writing – Page 8 – Shady Characters

Miscellany № 77: amperbrand

September 25, 2016

The ampersand is one of those shady characters that has taken on a life of its own, thriving happily beyond its home in writing and typography. In particular, it exerts an irresistible power over designers, advertisers and others in the business of creating and promoting commercial brands. Fortnum & Mason, for example, recently published a blog post1 explaining “the little-known story of the important symbol sat between our two famous names”. Crate & Barrel, the American homeware store, once built an advertising campaign around their ampersand;2 AT&T did the same earlier this year.3 As John Brownlee of Fast Co. Design puts it in “Why Designers Love The Ampersand”,

Shady Characters at I Love Typography: The Prints and the Pauper

September 4, 2016

I’ve been a fan of John Boardley’s blog, I Love Typography, since I first started learning about typography and symbols back in 2009. As such, I’m very happy to say that John recently published an extract from The Book at ILT.

Shady Characters at the BBC: The mysterious ancient origins of the book

August 28, 2016

In the run-up to the US publication of The Book, I was happy to be able to write an article for BBC Culture entitled “The mysterious ancient origins of the book”. It takes a look at the forces, mysterious and otherwise, that lay behind the evolution of the papyrus scroll into the parchment book. It was a challenge to write this one — it compresses a huge amount of history into a few hundred words — but I hope that it does justice to the subject. Have a read!

Booking It № 3: Movable Type at Robert Smail’s Printing Works

August 14, 2016

It’s publication week for The Book here in the UK, and so things are a little busy. For the third part of my “Booking It” series, then, on the arts and crafts that go into bookmaking, I’m cheating a little and republishing a post from November 2012, when I visited Robert Smail’s Printing Works in the Scottish borders. I hope you enjoy it!

Booking It № 2: Woodcut Printing at the Lavender Print School

July 31, 2016

So: you’ve made some paper, and now you need to put something on it. Some text would be nice, but what about illustrations? For a thousand years, first in China and later in the West, the best way to do just that was to make a woodcut print — to carve out an image on a wooden block, apply ink, and press it onto the page.