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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 called the Letter is Baked.” So we learn that, when printing, the physical pieces of type occasionally stuck together, but we’re left to wonder why this happened, how severe it was, and how printers corrected it. Did baking ruin the type? Did each printer have his own method to prevent baking, a trade secret he passed down only to his apprentice?

More fine examples follow but perhaps the best is saved till last -

To beat fat, 1683, “If a Press-man Takes too much Inck with his Balls, he Beats Fat.”

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Ranking fifth most ‘valuable’ item, and filed away in the mysterious Totem category on the Significant Objects site is this, an exemplar of kitsch and oddly proportioned, Pink Horse.

Pink Horse with a story by Kate Bernheimer

That the Pink Horse sold for a shade over $100, with the original cost a mere hundreth of the selling price seems to vindicate the idea behind Significant Objects -

A talented, creative writer invents a story about an object. Invested with new significance by this fiction, the object should — according to our hypothesis — acquire not merely subjective but objective value. How to test our theory? Via eBay!

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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 day. I have a feeling this one is going to be a nail-biting race to the finish.

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The addition of an orange light on the light switch to indicate a light remains on in another room is a simple, ‘life-hack’ that would help me remember that I’ve left the attic lit up after I’ve closed the hatch.

Matt Brown Lightswitch

When one of the lights in the garage is on, this orange light turns on in the kitchen. Really handy because those garage lights you normally turn on as you enter the house, and a lot of times they get left on. With this, you can see if they’re on from the inside and turn them off from the inside. It’s also nice because if they’re both on you know that someone is in there.

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Charting the Beatles is a collaborative design project with submissions exploring the music of the Beatles from their use of the American pronounciation to their habit of self-referential lyrics. Possibly the most successful infographic in the set is a graph by Michael Deal tracing the songwriting contributions from each band member using data gleaned from William Dowlding’s Beatlesongs.

Michael Deal, Charting The Beatles, Authorship and Collaboration

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Naoko Ito Ubiquitous 2009

As part of the Urban Nature series, Naoko Ito took a six foot tree branch cut it in several pieces. Then, with each piece trapped into it’s own jar, mounted the whole set to recreate the branches original form.

Via Neatorama

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Robin Sloan uses the economic concept of stock and flow as a metaphor for today’s media.

Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind peo­ple that you exist. Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the con­tent you pro­duce that’s as inter­est­ing in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what peo­ple dis­cover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, build­ing fans over time.

The clarity of such a mental model is incredibly valuable when determining the level of trust from your sources.

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Timelessness is as good a means to judge the importance and value of writing as any other and this article on how we lost (and now have rediscovered) interactivity by Douglas Adams, written in 1999 but still as relevant and enjoyable to read today is a perfect example. I’ve been misquoting a passage from this for years and so I’m pleased to be re-aquainted with the source (thanks to Aden Davies).

…during this century we have for the first time been dominated by non–interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport – the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for.

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The evolution of Crayola crayons, from the eight available in 1903 to the present day set of 120, charted for our amusement (or careful analysis). Despite the cull of shades in 1990, when eight were retired, is the ever increasing number of shades sustainable?

via Etre

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Many writers describe the arduous, physical side to their work and, importantly, the need to build up stamina. The emphasis on the labour of writing is brilliantly explored in Haruki Murakami’s ‘kind of a memoir’, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.Believing that writing requires talent, focus and endurance, Murakami’s daily ritual when writing a novel is a robust repetition of exercise, application and relaxation.

When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at 4:00 am and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for 10km or swim for 1500m (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at 9:00 pm. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind. But to hold to such repetition for so long — six months to a year — requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.

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