Quick bites about whatever interests me, amuses me, or not.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
An 18 second flick through a first edition NYCTA Graphics Standards Manual designed by Massimo Vignelli of Unimark International in 1970.
The last poem in Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger’s notebook, via the Writers No One Reads Tumblr. The niece of Paul Celan, Meerbaum-Eisinger died at the age of eighteen of typhus in the Mikhailovska labor camp. Fifty-seven poems survived in a notebook titled Blütenlese (Harvest of Blossoms).
Tragedy:
Dec. 23, 1941
This is the hardest: to give yourself
and know that you are unwanted,
to give yourself fully and to think
that you vanish like smoke into the void.Translation by Pearl Fichman.
The birth of emoticons, one of 100 diagrams that changed the world: Emoticons made a discreet entrance, arriving in print for the first time in this March 30, 1881 issue of Puck magazine. The small item in the middle of this page gives four examples of ‘typographical art’ – joy, melancholy, indifference, and astonishment.
Is everything topsy-turvy these days? Even oil on the troubled waters produces storm instead of calm—and one by one time-honored institutions and conventions go by the board, but if the subjunctive mood goes, then all is lost.
Ida M. Mason (New York, March 12, 1924)
(Source: The New York Times)
Make sure you have the backing of your family and friends.” “Surround yourself with the right people.” “Call in all favors.” “Build a wide base of support.” “Promise everything to everybody.” “Communication skills are key.” “Don’t leave town.” “Know the weaknesses of your opponents — and exploit them.” “Flatter voters shamelessly.” “Give people hope.
Cicero’s advice to candidates – how little has changed in 22 centuries. (via explore-blog)
Peanuts Creator Dealt With Copyright Infringers Using Kindness and Snoopy
Panama hat, top hat, 35 champagne glasses, 5 oyster-knives, one tiger skin… A partial illustrated inventory of Gustave Flaubert’s personal effects by Joanna Neborsky, as catalogued 12 days after the writer’s death – best thing since the lists, to-dos and illustrated inventories of great artists.
Table of Physiological Colors Both Mixt and Simple by Richard Waller, 1686 – a predecessor to Goethe’s famous color wheel from Theory of Colours. Waller’s table provided a cross-reference for colors one might find in nature. If a shade didn’t match exactly, he proposed, it was a simple matter of locating where on the table’s color-continuum that shade might fall.
