The Dun Emer Press

Elizabeth Yeats standing at the iron handpress, with Beatrice Cassidy rolling out ink and Esther Ryan correcting proofs at the table at Dun Emer Press in 1903.

via letterology
“Elizabeth ‘Lolly’ Corbett Yeats (1868-1940) was the first commercial printer in Ireland to work exclusively on iron handpresses. She was also an art teacher and member of William Morris’s circle in London and studied with the Women’s Printing Society there. In 1902 she established a private press at the large home of Evelyn Gleeson in Dundrum near Dublin and was placed in charge of managing the new Dun Emer Press. With her sister Lily, a skilled needleworker, and Evelyn Gleeson they also began the Dun Emer Guild to train young women in bookbinding, printing and other craft trades so they might earn a living. In 1908, Elizabeth and her poet brother, William Butler Yeats started the Cuala Press, publishing over 70 fine edition books of Irish writers including 48 works by her brother William. . .”


More can be found here.

Eric Whitacre: A virtual choir 2,052 voices strong

via TED

“In a moving and madly viral video last year, composer Eric Whitacre led a virtual choir of singers from around the world. He talks through the creative challenges of making music powered by YouTube, and unveils the first 2 minutes of his new work, Sleep, with a video choir of 2,052.

Watch the TED talk here, and Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir - Lux Aurumque here.

Planet eBook

via the PDF blog

Planet eBook hosts a growing number of iconic works of classic literature — free to download without needing a log-in or membership. 82 books are currently hosted in the library as PDF files, which can be opened and read on any computer or smartphone. The books served up on Planet eBook are all public domain material; meaning they can be downloaded, copied, printed, and shared without requiring authorization from the author or publisher — as long as you do not modify the content or sell them for a profit.

To read the novels on Planet eBook you will need a PDF reader. Visit Plant eBook here.

Nephew Art

A copy of B. Kliban’s art has had traveled with me and hung in the offices I’ve worked in since 1982. It has aged well over the years.

Fifteen More Minutes of Fame

via the Nightly Heller

Fifteen More Minutes of Fame at the Union Square Greengrocer’s Market in NYC — “The Andy Monument,” produced by the Public Art Fund is by Rob Pruitt and will on view until Oct 2. Bring your own soup cans!

Read and see more here.

Nerd Merit Badges

via PRINTERESTING

Printer Hero
“How does one earn this Nerd Merit Badge for being a ‘Printer Hero?’ It may appear that one must slay the Savage Printer, but apparently that sword is a reference to Arthurian legend. You don’t earn this badge by fixing printers and copiers. You earn this badge by being willing to try.”



Family Tech Support
“Requirements: You provide hardware, software, and telephone support for family computers and electronics—voluntarily or involuntarily.”

Visit the nerd merit badges site here.

Reno Dakota & Pantone 292

via a capital idea

“. . . A friend has recently rediscovered the Magnetic Fields, a favorite band of mine. We had a fun discussion of the song Reno Dakota, which includes the lyrics:

Reno Dakota there’s not an iota
Of kindness in you
You know you enthrall me
And yet you don’t call me
It’s making me blue
Pantone 292

Listen to it here.

The Pilcrow

via Shady Characters: The secret life of punctuation

“…Taking pride of place at the head of every new paragraph, the pilcrow had carved out a literal niche for itself at the heart of late medieval writing. Boldly inked by the rubricator, pilcrows grew ever more elaborate and time-consuming to add. Unfortunately the deadline is not a modern invention; occasionally, time would run out before the rubricator could complete his work and the white space carefully reserved for the pilcrow went undecorated. With the advent of the printing press, the volume of printed documents to be rubricated grew exponentially and it became increasingly difficult to attend to them all. The pilcrow became a ghost, and the indented paragraph was born in its stead.”

Read Parts 1, 2, and 3 here.

Image of the Day: Loose Change

Found in loose change.

Aldus Prepress Group

While searching through a box of my son’s Legos for people to use as part of an art project, I came across this pin. I must have picked it up at a trade show, very likely On-Demand in Philadelphia in the early 90’s. I would brought back bags of nifty free give-aways for my wife and son — usually pens, highlighters, mousepads, and such from my visits with the vendors there. We used the the Aldus products PressWise and TrapWise for many years at work. Finding this pin brought back fond memories of the early days of Penn State Printing Services.

“The Aldus Prepress Group was started by Ranjit Mulgaonkar and Michael Reiher in 1990. Under the leadership of Ranjit Mulgaonkar in three years time the group built the industries first desktop prepress software to perform operations such as color separation, imposition, trapping and automated work-flow. The Aldus Prepress products were used by trade shops and service bureaus around the world. These products were also OEMed by print industry Giants like DuPont (1993) and Agfa (1993). After the Adobe acquisition/merger of Aldus Corporation, the product-line was acquired by Luminous Corporation on January 12, 1996.”

Watch videos of their products here.

1962: Proposed Interrobangs

via welovetypography
“…Frustrated with the growing tendency of copywriters to combine the exclamation mark and question mark to yield a surprised or rhetorical question — “Who would punctuate a sentence like that?!” — [Martin K. Speckter] penned an article for Type Talks to offer a solution. ‘Making a new point, or, how about that…’ appeared in the March-April 1962 issue and argued that there was a need for a single punctuation mark to replace this ugly, jury-rigged construction. As the article went on to explain, this putative symbol was intended to convey a particular mixture of surprise and doubt…”

Read the rest here.

360º Panorama is the largest indoor photo in the world

via letterology

“Read a fascinating story from Wired about a 360 degree photograph of Prague’s Philosophical Hall, a Baroque reading room in the city’s 868-year-old Strahov Monastery Library. And then view the 40 gigapixel photo produced by photographer Jeffrey Martin here. This room is a repository of rare books and is typically off limits to the public. Martin received special permission to spend the five days of shooting it took to make the composite image. The camera took another 111 hours of post-processing in order to stitch together the nearly 3000 images of the final 360 degree photo. You can actually scan the entire room of the finished photograph and zoom in close enough to read some of the titles on the rare books.”

Open Source Ampersands

via brainpickings

“Open Source Ampersands is essentially a single-character font — a font file that only contains glyphs for a single character — using the ampersand. Each of the ampersand characters is real text, not an image, and can be selected, copied, pasted and applied CSS to. The ampersands scale as you zoom the page and work in every browser, even ancient versions of Internet Explorer. The project serves as a statement against licensing limitations on the web and aims to celebrate open standards and open source. And though the folks at shit ampersand may be less than thrilled with many of the designs, it’s still an admirable project.”

Visit the site here.

Mimetoliths of the World

via wired
“Rocks weather and erode into all sorts of shapes that the imagination can interpret as familiar objects. Like clouds, these rock formations, sometimes called mimetoliths, may look like different things to different people. But some are unarguably humanoid. . . ”

See some examples of mimetoliths, here.

All Types of Wallpaper

via death by kerning

Check out the type-inspired iPhone & desktop wallpapers from typenuts.com.

New York Public Library to hold 500-person scavenger hunt in honor of 100th anniversary

via mybug 

“It's every book worm’s dream—a night at the New York Public Library. For the first time ever, the library said Thursday it will let select members of the public roam its main branch for a special after-hours event.

On May 20 the 42nd St. location will host a giant, modernized scavenger hunt to help commemorate the library's 100th birthday. ‘Find the Future: The Game’ will allow 500 contestants, split into teams of eight, to search for historic objects within the library, according to the library officials. The groups will use smart phones to get clues, leading them to items like a draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jack Kerouac’s glasses or Charles Dickens’ letter opener, fashioned out of his dead cat Bob’s amputated arm.”

Read the rest here, visit the New York Public Library site here; registration to participate starts at 9 a.m. today.

Visibility: Spotty

via shorpy

“Washington, D.C., circa 1911. ‘Flights and test of Rex Smith biplane flown by Antony Jannus. The plane with Rufus R. Bermann, wireless operator, and Fred Aubert.’ Whose somewhat pixilated appearance can be attributed to mold on the emulsion. Harris & Ewing Collection glass negative.”

View full size here. I love the almost surreal effect that the mold has created — it reminds me of early transporting in Start Trek.  

How to Steal Like an Artist and 9 Other Things that Nobody Told Me

1 + 1 = 3

via HOW

“I love it when creative people explain how their creativity works. Artist and writer Austin Kleon gave a presentation called How to Steal Like an Artist and 9 Other Things that Nobody Told Me yesterday at Broome Community College in Binghamton, New York, and was kind enough to share the slides.”

See the presentation here.

“What is a Typeface?” Alex

via speak up

“On Wednesday, November 7th, 2007, the show Jeopardy presented its 5,328th show, the quarterfinal of the Tournament of Champions. In the Double Jeopardy! Round, the three contestants were faced with the following category: Knowledge of Fonts. . . ”

See the answers and questions, here.

Kurt Weidemann Passes Away At Age 87

via the font shop

“. . . During a discussion at Swiss Mediaforum in 2010 [Kurt Weidemann] literally said: ‘There are ten, maybe fifteen very good typefaces, with which one can at least make do. There are 30,000 on the market, of which 29,990 can sink in the Pacific Ocean without causing any cultural damage.’ ”

Read the entire post here.