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Steinbeck on lice

Rob posting Burns’s To a Louse reminded me of this passage. It’s from a John Steinbeck letter, but I encountered it in John Carey’s brilliant anthology, The Faber Book of Science.

The Morgan Library has a very fine 11th-century Launcelot in perfect condition. I was going over it one day and turned to the rubric of the first owner dated 1221, the rubric a squiggle of very thick ink. I put a glass on it and there imbedded deep in the ink was the finest crab louse, pfithira pulus, I ever saw. He was perfectly preserved even to his little claws. I knew I would find him sooner or later because the people of that period were deeply troubled with lice and other little beasties — hence the plagues. I called the curator over and showed him my find and he let out a cry of sorrow. ‘I’ve looked at that rubric a thousand times,’ he said. ‘Why couldn’t I have found him?’

I notice, btw, that the book now has a rather gaudy cover that makes it look like a textbook, whereas my copy has a fabulous photo of ‘Mabel and Alexander Graham Bell kissing inside the frame of a tetrahedral kite’.

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Fun with type

I’ve been playing with these very cool typefaces.

mock-up of C18th style flyleaf
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Site Redesign

As should be obvious, unless you’re reading this via the RSS feed, I’ve redesigned the site again. I was just a bit bored with the old look, basically. As usual, I haven’t tested it in Internet Explorer for Windows, so if anything looks obviously wrong, let me know.

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  • ‘At the foot of this post there can be seen the name of Victory as it would appear in the capitals from Bowles’s Roman and italic print alphabets of 1775, and in the one that follows, capitals from an alphabet in Bickham’s Universal penman of 1733, et
  • ‘The Nymph and the Grot’ was the title of an article that I wrote in the journal Typographica. It explored the background to the appearance of geometrical, monoline sanserif lettering in Britain towards the end of the 18th century[…]
  • ‘The project documents every instance of the phrase “is the new” encountered from various sources in 2005. It is intended to map the iterations of a peculiarly common marketing and literary device.’ via Design Observer
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