookshop who had known Troxell since she worked with Wells, said, "She's just wonderful and she was certainly a mythic part of downtown. And she'll be missed horribly."
Jane Kulow, director of the Virginia Festival of the Book, called Troxell "an invaluable part" of the festival, "helping establish it as the beloved annual event that it is and enthusiastically welcoming authors into her shop each year during the festival, but also year-round. Her impact on the local community--both writers and readers--simply cannot be measured, and she will be sorely missed by all."
New Dominion bookseller Melissa Lockwood told CBS19: "This bookshop was more than a bookshop. It was an area where people would come in and look for Carol because she was such a force and really irreplaceable. They don't make 'em like Carol Troxell anymore."
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James S. Ackerman, "a Harvard art historian whose studies of the architecture of Michelangelo and Palladio remain classics in the field," died December 31, the New York Times reported. He was 97. While serving in Italy after WWII, "he volunteered to work for the Monuments and Fine Arts Commission in Milan," the Times noted, adding that "his immersion in the Certosa di Pavia generated a master's thesis at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York, where he went on to earn a doctorate in 1952. While teaching art history at the University of California, Berkeley, he was approached by the art historians Anthony Blunt and Rudolf Wittkower to write a survey of Michelangelo's architecture for a series of architectural monographs they were editing."
The Architecture of Michelangelo, published in two volumes in 1961, "was greeted as an indispensable work on an overlooked subject" and was honored with the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians' Hitchcock Award. Ackerman subsequent books include Palladio; The Villa: Form & Ideology of Country Houses; Distance Points: Studies in Theory and Renaissance Art and Architecture; Origins, Imitation, Conventions: Representation in the Visual Arts; and Origins, Invention, Revision: Studying the History of Art and Architecture.