July 2011
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June 2011
1 post
April 2011
1 post
December 2010
1 post
Frank Chimero: Rest in peace, medial s. You know,... →
Great use of Google new present to humanities scholars and bored people everywhere:
viafrank:
Rest in peace, medial s. You know, that thingie that you sometimes see in type that kind of looks like a lowercase f, but really should be a lowercase s, but doesn’t really look quite right by your modern standards. You know, the thing that you see on the title page when you pick up your 17th…
November 2010
4 posts
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August 2010
3 posts
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July 2010
11 posts
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“I don’t actually lose sleep calculating whether today’s...”
– Is today’s fiction irrelevant? The blogosphere debates: Are today’s novels merely clever where they should be deep? (via libraryland)
Quite so. I think that the only way to know if a writer can be considered a ‘great’ is to wait a few decades or, better yet, coupla hundred years. In the...
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“…it having been decided by the University of Coimbra that burning a few people...”
–
Candide, page 28.
This sentence is referring to the earthquake in Lisbon which occurs in Voltaire’s satire (it was also a real event). As it is a satire, I can see it being funny on purpose; however this was written in the 1700s so I can’t tell if Voltaire is being serious or is poking fun…...
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Britain: A False Dawn? | The New York Review of... →
One of the best articles on the past General Election I’ve had the pleasure to read (and oh so much better than my little piece). I do think it’s interesting that the mood of disuillusionment that was so evident before the election seems to have been replaced in many people by a rather more optimistic attitude – to which this article is a sombre exception.
June 2010
10 posts
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“To a certain extent, it’s a book that you don’t have to read any more because...”
– if:book: cheap editions past and present
That’s a very good description of a certain kind of books (The Odyssey, in this case). I sometimes feel it would be much better if Oxford forced its humanities students to learn Latin, or at least give them a compulsory crash-course in the classical...
Landlocked countries →
Interesting how many of the landlocked countries are some of the worst-off in the world. Not a rigorously drawn up conclusion, I know.
Better Reading on the iPad: iBooks 1.1, VQR, & PDF... →
I’m really looking forward to having some free time and finding out more about the ePUB format. This article has an example of a magazine done in ePUB and how it looks in iBooks. (God, what’s with all the uncapitalized first letters these days?) Sounds like the idea kinda worked, but a magazine article looks weird in the iBooks ‘really thick book’ interface.
“The more we peer into the pre-Copernican universe, the more harmonies we find....”
– William T. Vollmann, Uncentering the Earth
Vollmann is often annoyingly condescending, but he managed to explain and tie together the theories of four elements, four humours, etc. a lot better in one page than an Oxford lecturer did in an hour.
“Building a great display for typography without building great typographic tools...”
– Subtraction.com: Better Screen, Same Typography
Re: Can the humanities make a comeback?
wendyparker:
David Brooks calls for a new emphasis on a classical liberal arts education in difficult times, instead of the pursuit of career-oriented professions:
“Studying the humanities will give you a familiarity with the language of emotion. In an information economy, many people have the ability to produce a technical innovation: a new MP3 player. Very few people have the ability to...
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“According to ‘a certain Chinese Encyclopaedia,’ The Celestial Emporium of...”
– John Hudson in a discussion on Typeface classification @ Typophile
May 2010
2 posts
April 2010
2 posts
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“And the techies are right about another thing: the iPad is not a laptop. It’s...”
– State of the Art - David Pogue’s Review of the iPad - NYTimes.com
Well, that hits the nail on the head.
March 2010
9 posts
Listen
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What If Your Postage Stamp Was the Letter--Or an... →
Dutch post puts a short story in a book-like stamp.
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February 2010
5 posts
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“Linnaeus never had an argument with Siegesbeck, but his revenge for the...”
– B. E. Raikov, “Notes on the history of heliocentrism in Russia”, p. 256, footnote 1. (Translation mine).
10+ Flickr Groups for Book Design and Inspiration... →
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Mandelstam’s ‘Two Trams’ (1925) in PDF →
A great piece of Soviet book design. The link is to a PDF facsimile of the book.
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…another problem with the iPad is that of personal space. There is a difference between doing things like browsing on a smartphone and a laptop. A phone is small and, by definition, private; what happens on the screen is not public knowledge. Even on a 12” laptop, the screen is big enough to, effectively, enter the public sphere. I see no reason why an iPad, with its large screen, should prove to...