Word & Letter Play

A 1910 spelling game from Germany. 
Bonus points kids for texting in black letter! Hint: mind the word gaps. 

Source: Antique Pool

A rewarding game of wordmaking and taking from 1877 with an 

even more rewarding wood engraved label design.

Source: The Big Game Hunter

A charming crossword game from 1954.
Source: Etsy Paper Creations

 A French wordgame of strategy using letter tiles.
Source: Etsy lestrictmaximum 

Construct the alphabet and a cottage tower at the same time with 
The New Alphabet Game from 1850.
Source: The V&A Museum 

The Super Spelling Card Game from Sylabex.
Source: Etsy Kipperbone 

Scrabble's 1972 Alphabet Game featuring a questionable 
child labor practice of lugging large letters.
Source: eBay

A Velveteen Rabbit

For sale 

Velveteen rabbit. Needs good home. Ears permanently flopped and has obvious signs of being well-loved. Smartly attired, yet missing red buttons and one torn suspender. Reads at four year-old level, and comes with own book. Inquire within.

Book Dominoes Theory

The Seattle Public Library recently celebrated the season opener of Summer reading and dominoes. And they also got one for the record book for successfully creating the world's longest book domino chain. You know what they say about the domino theory; reading one book will just lead on to another. Thanks Book Patrol! 

First Books of Many

Happy Children's Book Week! It almost escaped me again this year. Doesn't Hallmark have a greeting card for this? Evidently CBW has been around since 1919 with book and reading events held nationwide in schools, libraries, and bookstores. Even Google maps has a national CBW page of events with listings ongoing through Sunday, May 19th. So I have no excuse for being late to the party, except to honor it by including some of my favorite found first's. Not first edition first's, mind you; but first book's of reading. Still looking for that special First Book of Typography title, but I may have to write and design it myself.
   

See more of Langston Hughes delightful book, deftly illustrated by Cliff Roberts at We Too Were Children, Mr. Barrie.

For the budding geologist, from Calsidyrose's Flickrstream.

A 1957 first from Vintage Nelly's Etsy bookshelf. Don't they realize they are on the cover of the first ever book they are reading? 

A 1951 gem from Brain Pickings, where you can see more of Jeanne Bendick's lovely illustrations.

See more of Mark Hearld's remarkable illustrations at St. Jude's Prints. There are words in it too. 

Another first from Calsidyrose, and naturally, with the great title. A revised 1956 edition.

I'm not sure this is the first book I would want to remember reading, but what great illustrations. Via Steph's Flickrstream.

From Farm to Book via liz and jay books n' more.

The first, though maybe not the last conchologists book. First published in 1839 originally under Edgar Allan Poe's name, although he never claimed he was the author. He was more likely the editor or compiler and translator of the work, and also wrote the preface and the introduction. Natural history books were very popular reading in the 19th century, and I guess conchology was no exception.

Another Jeanne Bendick illustrated book with astronaut space walkers on the cover. What could they possibly be spraying in space? Maria Popova at Brain Pickings reports that Bendick authored and illustrated over 100 mid-century children's science and technology books. Read and learn more about this wonderful 1953 book at Brain Pickings. The illustrations are out of this world. 

Tom Waits Reads Bukowski

A short animation of Charles Bukowski's poem, The Laughing Heart, read by Tom Waits. Produced in 2011 by Bradley Bell for a student project at the Chelsea College of Art and Design. For another take, you can watch Waits read this same poem in 2008, along with another by Bono. 
::H/t to Mix

Gnomes With Books

Some seriously sad looking indoor garden gnomes who need shelter. Would be happy to just take up space on a bookshelf, safe from roaming dogs and feral cats. Available on Etsy.

An outdoor garden gnome with his head in a book will make any garden look smart. This little guy is up for adoption on eBay.

This bookish gnome found at Tracy's Toys is from Germany and made of high-quality vinyl by Heissner, one of the oldest German gnome makers. He is most likely from the 1950s or 60s. The little reading gnome below is homeless near as I can tell. I can't find the site he was originally located, but wanted to share him just the same.  

That Readin' Stuff is Out of Sight

Before he was God or Nelson Mandela, Morgan Freeman played the hipster, Easy Reader on the children's TV show, The Electric Company in the seventies. Alongside him here was actress Rita Moreno playing Carmelita. Uh, uh, uhhh!

::A shout out to Book Patrol where Easy Reader is featured on Book Patrol TV, episode 4. 

Summer Reading Rap

Yes, I am putting a wrap on things while Letterology goes on Summer vacation for next 2 weeks. Stay tuned for some "best of" Summer rewinds. Meanwhile, if anyone has some book or type-related suggestions of things to do, places to go, or events to see in the Boston to Nova Scotia corridor during that time, please let me know. Letterology is going on the road. 
::Hat's off to Maria Popova at ExpLore for DeStorm's book title rap. 

The Story of The Book

"Books are more than the sum of their parts" according to bookseller Jonathan Kearnes who describes the hold books have upon us. He and London bookseller Adrian Harrington each provide a historical context for the significant influence books have had in our lives over several centuries. They also praise the digital eBook for making more texts available to the public. Their professional insights provide a fascinating narrative of the historical book and the future of the publishing industries. I surely hope it ends well. 
::Thank you Book Patrol. ;)

No Match for Reading Books

Proof positive from Dept. B: people still read books of all kinds. 
::From Inferno55's Flickrstream.

The eBook 2.0

The book bar has been raised by the students at KAIST Institute of Information Technology Convergence in Korea. Reading and navigating is about to get easier with their development of a smart eBook system. Pretty remarkable!
::Via Maria Popova at TBWA

Frankenstein meets Frankenfont

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, reinvented from fragments of PDF fonts by the team at Fathom Information Design in Boston.
A team of visual storytellers from Fathom lead by data-viz wiz Ben Fry, recently recreated the entire text of Frankenstein using characters and glyphs from over 64,000 PDF documents obtained through internet searches. Precisely 55,382 different glyph shapes were extracted from 347,565 fonts in the PDFs, which were then coded and sequenced to fill all of the 342,889 individual letters found in the Frankenstein text. What emerges from this DNA-like sequencing is a new Frankenfont creation formed from font fragments by Fathoms' Fry and friends.
      The story opens with the display of the most common characters such as Arial, Helvetica and Times New Roman. As the story of the Frankenstein monster evolves, so does the text which is coded to completely devolve into grotesque shapes near the end. Familiar glyphs and fonts merge into obscure scripts; non-Roman fonts begin to appear; and even typefaces morph into pictograms. This Frankenfont transformation becomes the perfect metaphor for Shelley's classic tale of the deformed monster Frankenstein. 

While most books are typically designed to interpret the authors' words with little fanfare and with an obedience to convention as Stanley Morrison once put it, Fry's new Frankenfont edition plays with our sense of order, and the traditional design principles such as consistency, navigation and readability go entirely out the window. As a teacher of book design and typography for many years, I strongly advocate these principles of convention to my students. Afterall, books have been successfully published in this manner for over 500 years. Despite this endorsement, I'm also a big fan of innovation and experimentation in books. In Fry's edition of Frankenstein, a hallmark of book design and innovation has been reached with this conceptual approach to text layout.
      As a timely sidenote to this story, the topic of a frankenfont came up in my classroom just 2 weeks ago when Kevin Larson from the Advanced Reading Technologies Department at Microsoft, was speaking to my students about readability studies of various typefonts and individual characters. Larson is a text enthusiast and has published many studies on the science of word recognition and legibility of characters. The suggestion of a frankenfont was mentioned in jest as one which could build upon the best characters of many fonts in order to achieve greater legibility. The next day, my student Susan Schumacher added a post on our class Facebook page with a link to Fathom's new Frankenfont edition of Frankenstein.
      Copies of the Frankenfont project can be purchased in paperback or hardback editions on Blurb with all profits given to Donors Choose to buy books for students. Incidently, Ben Fry was recently awarded a National Design Award in Interaction Design in June from the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. 

All of the nearly 5500 unique words to be found in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. (Click image to expand). The key to any great novel is to put them all in the right place ; )
:: Thanks to James Gaddy of Co.Design for packaging this story so nicely.

Festival of the Book Poster

Missed out on the 2011 Montana book festival, but caught the poster on a recent visit to the Exile Bibliophile site. Host Benjamin Clark tells me it was designed and illustrated by Joana Yardley. I just want to be inside this Montana poster, and reading by alpenglow beside the lake. Very dreamy! 

Time to Get Busy Reading

no no no no no no no yes no...
::Via the Letterology Archives

Just my Type of Book

Just My Type from Pentagram on Vimeo.

Released in the UK last Fall, Just My Type, by Simon Garfield will be released tomorrow, September 1st, in the US. I love this book (cover design; not so much). It is indeed a great read—like a pleasant walk through the long corridor of type history! Maria Popova over at Brain Pickings, just included it in a great post on her list of the 10 Essential Books on Typography. You can also read more about it in my earlier Letterology post here which has some cool links.

Any Book in a Storm

Recently seen at WORD bookstore in Brooklyn NY.
::Via ShelfAwareness

Reading for Pleasure

Donald Brun poster, 1966

Oliver Jeffers Book, 2004

Don't miss Shelley Davies' recent post on reading as seen through the eyes of designers, artists and illustrators. These 2 selections are just a sneak preview of her entire archive of readers. It is such a pleasure to see them all in one place. Delightful! 

Read! Read! Read! Read! Read! Read!

In early 1971, a city librarian in the town of Troy, Michigan wrote to dozens of actors, authors, artists, politicians, writers and musicians and asked them to write a letter to the children of Troy about the importance of libraries and books. These 3 letters above were among 97 letters she received in reply. Read the full story here. As usual, these images are always clickable.
:: From the Troy Library Flickrstream.

Summer Reading

Dames in dunes. From Jan Willemsen's Flickr page.

Early 20th century image of man floating in the Dead Sea. You can see the stereo version of this photo on Thiophene Guy's Flickr page.

Who Doesn't Like Books?

          





















Top: Bookplate from Library Mistress' Photostream. Middle: From Los Angeles Public Central Library, Bookplate Collection. Designed by "Binner".  Lastly: Ex Libris from Los Angeles Public Central Library, Bookplate Collection. Design by A.R., 1919.