Reviews and other ponderings
I heard an interview with Prof Daniel Oppenheimer on the radio this morning, where he was discussing his discovery that people remember a text more accurately if it has been printed using a less legible font. He speculates that the effect may be the result of the brain having to work harder to read an [...]
See the ‘My sinful earth’ bit at the end of the first line repeated at the start of the second? Some editors replace the repeated words with dots like this: [...]. Wikipedia talks about it here. I remember being amazed when I found out about this: I had read the sonnet many time without realising [...]
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a Nineteenth century art movement which thought that art had taken a wrong turn around the time of Raphael. A friend and I once formed a two man movement of our own: The Pre-Gutenberg Brotherhood. It is difficult to make ourselves aware of all the things that we take for granted, [...]
When Steve Jobs saw the first LaserWriter, in 1982, he seems to have had one of his great moments of insight. He knew that this was going to change the world. In fact, he immediately tried to buy the company, Adobe, who had invented it, but they turned him down. Undeterred, he got Apple to [...]
At one time, I was probably the biggest typographical snob (and bore) you were ever likely to meet. I grew up in a house littered with books about typography, and beautiful books. My grandfather typeset private press books, using hot metal, well into his eighties. My father had helped develop page layout software and hyphenation [...]