"…Matching blue morocco doublures are tooled with an attractively complex central ornament encompassing considerable stippling and twenty large stylized flowers on curvilinear stems. Vellum free endleaves are ornamented with gilt hearts at the corners, and the top edge is gilt."

"So who was responsible and when is it from? Since the sheet is neither signed nor dated, we can only make this assertion thanks to the sleuthing done by earlier scholars, most importantly by John Dreyfus for his collection of type specimen facsimiles, and the source of much of the information I give here.1 This sheet can be connected to its type caster thanks to the detailed records kept by the Dutch printer Christophe Plantin and the remarkable longevity of his press, now the home of the Plantin-Moretus Museum. Plantin’s 1575 inventory of fonts includes the double pica italic typeface shown on this sheet (it’s the largest size of the italic face, on the right-hand column), with a note on the facing page identifying it as “Ascendonica Cursive de Guiot.” François Guyot was a type caster in Antwerp who worked from the 1540s until his death in 1570, and who was the main caster for Plantin from 1555 onwards; he also seems to have worked briefly for John Day in London."

"Nabokov famously told the story of the Cornell student who beseeched him to divulge the secret of great writing. 'Learn the names of plants', Nabokov is said to have said. He surely did not mean the Linnean names (though those can help to add an extra flair of erudition); he meant the Russian-English-French names that turn the things into repositories of human lore and values and fears."

"Humans have been seeing strange things on the surface of Mars for centuries. From the 1700s up through the present day, widespread fame has been available to anyone able to produce even the slightest bit of flimsy evidence that there's Martian life."

we need these in Ann Arbor

"The map is truly a beautiful bit of geologic history. For more info on it, see my previous blog post. So many amazing swirls and details in the river's course. Rendering it as a slippy map makes it easy to see the map in great detail, for instance the Old River Control Structure, a site threatened by the floodwaters of 2011. (Interestingly, the modern channel was built on relatively dry land.) The opacity slider (or text box) in the upper right lets you look through the Fisk map to a contemporary Google map. Check out this flood plain, for example. The satellite view contains echoes of the various old meanders, too, like these curved fields."

"This special issue of Common-place explores food. It particularly investigates the production and consumption of food during the age of experiment, that period between 1820 and 1890 in the United States after the soil crisis of the early nineteenth century disrupted customary agriculture and before scientific agriculture became institutionalized nationally in the system of experimental stations legislated into being by the Hatch Act (1887)."

"Although Laposky, a draftsman by profession, had received a proper recognition as a pioneer of electronic art, at no time his name has emerged in the context of dynamical chaos theory. The circuits he had implemented for generation of “oscillons” on the screen of a cathode ray tube oscilloscope, remain a mystery. It is known that some of his thirty-seven circuits [2] had “as many as 70 different setting of controls”[3] and that ac-voltage has been used for the circuit feeding. Our analysis is based on the vanity press booklet with the still photos of the fifty-six oscillons, which were exhibited at the Sanford Museum (Cherokee, Iowa) in 1953 [2]."

"Ron Doerfler has created a truly gorgeous 2010 calendar titled The Age of Graphical Computing. Ron has transformed nomography into a form of art."

"…Being on fire, you would probably apply powerful pails of water to put it out, and send off your man for the engines? You would do very wrong.…"

"For example, the manual for the Franklin Ace 100 begins with about 40 pages of computer basics (What are they? What can they do? etc). And then, on page 40, two thirds of the way down the page, there is a chapter heading called “The Ancestral Territorial Imperatives of the Trumpeter Swan.” Here’s how the chapter begins:…"

"In 1903, Crayola had eight colors in its standard package. Today, there are 120, along with special packs like Gem Tones and Silver Swhirls. What happened? Above, from Weather Sealed, shows the growing color selection (and a few color retirements) in the standard package from 1903 to now."

"Although much comes in, there is still plenty for us to seek out and acquire. We are omnivorous in our appetite for material printed in the United States before 1877—if we don’t already have it, we want it, and even if we do have it, we might want another copy if it is slightly different or in better condition than the one we have. We also add secondary materials to the collections to support research here."

"According to Mental Floss Magazine, Kennedy managed to work all of the Ku Klux Klan's most secret recruiting and organizational practices into his 1940s radio serial, "Clan Of The Fiery Cross." And as a result, the Man Of Steel dealt a crushing blow to the racist organization:"

"Though one of our most ancient holidays, Halloween wasn’t celebrated widely in America until the latter part of the 1800s. Ypsilanti likely didn’t celebrate Halloween for half a century after the city’s founding in 1823—the quote above is the first Halloween story to appear in old newspapers dating back to the 1840s."

Be sure to look at the background and silhouetted wires in this shot. See the comment, "That's one of the most amazing collections of overhead wires I've ever seen on Shorpy. I'll bet that it has a lot to do with the business on the ground floor of our featured building."

"The NY Times reports that architects Irene Cheng and Brett Snyder “have created a virtual map to guide users around Manhattan to sites where projects they describe as ‘visionary’ were planned but never built. The map is available as an interactive iPhone application…that uses GPS technology to detect when a user is near any of the roughly 50 notable sites, triggering a feature that allows the user to learn about the proposal through the architect’s foiled designs and words. ‘It’s a wall-less museum where the art isn’t even there,’ Mr. Snyder said. ‘The juxtaposition of what could be against what is’.”"

"The machine translates words of a text into patent drawings. Seven million patents — linked by over 22 million references — form the vocabulary. By using references to earlier patents, it is possible to find paths between arbitrary patents. They form a kind of subtext."

"The proposition of the paper is that a direct relation held between the spatial shape of the church, its dedication and the cultural and political situation in the region. These churches inspire further studies of the use of the equilateral triangle plan in architecture, particularly for sacred buildings. In the future such studies should result in a more complete review and perhaps a full catalogue of buildings established on such a plan."