Almost a year ago, the excellent India Ink was tagged for excellence in blogging, an award she rebranded as the Charles Montgomery Burns Award. Mr. Burns is the owner of the Springfield nuclear power plant on the Simpsons. Well, India’s blog is hot.
Month: February 2009
“If Folly link with Elegance no man knows which is which.” – William Butler Yeats
- Collectanea Botanica : Illustrated herbals are the perfection of print publishing
- Are the Humanities Becoming Irrelevant? : Maybe we need a new vocabulary for addressing this perennial question
- To Sleep, Perchance to Dream : Get cosy with the Folger Shakespeare Library
- Locusts and biblipphiles : They both swarm
- Recognizing political blogging : Blogs now in running for Orwell Prize
- What are the oldest words of English? : I’m not really sure what that question means
- Journalism is Dead, Long Live Journalism : Is the news-blog the newspaper of the future?
Latest inbound links
Crave that prominent-grid, basic-fonts, industrial design aesthetic? Massamo Vignelli would tell you that you can’t just imitate the surface, which must emerge as an epiphenomenon from an essential spirit embuing the design at its most fundamental level. He has put a document called The Vignelli Canon on the web as a pdf. It’s worth consulting.
Who would have guessed that the San Francico Chronicle‘s Sunday book review would be one of the few standalone newspaper reviews remaining? (It survives as a pull-out from the paper’s opinion section.) That the review has stayed alive is more a testament to the exceptional dedication of the Bay Area book community than to any quality of the review itself.
“Honour commercio’s energy yet aid the linkless proud, the plurable with everybody.” — Finnegans Wake
- Does Kindle violate authors’ audio rights? : New text-to-speech function
- More on Kindle’s text-to-speech feature : Wilkert leaning to IPhone instead
- Walker design blog : Getting interesting
- 2009 Best Translated Book winners : According to Three Percent
- How to sell books in a recession : Be big or be small?
- Decline and fall : Foreseen for Amazon
- Harper Perennial tests content giveaway : About time
- Matsuo Basho’s frog haiku : 30 translations
- Borders Reduces Corporate Staffing : Times are hard all over
Latest inbound links
The Writers Center is looking for a Business and Operations Manager, “overseeing day-to-day business functions and facility upkeep and maintenance.” The job pays $35-40K. They are located in the DC area.
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Aoccrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny ipormoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed the txet wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
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via hosted.pl
image via Gary McMurray’s photostream
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Maybe by the time this post runs the photo will have been widely printed. If not, you can still try your luck at guessing what this picture — which won the 2008 World Press Photo of the Year contest — represents. Answer after the break …
I have been busy constructing an index to my 7 Junipers site, which is devoted to Asian Art and Culture. The index in process is accessed via one of the site’s navigation tabs. Tag clouds are often seen in sidebars, but I think they work better as pages. At 7J I made a brief post summarizing the steps involved creating an index page via the tags function.
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Because this cannot be said often enough. From Robert Bringhurst’s Elements of Typographic Style:
In the nineteenth century, which was a dark and inflationary age in typography and type design, many compositors were encouraged to stuff extra space between sentences. Generations of twentieth-century typists were then taught to do the same, by hitting the spacebar twice after every period. Your typing as well as your typesetting will benefit from unlearning this quaint Victorian habit.
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According to BusinessWriting.com, these are the 25 most commonly misspelled words in English.
I don’t consider myself a very good speller, for an editor (I just look everything up). But this test seemed easy to me. The only question that I thought was a little tricky was the one that asked about a British spelling, since I’m only familiar with U.S. style. I figured it was a trick question and answered with the U.S. spelling, which luckily was right.
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“Every separation is a link.” — Simone Weil
- In celebration of the farmer poet : But no Wendell Berry?
- What’s on Bruce Springsteen’s Bookshelves? : Books, I’m guessing
- Don’t Work for Arseholes : Excellent advice from Derek Powazek
- Internet Famous Class : When your grade depends on getting famous
- Books and the web : Together at last?
- The poems of Barack Obama : “… caverns / Filled with apes / That eat figs …”
Duly Quoted
“Not in the history of mankind has the government ever created a job.” — RNC Chair Michael Steele
“One of my sons … was more interested in Alexander’s stilted delivery which paused. After. Every. Word. He wanted to know if Alexander had had a stroke.” — Ron Silliman
Incoming
The second biennial CODEX Book Fair will be held this weekend, February 8-11 in Berkeley. The Codex Foundation promotes the art and craft of the book and strives to increase awareness of the book arts.
For those unable to attend in person, Codex now maintains a blog.
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Elsewhere I mentioned recently that the David R. Godine blog has been a dispirited creature, with few and meager posts. I am happy to report that it has now been infused with new dedication and spark, and I am informed by both David Godine and Daniel Pritchard at the press that they are resolved to maintain the blog at a high level going forward.
For about the past week substantial posts have been coming almost daily. Yesterday featured a generous commentary on Bruce Rogers, the great American typographer best known for designing the neo-Venetian typeface Centaur.
Here’s a cool thing. I received an e-mail yesterday from Dave Kellam, someone I didn’t know. An excerpt:
Just found your blog today, via India Amos. I’m an aspiring book designer, and it’s been fun poking through your site. One of the posts linked to another post (http://www.rightreading.com/blog/2008/09/03/wordpress-plugin-wanted/) about wanting a WP plugin. I’ve created a few WordPress plugins, and might be able help you out with you with a custom plugin.
Over at India, Ink., the redoubtable India is thinking about “what materials and processes and vendors to use to make books that will last a hundred years.”
I think traditional books will survive the digital revolution but that their role will change. They will become luxury items, keepsakes, so whoever still knows how to make the nicest books will win. But I’ll bet that a lot of well-meaning production people don’t even know how to spec well-made books, because all they’ve ever been asked to do at their jobs is make everything cheaper and faster. And as the vendors that excel at quality work die off—Stinehour comes to mind—it will become even more difficult to acquire that kind of experience.
