September 2007 Archives

''Yow!'

The boy's 'Yow!' echoes across the field like the sound of a horn. They build a snowman and riddle it with snowballs, and now dusk is coming and March sky is mad and lowering with angry, purple clouds. In a moment the sun is going to break through and flame in all the windows of Galloway, the mill windows will be a thousand red flambeaux, something will slant across the skies and over the river.

'Yow!''

'Jack Kerouac, The Town and the City, 1950.

'The streetlamp at the corner-store sways shadows in a big black dance, the store sign swings and creaks in the wind, leaves fly, apples thud to the ground in the orchards, the stars are blazing in the somber sky'everything is raw, smoky, and terrific.'

'Jack Kerouac, The Town and the City, 1950.

'a great essay (and a nice illustration, too) from The Nonist.

All of these shots were taken are along Highland Road, north of the LSU campus. I have long admired the TV Service wall. . . .

'What worries me now is what the regime is doing behind closed doors, at night, to the monks, to the people in jail.'

'Burmese diplomat.

In Burma, an unknown number of people were killed by soldiers yesterday, including a Japanese photographer who continued to take pictures as he died. Thousands of monks and ordinary citizens are in detention. Today, there are reports of people defying and confronting the soldiers, and also reports that some of the troops are refusing to obey orders. The split in the military may go all the way up to the top two leaders. The government shut down the internet yesterday, but news is still making its way out of the country. Cllck here (down here, on the caption) for the latest news I can find. I have been to Burma, it is a real place, and they are beautiful but terribly oppressed people!

'. . . Oh say can you see in the dark you
observe Minerva nerveless in Nirvana because
Zeus rides reindeer thru Bethlehem's blue sky.
It's Buddha sits in Mary's belly waving Kuan
Yin's white hand at the Jang-tze that Mao sees,
tongue of Kali licking Krishna's soft blue lips.'

'Allen Ginsberg, Holy Ghost on the Nod over the Body of Bliss, 1966, from Collected Poems 1947'1997.

'Six women dancing together on a red stage naked
The leaves are green on all the trees in Paris now
I will be home in two months and look you in the eyes'

'Allen Ginsberg, Message, 1958, from Collected Poems 1947'1997.

''I like a fine prospect, but not on picturesque principles. I do not like crooked, twisted, blasted trees. I admire them much more if they are tall, straight and flourishing. I do not like ruined, tattered cottages. I am not fond of nettles, or thistles, or heath blossoms. I have more pleasure in a snug farm-house than in a watch-tower'and a troop of tidy, happy villagers please me better than the finest banditti in the world.''

'Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 1811.

'Michael Bierut, at DesignObserver.com.

''ʇı̣ əsnqɐ ʇ,uɐɔ noʎ ɟı̣ əpoɔı̣un sı̣ pooɓ ʇɐɥʍ'

˙5002 'uoʇʍǝu dılıɥd'

'from 13 More Great Color Legends, another great article at COLOURlovers.com.

'The emerging International Typographic Style was exemplified by several new sans-serif type families designed in the 1950s. The geometric sans-serif styles, mathematically constructed with drafting instruments during the 1920s and 1930s, were rejected in favor of more refined designs inspired by . . . Akzidenz grotesk. . . . In 1954 a young Swiss designer working in Paris, Adrian Frutiger, completed a visually programmed family of twenty-one sans-serif fonts named Universe. . . .

In the mid-1950s, Edouard Hoffman of the HAAS type foundry in Switzerland decided that the Akzidenz Grotesk fonts should be refined and upgraded. Hoffman collaborated with Mex Miedinger, who executed the designs, andt their new sans serif, with an even larger x-height than that of Univers, was released as Neue Haas Grotesk. When this face was produced in Germany . . . the face name was [changed to] Helvetica, the traditional Latin name for Switzerland. Helvetica's well-defined forms and excellent rhythm of positive and negative shapes made it the most specified typeface internationally during the 1960s and 1970s.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'The Berthold Foundry [at the turn of the twentieth-century] designed a family of ten sans serifs that were variations on one original font. This Akzidenz Grotesk (called Standard in the United States) type family had a major influence on twentieth-century typography. In addition to . . . four weights . . . Berthold released three expanded and three condensed verions. Akzidenz Grotesk permitted compositors to achieve contrast and emphasis within one family of typefaces. It was a major step in the evolution of the unified and systematized type family.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'Sans-serif type made its modest debut in an 1816 specimen book issued by William Caslon IV. Buried . . . in the back of the book, one line of medium-weight monoline serifless capitals proclaimed 'W CASLON JUNR LETTER FOUNDER.' It looked a lot like an Egyptian face with the serifs removed, which is probably how Caslon IV designed it. . . .

Sans serifs, which became so important to twentieth-century graphic design, had a tentative beginning. The cumbersome early sans serifs were used primarily for subtitles and descriptive material under excessively bold fat faces and Egyptians. They were little noticed until the early 1830s, when several typefounders introduced new sans-serif styles. . . . Vincent Figgins dubbed his 1832 specimen sans serif in recognition of the font's most apparent feature, and the name stuck.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'Around 1790 [Giambattista] Bodoni redesigned the roman letterforms to give them a more mathematical, geometric, and mechanical appearance. He reinvented the serifs by making them hairlines that formed sharp right angles with the upright strokes. . . . The thin strokes of his letterforms were trimmed to the same weight as the hairline serifs, creating a brilliant sharpness and a dazzling contrast not seen before. . . . Bodoni's precise, measurable, and repeatable forms expressed the vision and spirit of the machine age.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'John Baskerville [was] an innovator who broke the prevailing rules of design and printing in fifty-six editions produced at his press in Birmingham, England. . . .

Baskerville's type designs, which bear his name to this day, represent the zenith of the transitional style bridging the gap between Old Style and modern type design. His letters possessed a new elegance and lightness. In comparison with earlier designs, his types are wider, the weight contrast between thick and thin strokes is increased, and the placement of the thickest part of the letter is different. The treament of the serifs is new: they flow smoothly out of the major strokes and terminate as refined points. His italic fonts most clearly show the influence of master handwriting.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'After apprenticing to a London engraver of gunlocks and barrels, young [William] Caslon opened his own shop and added silver chasing and the cutting of gilding tools and letter stamps for bookbinders to his repertoire of engraving skills. [He was encouraged] . . . to take up type design and founding, which he did in 1720 with almost immediate success. His first commission was an Arabic font for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. This was followed closely by the first size of Caslon Old Style with italic in 1722, and his reputation was made. For the next sixty years, virtually all English printing used Caslon fonts, and these types followed English colonialism around the glove. Printer Benjamin Franklin introduced Caslon into the American colonies, where it was used extensively, including for the offical printing of the Declaration of Independence. . . .

Beginning with the Dutch types of his day, Caslon increased the contrast between thick and thin strokes by making the former slightly heavier. . . . Caslon's fonts have variety in their design, giving them an uneven, rhythmic texture that adds to their visual interest and appeal. The Caslon foundry continued under his heirs and was in operation until the 1960s.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'Claude Garamond was the first punch cutter to work independently of printing firms. His roman typefaces were designed with such perfection that French printers in the sixteenth century were able to print books of extraordinary legibility and beauty. Garamond is credited, by the sheer quality of his fonts, with a major role in eliminating Gothic styles from compositors' cases all over Europe, except in Germany. . . .

Around 1530 Garamond established his independent type foundry to sell to printers cast type ready to distribute into the compositor's case. This was a first step away from the 'scholar-publisher-typefounder-printer-bookseller,' all in one, that began in Mainz some eighty years earlier. The fonts Garamond cut during the 1540s achieved a mastery of visual form and a tighter fit that allowed closer word spacing and harmony of design between capitals.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'[Geoffroy] Tory's Champ Fleury (subtitled The art and science of the proper and true proportions of the attic letters, which are otherwise called antique letters, and in common speech roman letters), first published in 1529, was his most important and influential work. It consists of three book. In the first, he attempted to establish and order the French tongue by fixed rules of pronunciation and speech. The second discusses the history of roman letters and compares their proprtions with the ideal proportions of the human figure and face. Errors in Albrecht D'rer's letterform designs in the recently published Underweisung der Messung are carefully analyzed, then D'rer is forgiven his errors because he is a painter. . . . The third and final book offers instructions in the geometric construction of the twenty-three letters of the Latin alphabet on background grids of one hundred squares. It closes with Tory's designs for thirteen other alphabets, including Greek, Hebrew, Chaldean, and his fantasy style made of hand tools.

Champ Fleury is a personal book written in a rambling conversational style with frequent digressions into Roman history and mythology. And yet its message about the Latin alphabet influenced a generation of French printers and punch cutters, and Tory became the most influential graphic designer of his century.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'An important humanist and scholar of the Italian Renaissance, Aldus Manutius, established a printing press in Venice at the age of forty-five to realize his vision of publishing the major works of the great thinkers of the Greek and Roman worlds. . . .

In 1501 Manutius addressed the need for smaller, more economical books by publishing the prototype of the pocket book. . . . [This] was set in the first italic type font. . . . Italic was closely modeled on the cancelleresca script, a slanted handwriting style that found favor among scholars, who liked its writing speed and informality.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'It was not Florence, where the wealthy Medicis scorned printing as inferior to manuscript books, but Venice . . . that led the way in Italian typographic book design. A Mainz goldsmith, Johannes de Spira, was given a five-year monopoly on printing in Venice, publishing his first book . . . in 1469. . . .

Nicolas Jenson, who had been Master of the Royal Mint of Tours, France, was a highly skilled cutter of dies used for striking coin. He established Venice's second press shortly after de Spira's death. . . .

Part of the lasting influence of Jenson's fonts is their extreme legibility, but it was his ability to design the spaces between the letters and within each form to create an even tone throughout the page that placed the mark of genius on this work. The characters in Jenson's fonts aligned more perfectly than those of any other printer of his time.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'In 1498 [Albrecht] D'rer published Latin and German editions of The Apocalypse illustrated by his monumental sequence of fifteen woodcuts. . . . D'rer's Apocalypse has an unprecedented emotional power and graphic expressiveness. . . . At age twenty-seven, D'rer earned reknown throughout Europe. . . .

His first book [as an author], Underweisung der Messung mit dem Zirckel unt Richtscheyt (A Course in the Art of Measurement with Compass and Ruler), [was published] in 1525. . . . The third chapter explains the application of geometry to architecture, decoration, engineering, and letterforms. D'rer's beautifully proportioned Roman capitals, with clear instructions for their composition, contributed significantly to the evolution of alphabet design. Relating each letter to the square, D'rer worked out a construction method using a one-to ten ratio of the heavy stroke width to height. This is the approximate proportion of the Trajan alphabet, but D'rer did not base his designs on any single source. Recognizing the value of art and perception as well as geometry, he advised his readers that certain construction faults could only be corrected by a sensitive eye and trained hand.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'from 11 Great Colour Legends, at COLOURlovers.com. Click here for the whole article.

'The Book of Revelation had a surge of unexplained popularity in England and France during the 1200s. A scriptorium at Saint Albans with high artistic standards seems to have figured prominently in this development. At least ninety-three copies of the Apocalypse survive from this period. . . .

The Douce Apocalypse, written and illustrated around A.D. 1265 is one of the many masterpieces of Gothic illumination. . . . The scribe used a lettering style whose repetition of verticals capped with pointed serifs has been compared to a picket fence. Textura (from the Latin texturum, meaning woven fabric or texture) is the favored name for this dominant mode of Gothic lettering. Other terms, such as . . . the English blackletter . . . are vague and misleading. During its time, textura was called littera moderna (Latin for 'modern lettering').'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'In 1424, only 122 manuscript books resided in the university library at Cambridge, England, and the library of a wealthy nobleman whose books were his most prized and sought-after possessions probably numbered less than two dozen volumes. The value of a book was equal to the value of a farm or vineyard.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'The origins of woodblock printing in Europe are shrouded in mystery. . . . Playing cards and religious-image prints were early manifestations. . . . Card playing was popular, and in spite of being outlawed and denounced by zealous clergy, this pastime stimulated a thriving underground block-printing industry, possible before 1400. . . . Playing cards were the first printed pieces to move into an illiterate culture, making them the earliest European manifestation of printing's democratizing ability. The games of kings could now become the games of peasants and craftsmen.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'The watermark, a translucent emblem produced by pressure from a raised design on the mold and visible when the sheet of paper is held to the light, was used in Italy by 1282. The origin of this design device is unknown. Trademarks for paper mills, individual craftsmen, and perhaps religious symbolism were early uses. As successful marks were imitated, they began to be used as a designation for sheet and mold sizes and paper grade. Mermaids, unicorns, animals, flowers, and heraldic shields were frequent design motifs.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

Jack Kerouac's On the Road was written in three weeks, between April 2 and April 22, 1951; famously typed on a single roll (individual leaves of tracing paper spliced together with tape). There were no paragraph breaks, it was a single column of text that just went and went, like a road. The novel wasn't published until 1957, six years after it was written. Jack Kerouac, meanwhile, rewrote the story in a completely different, almost Joycean style (eventually published in 1972 as Visions of Cody), even as he helped its eventual publisher, Viking, rework the original draft extensively. This involved, outside of choosing the paragraph breaks, streamlining the story, avoiding libel suits by changing the names and identities of the characters, and avoiding obscenity charges by removing several of the more startling, and hilarious, scenes. Well, here's the big news: 56 years later, Viking has finally published, for the general public, On the Road: The Original Scroll. Was worth the wait' For me (I was born in 1958 and I've waited my whole life for this) it definitely was. What a kick! I laughed with Jack, I cried with Jack. Was Jack a great writer' Undeniably he was. There is now a trifecta of versions of On the Road: the novel as released in 1957, Visions of Cody and now The Original Scroll. Which one is the 'real' book' Which one is the 'best' one' You'll have to read them all before you can decide.

'[Neal] and I suddenly saw the whole country like an oyster for us to open; and the pearl was there, the pearl was there.'

'Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll, 2007.

'And I had many a romantic fancy then, and sighed at my star. The truth of the matter is, you die, all you do is die, and yet you live, yes you live, and that's no Harvard lie.'

'Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll, 2007.

'There was a mystic wraith of fog over the brown waters that night, together with dark driftwoods; and across the way New Orleans glowed orange bright, with a few dark ships at her hem, ghostly fogbound Cereno ships with Spanish balconies and ornamental poops, till you got up close and saw they were just old freighters from Sweden and Panama.'

'Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll, 2007.

'At night in this part of the West the stars, as I had seen them in Wyoming, are big as Roman Candles and as lonely as the Prince who's lost his ancestral home and journeys across the spaces trying to find it again, and knows he never will.'

'Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll, 2007.

'I was suddenly left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy stars.'

'Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll, 2007.

'There was the Pacific, a few more foothills away, blue and vast and with a great wall of white advancing from the legendary Potato Patch where Frisco fogs are born. Another hour and it would come streaming through Golden Gate to shroud the romantic city in white, and a young man would hold his girl by the hand and climb slowly up a long white sidewalk with a bottle of Tokay in his pocket.'

'Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll, 2007.

'Great snowstorms overtook them. In Missouri, at night, Neal had to drive with his scarf-wrapped head stuck out the window with snowglasses that made him look like a monk peering into the manuscripts of the snow because the windshield was covered with an inch of ice.'

'Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll, 2007.

'Benny, tea, anything I KNOW none as good as coffee for real mental power kicks.'

'Jack Kerouac, in a 1951 letter to Neal Cassady; quoted by John Leland in Why Kerouac Matters, 2007.

'More and more as I grow older I see the beautiful dream of life expanding till it is much more important than gray life itself'a dark, red dream the color of the cockatoo.'

'Jack Kerouac, Journal, July 4, 1949; quoted by John Leland in Why Kerouac Matters, 2007.

We in graphic design call the graffiti and hand painted signage of a given area 'the vernacular.' And I have been impressed for years by the vernacular here in Baton Rouge. I don't know how many times I've said to myself 'I should take a picture of that.' So here it is, the first in a series. These unsigned heads face River Road just south of the I-10 bridge.

''So there was a old woman told my mammy once that if a woman showed her belly to the full moon after she had done caught, it would be a gal.''

'William Faulkner, Spotted Horses, 1940.

Bernard Maisner is a calligrapher and a specialist at historically accurate handwriting. And a movie star!

Niels 'Shoe' Meulman' is a Dutch graffiti artist, graphic designer, and calligrapher. He started tagging at the age of 16. Now he's 40 and his work is amazing. Click here to see his portfolio, which is worth checking out. And click here to watch a four-part interview with him on YouTube.

'Although by some reports he was illiterate except to sign his name, Charlemagne fostered a revival of learning and the arts. The England of the 700s had seen much intellectual activity, and Charlemagne recruited the English scholar Alcuin of York to come to his palace at Aachen and establish a school. . . . Many manuscripts were difficult, if not impossible, to read. Charlemagne mandated reform by royal edict in A.D. 789. . . .

Efforts to reform the alphabet succeeded. For a model, the ordinary writing script of the late antique period was selected [and] combined with Celtic innovations, including the use of four guidelines, ascenders, and descenders. . . . The Caroline miniscule is the forerunner of our contemporary lowercase alphabet. . . . Roman capitals were studied and adopted for headings and initials. . . . The use of a dual alphabet was not fully developed in the sense that we use capital and small letters today, but a process in that direction had begun.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'The codex, a revolutionary design format, began to suplant the scroll (called a rotulus) in Rome and Greece, beginning about the time of Christ. Parchment was gathered in signatures of two, four or eight sheets. These were folded, stitched, and combined into codices with pages like a modern book. . . .

Christians sought the codex format to distance themselves from the pagan scroll; pagans clung to their scrolls in resistance to Christianity. Graphic format thereby became a symbol of religious belief during the late decades of the Roman Empire.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'The Latin alphabet came to the Romans from Greece by way of the ancient Etruscans, a people whose civilization on the Italian peninsula reached its height during the sixth century B.C. After the letter G was designed by one Spurius Carvilius (c. 250 B.C.) to replace the greek letter Z (zeta), which was of little value to the Romans, the Latin alphabet contained twenty-one letters: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R (which evolved as a variant of P), S, T, V, and X. Following the Roman conquest of Greece during the first century B.C., the Greek letters Y and Z were added to the end of the Latin alphabet because the Romans were appropriating Greek words containing these sounds. . . .

Roman inscriptions were designed for great beauty and permanence. The simple geometric lines of the capitalis monumentalis (monumental capitals) were drawn in thick and thin strokes, with organically unified straight and curved lines. Each letterform was designed to become one form rather than merely the sum of its parts. Careful attention was given to the shapes of spaces inside and between the letters. . . .

Regardless of which tool initiated the serif as a design element, we do know that the original letters were drawn on the stone with a brush and then carved into it. The shapes and forms defy mathematical analysis or geometrical construction. . . . Some Roman Inscriptions . . . contain minute particles of red paint that have adhered to the stone through the centuries, leaving little doubt that the carved letters were painted with red pigment.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'The Phoenician alphabet was adopted by the ancient Greeks and spreak through their city-states around 1000 B.C. . . . The Greeks took the Phoenician or North Semitic alphabet and changed five consonants to vowels. . . . .

From a graphic design standpoint, the Greeks applied geometric structure and order to the uneven Phoenician characters, converting them into art forms of great harmony and beauty. The written form of Greek . . . has a visual order and balance as the letters move along a baseline in an even repetition of form and space. The letters and their component strokes are somewhat standardized because a system of horizontal, vertical, curved, and diagonal strokes is used. In the inscriptional form, the letters became symmetrical geometric constructions. . . . [M]any letterforms, including the E and M, are based on a square, A is constructed from an equilateral triangle, and the design of the O is a near-perfect circle.

Initially the Greeks adopted the Phoenician style of writing from right to left. Later they developed a writing method called boustrophedon, from the words meaning 'to plow a field with an ox,' for every other line reads in the opposite direction. Line one reads from right to left; then the characters do an about-face, and line two reads from left to right. . . . Finally the Greeks adopted the left-to-right reading movement that continues to this day in Western civilization.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'While the alphabet's inventors are unknown, Northwest semitic peoples of the western Mediterranean region'early Canaanites, Hebrews, and Phoenicians'are widely believed to be the source. The term North Semitic writing is used for early alphabetic writing found theoughout this region. Because the earliest surviving examples are from ancient Phoenicia . . . these early scripts are often called the Phoenician alphabet. During the second millennium B.C. the Phoenicians became seafaring merchants. Their sailing ships, the fastest and best engineered in the ancient world, linked settlements throughout the Medterranean region. Influences and ideas were absorbed from other areas, including Egypt and Mesopotamia. . . .

The Phoenicians absorbed cuneiform from Mesopotamia in the west and Egyptian hieroglyphics and scripts from the south. Possibly they had knowledge of Cretan pictographs and scripts and may have been influenced by them. . . .

The writing exported by the Phoenicians, a totally abstract and alphabetical system of twenty-two characters was in use by 1500 B.C.

Although North Semitic writing is the historical beginning of the alphabet, it may have descended from an earlier, lost prototype. Early alphabets branched into multiple directions, including the Phoenician alphabet that evolved further in Greece and Rome, as well as the Aramaic alphabet, which gave rise to Hebrew and Arabic writing elsewhere in the region.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'The Book of the Dead was a third phase in the evolution of funerary texts. Beginning with the pyramid of Unas (c. 2345 B.C.), the walls and passages of the pyramids were covered with the pyramid texts of hieroglyphic writings, including myths, hymns, and prayers relating to the godlike pharaoh's life in the afterworld. This practice was followed by the coffin texts. All surfaces of the wooden coffin and/or stone sarcophagus were covered with writings and often illustrated with pictures of possessions for use in the afterlife. Thus, high officials and noblemen could enjoy the benefits of funerary texts even though the cost of a pyramid was beyond their means.

The dawning of the New Kingdom, around 1580 B.C., saw papyrus manuscripts come into use for funerary texts. Even citizens of fairly limited means could afford to have at least simple papyri to accomany them on the journey into the afterlife. From pyramid to coffin to papyri'this evolution toward cheaper and more widespread use of funerary texts paralleled the increasingly democratic and secular aspects of Egyptian life.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'The development of papyrus, a paperlike substrate for manuscripts, was a major step forward in Egyptian visual communications. . . . Eight different papyrus grades were made for uses ranging from royal proclamations to daily accounting. The finished sheets had an upper surface of horizontal fibers called the recto and a bottom surface of vertical fibers called the verso. The tallest papyrus sheets measured 49 centimeters (19 inches), and up to twenty sheets would be pasted together and rolled into a scroll, with the recto side facing inward. . . .'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'Hieroglyphics consisted of pictograpms that depicted objects or beings. These were combined to deignate actual ideas, phonograms denoting sounds and determinatives identifying categories. When the early Egyptian scribes were confronted with words difficut to express in visual form, they devised a rebus, using pictures for sounds, to write the desired word. . . . At the same time they designated a pictorial symbol for every consonant sound and combination of consonants in their speech. . . . By the time of the New Kingdon this remarkably efficient writing system had over seven hundred hieroglyphs. . . .

The design flexibility of hieroglyphics was greatly increased by the choice of writing direction. One started from the direction in which the living creatures were facing. The lines could be written horizontally or vertically, so the designer of an artifact or manuscipt had four choices: left to right horizontlly; left to right in vertical columns; right to left horizontally; and right to left in vertical columns. Sometimes . . . these design possiblities were combined in one work.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'Mesopotamian cylinder seals provided a forgery-proof method for sealing documents and proving their authenticity. In use for over three thousand years, these small cylinders had images and writing etched into their surfaces. When they were rolled across a damp clay tablet, a raised impression of the depressed design, which became a 'trademark' for the owner, was formed. . . . Many such stones had a hollow perforation running through them so that they could be worn on a string around the neck or wrist. . . .

The widely traveled Greek historian Herodotus wrote that the Babylonians each wore a cylinder seal on a cord around their wrists like a bracelet. Prized as ornaments, status symbols, and unique personal signatures, cylinder seals were even used to mark a damp clay seal on the house door when the occupants were away. . . .'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'Cuneiform was a difficult writing system to master, even after the Assyrians simplified it to only 560 signs. . . .

The general public held those who could write in awe, and it was believed that death occured when a divine scribe etched one's name in a mythical Book of Fate.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'Around 2800 B.C. scribes turned the pictographs on their sides and began to write in horizontal rows, from left to right and top to bottom. . . . About three hundred years later, writing speed was increased by replacing the sharp-pointed stylus with a triangular-tipped one. This stylus was pushed into the clay instead of being dragged through it. . . . This innovation radically altered the nature of the writing; pictographs evolved into an abstract sign writing called cuneiform (from the Latin for 'wedge-shaped'). . . .

As early scribes developed their written language to function in the same way as their speech, the need to represent spoken sounds not easily depicted arose. Adverbs, prepositions, and personal names often could not be adapted to pictographic representation. Picture symbols began to represent the sounds of the objects depicted instead of the objects themselves. Cuneiform became rebus writing, which is pictures and/or pictographs representing words and syllables with the same or similar sound as the object depicted. Pictures were used as phonograms, or graphic symbols for sounds. The highest development of cuneiform was its use of abstract signs to represent syllables, which are sounds made by combining more elementary sounds.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'The early pictographs evolved in two ways: first, they were the beginning of pictorial art'the objects and events of the world were recorded with increasing fidelity and exactitude as the centuries passed; second, they formed the basis for writing. The images, where the original pictorial form was retained or not, ultimately became symbols for spoken-language sounds.

The Paleolithic artist developed a tendency toward simplification and stylization. Figures became increasingly abbreviated and were expressed with a minimum number of lines. By the late Paleolithic period, some petroglyphs and pictographs had been reduced to the point of almost resembling letters. . . .

The leap from village culture to high civilization occured after the Sumerian people arrived in Mesopotamia near the end of the fourth millennium B.C. . . .

One theory holds that the origin of visible language evolved from the need to identify the contents of sacks and pottery containers used to store food. Small clay tags were made that identified the contents with a pictograph and the amount through an elementary decimal numbering system, based on the ten human fingers.

The earliest written records are tablets from the city of Uruk. They apparently list commodities by pictographic drawings of objects accompanied by numerals and personal names inscribed in orderly columns. An abudance of clay in Sumer made it the logical material for record keeping, and a reed stylus sharpened to a point was used to draw the fine, curved lines of the early pictographs.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'In the eighteenth century two great type designers drew English printing, at least temporarily, out of the depths of dullness and ugliness into which it had fallen.

The first of these was the Englishman, William Caslon, whose business was casting, or 'founding,' type. Like Nicolas Jenson, Caslon had the skilled eye and hand of an engraver. . . . About 1724 he designed a type that came to be known as 'Caslon Old Face,' based largely on the fine letter forms of Jenson but a little less black and heavy, showing the free work of a fine artist. . . .

The other style of roman type designed in the eighteenth century, which had an even greater influence than the 'old-style' of Cason for a while, was what came to be known in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as modern. Its most successful designer, perhaps, was Giambattista Bodoni, an Italian printer working at Parma. Bodoni's modern letters have no gradual shading of thick lines or curves into thin as have the oldstyle; the thicks are very thick and black and the thins are almost hairlines. The serifs, instead of rounding gradually into the stem, are squared off at the ends of the main strokes. Bodoni's letters make an elegant, sparkling page but not so readable as one of Caslon's.'

'Oscar Ogg, The 26 Letters, 1961.

'Nicholas Jenson . . . former master of the mint at Tours . . . had been sent to Mainz in 1458 by the French king to learn Gutenberg's secret, [and] returned to France in 1461. Finding that the son of Charles VII, who had succeeded to the French throne, was not not interested in the new art, he emigrated to Italy where he met with more enthusiasm.

Some time before 1470 he started printing in Venice. He so perfected the roman small letters that his type forms became models not only for printers in his own day but for all since who have cared for the beautiful letter forms.

Jenson's type was beautiful, and the letters fitted harmoniously together on the page because he did not try to imitate handwriting, as did so many of the early printers and type-cuttters, but accepted honestly the medium in which he worked. He took as inspiration a fine manuscript hand, but only as inspiration, and then worked as an independent craftsman in metal. He did not try to follow the pen slavishly.

This French maker of coins and types brought much glory to Venice. . . . Another Venetian who followed him and used his fonts of type, however, won even greater fame both as printer and type designer. Aldus Manutius was his name.

Aldus . . . put more care into the designing and setting and arranging of his type and the actual printing than had most of his predecessors. He produced some of the finest books of all times. Others had printed large books; he made small and cheap ones, well printed and easy to read. A special type that he designed for these little books, based on a slanted 'familiar,' or local, handwriting was the first italic type.'

'Oscar Ogg, The 26 Letters, 1961.

'In 781 Charlemagne invited to his court a famous English scholar from York named Alcuin. . . . In 796 Alcuin, encouraged by Charlemagne, started a school at the Abbey of Saint Martin's at Tours. . .

First of all, Charlemagne gave Alcuin the job of managing the revision and rewriting of all Church literature. . . .

Alcuin set our first to teach his scribes to write as fine and readable a hand as possible. Fortunately he had leared to write the northern type of Angle-Saxon script, which ws the most beautiful then being written in England. It was a modification and further development of the semi-uncials of the Irish monks. Based on this form, a new style of writing which Alcuin developed at Tours was spread throughout Europe. . . .

The 'Caroline' alphabet (named for Charlemagne) which Alcuin designed, was a true 'small-letter' alphabet. . . . [T]he Caroline letters arrived at forms so closely akin to the letters we use every day . . . that the resemblance is immediately apparent. . . .

The sentence now started with a capital and continued with a true miniscule, not just a small capital.'

'Oscar Ogg, The 26 Letters, 1961.

'[I]n Roman letters . . . all the strokes are not of the same weight; some are thick, some are thin, and the curves show a gradual change from thick to thin. This characteristic was not necessarily designed; it, like the more flowing shape of the letters, came about because the tools which were used in developing the letters gave them that character naturally. The Roman alphabet was developed through writing as compared to drawing.'

'Oscar Ogg, The 26 Letters, 1961.

'The standard Greek alphabet had twenty-four letters; the standard late Roman alphabet had twenty-three; ours has twenty-six.

From the standard Greek alphabet the Romans took A, B, E, Z, H, I, K, M, N, O, T, X and Y with hardly any change at all. . . . Remodeling and finishing other Greek letters, the Romans produced C (and G), L, S, P, R, D and V. F and Q were taken from two old characters abandoned by the Greeks themselves. And that makes twenty-three. . . .

The missing letters, J, U and W, were not used by the Romans at all. U and W developed from V about a thousand years ago, and J developed from the letter I about five hundred years ago.'

'Oscar Ogg, The 26 Letters, 1961.

'The Phoenicians, we believe, supplied the Greeks with nineteen characters'all consonants, no vowels. They wrote entirely with consonants. . . . It was a sort of 'abbreviation' writing. We sometimes do almost the same thing as, for instance, yr for 'your' and bldg for 'building.''

'Oscar Ogg, The 26 Letters, 1961.

'One of the finest specimens of Phoenician writing, and also the oldest known one that can be dated, is an inscription in the alphabet of Tyre written in the reign of Mesha, king of Moab, early in the ninth century B.C. This inscription on a stone tablet with a rounded top known as the Moabite stone, was discovered in 1868 in the vicinity of the Dead Sea and is now in the museum of the Louvre in Paris.'

'Oscar Ogg, The 26 Letters, 1961.

The currency of Kyoorius Designyatra, a graphic design conference which took place in Goa (India) earlier this month. I can't believe I missed it!

'In India, when the Hindu god Brahma decided to write down his teachings, there were no letters for him to use so he invented some. His patterns came mainly from the seams in the human skull. Brahma, they say, traced the first Hindu characters with his finger on leaves of gold.'

'Oscar Ogg, The 26 Letters, 1961.

'Many peoples believe their language or system of writing to be of divine origin. The name of the Sanskrit alphabet is Devanagari, which means 'pertaining to the city of the gods.' Hieroglyphic, used by the ancient Egyptians for their formal documents, carved in stone, means 'sacred stone writing.' . . . The Assyrians had a legend to the effect that the cuneiform characters were given to man by the god Nebo, who held sway over human destiny. . . . The Mayas attributed writing to their most important deity, Itzamna. The lost prehistoric writing of Japan was styled kami no moji or 'divine characters.' As late as the Christian Middle Ages, Constantine the Philosopher (another name for Cyril, apostle to the Slavs) is described as having had Slavic writing revealed to him by God.'

'Mario Pei, The Story of Language, 1965.

'The Egyptian symbol for 'sun' was a picture of the sun. The spoken Egyptian word for 'sun' was re. The sun picture is often found in hieroglyphic inscriptions standing not for 'sun' but for the spoken syllable re occuring in a longer word.

It remained for the Phoenicians and Hebrews finally to use their symbols with the exclusively phonetic value of single syllables or consonants, dropping the ideographic connotation altogether. At this point, we have the beginning of a true phonetic alphabet.'

'Mario Pei, The Story of Language, 1965.

'The Greek alphabet, derived from the Phoenician, gave rise to the Etruscan, which in turn gave rise to the Roman, in use among western nations today.'

'Mario Pei, The Story of Language, 1965.

'[A] version of the Greek alphabet was devised by two bishops from Constantinople, Cyril and Methodius, for the Slavs to whom they brought Christianity in the ninth century. Faced with Slavic sounds which did not exist in Greek, they stretched the Greek alphabet as far as it would go, then drafted one or two Hebrew characters and invented others. The result was the Cyrillic alphabet used today by those nations which followed the Eatern Church'Russians, Ukranians, Serbs, and Bulgars.'

'Mario Pei, The Story of Language, 1965.

'[T]he German Gothic or Black Letter alphabet, first developed around the twelfth century from the earlier Carolingian script used by scribes at the court of Charlemagne and his successors. Black Letter was used in English till the sixteenth century, when it was replaced by the plainer Roman.'

'Mario Pei, The Story of Language, 1965.

''The colours of life in youth and age appear different, as the face of nature in spring and winter.''

'Samuel Johnson, Rasselas, 1759.

''Of the blessings set before you make your choice, and be content. No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of the spring: no man can, at the same time, fill his cup from the source and from the mouth of the Nile.''

'Samuel Johnson, Rasselas, 1759.

'Colors of Religion: Islam, an article at COLOURlovers.com. And COLOURlovers is only one of our new links. Check 'em out, they are all YOURS TO ENJOY!

'Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.'

'Virgina Woolf, quoted in Schott's Original Miscellany, 2003.

''Being now resolved to be a poet, I saw every thing with a new purpose; my sphere of attention was suddenly magnified: no kind of knowledge was to be overlooked. I ranged mountains and deserts for images and resemblances, and pictured upon my mind every tree of the forest and flower of the valley. I observed with equal care the crags of the rock and the pinnacles of the palace. Sometimes I wandered along the mazes of the rivulet, and sometimes watched the changes of the summer clouds. To a poet nothing can be uselsess.''

'Samuel Johnson, Rasselas, 1759.

'The sun is God.'

'J.M.W. Turner, the British landscape painter. His last words.

'Again to my great surprise there were 'all-coloured lights' which lighted and shone as diamonds on to every part of this house, even I tried my best to find out from where the lights were coming, but it was in vain, because it was not quenched both day and night. As it surprised me greatly I asked her about it, she replied''the power of lights is among my supernatural powers.''

'Amos Tutuola, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, 1954.

Yes, this is the book (or at least the title) that inspired one of the most influential record albums of 1980 (or at least its title), David Byrne and Brian Eno's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. The broken english is all sic and stet . . . it's just as Amos Tutuola wrote it.

'The flow of talk goes forward. Words or no words we must make a sound of voices to each other and we will; but it will be better if we can launch a thought now and then on the stream of words.'

'Robert Frost, quoted in Antaeus, 20th Anniversary Issue, 1990.

'The ugly little window proved accessible to the sunset; a fiery parallelogram appeared on the side wall. The cell was filled to the ceiling with the oils of twilight, containing extraordinary pigments.'

'Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, 1959.

This is the second prison novel I've read lately (the other being C'line's Fable for Another Time, what a rant!) and I am absolutely enjoying it. This is the better book.

'Not knowing how to write, but sensing with my criminal intuition how words are combined, what one must do for a commonplace word to come alive and to share its neighbor's sheen, heat, shadow, while reflecting itself in the process, so that the whole line is live iridescence; while I sense the nature of this kind of word propinquity, I am nevertheless unable to achieve it. . . .'

'Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, 1959.

'You are about to begin reading. . . . Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, 'No, I don't want to watch TV!' Raise your voice'they won't hear you otherwise''I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!' Maybe they haven't heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: 'I'm beginning to read!''

'Italo Calvino, quoted in Antaeus, 20th Anniversary Issue, 1990.

'The flower blazed between the angles of the roots. . . . It blazed a soft yellow, a lambent light under a film of velvet; it filled the caverns behind the eyes with light. All that inner darkness became a hall, leaf smelling, earth smelling, of yellow light.'

'Virginia Woolf, Between The Acts, 1941.

''Modern writers are the moons of literature; they shine with reflected light, with light borrowed from the ancients.''

'Ben Johnson, quoted in James Boswell's Life of Johnson, 1791.

''Idleness is a disease which must be combated; but I would not advise a rigid adherence to a particular plan of study. I myself have never persisted in any plan for two days together. A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good. A young man should read five hours in a day, and so may acquire a great deal of knowledge.''

'Ben Johnson, quoted in James Boswell's Life of Johnson, 1791.

??There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.??

—Ben Johnson, quoted in James Boswell?s Life of Johnson, 1791.