Nick Martens writing on The Bygone Bureau achieves a step closer to becoming that most desirable of authority, a ‘palaeotypographist’, after browsing the Oxford English Dictionary’s archives revealed some hitherto unknown and, given the brevity of their definitions, ambiguous typographic references. Take this 1688 quote for bake: “when Letters stick together in distributing… This is […]
It’s one thing to idly boast you can collect a million drawings of everyone’s favourite, lumbering prairie beast by 2011 and another to build a platform for submissions, display illustrations (of varying quality it must be said) and collect data on the whole project. To succeed, Ola Helland currently needs 1,406 giraffes to arrive each […]
As an antidote to the charming, eccentric science-fiction illustrations (‘Steampunk’ if you will) that we rely on when discussing the industry and innovation of the Victorian age, BibliOdyssey recently published a range of Victorian posters, pages and pamphlets selected from the David Rumsey Historial Map Collection that reveal the theories, beliefs and understanding across the […]
Whilst boffins in England were building concrete behemoths for their ‘Sound Mirrors’ to collect and amplify sounds to detect incoming enemy planes and Zeppelins across the Channel, it seems the Dutch were looking at amplification on more personal format.. I’m not sure if they preserved with these explosions of ear trumpet oddities but the English […]
A tour through the V&A inspired illustrator Jim Unwin to draw up a handy reference graph for the mythical creatures he encountered. My favourite? Cerberus, (dog, dog, dog).
Stuart McMillen’s illustration expertly distills the concept of Neil Postman’s, ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death’ — A book about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.
We often see examples of Soviet era propaganda from the High Stalinist Period with it’s utopian harmony, revolutionary fervor and the space race. But what is rare is a showcase of anti-communist or pro-american propaganda, clearly revealing that the propaganda machine was just as busy on the other side of political divide.
Prepare to loose a few hours searching through Matt Novak’s archives at paleofuture.com where our future, predicted from the past decades are collected for our amusement. Some are startling, bizarre and somewhat fragile in their vision.
Have a picture of the night sky? Want it decoding? Post your photograph to the Astrometry Flickr group and have a team of experts solve the star puzzles for you.