This is a video of “Remember,” an installation by John Powers that makes music with old typewriters. The video is from the Universtiy of Alabama website. Power’s has another video and more photos on his own website (it doesn’t have the background music so you can really hear the typewriters playing).

… or so says Robert Bringhurst in The Elements of Typographic Style. He also says

Since the ampersand is more often used in display work than in ordinary text, the more creative versions are often the more useful. There is rarely any reason not to borrow the italic ampersand for use with roman text.

My recent computer woes are boring even to me so suffice it to say that over the past week I’ve been forced into a lot of digital house cleaning. As I hunted around for what I might do to get my various blogs and websites to use less bandwidth, less disk space, less memory and to load faster, I happened on this post about coding web pages to use “the best available” ampersand (that’s where the opening quotes come from). Of course I side-tracked myself completely by reading the entire post, plus comments, and clicking on lots of links (like Robert Rutter’s The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web. ) But I think it would be over-kill (even for me) to have the desktop wallpaper of ampersands mentioned at the end of the post — especially in all black! — see below (or go here for every format imaginable).

I’m continuing to read books on my kindle — I’m currently wading through James’ The Bostonians — and I like it better and better for reading in bed. Despite what xkcd says in the comic above, the web access may be free but the built-in browser is horrible.
My friend Cathy sent me a link to this wonderful interview with Ann Krischner where she compares reading Dickens’ “Little Dorrit” 4 different ways: as a paperback, as an audio book, on her Kindle and on her iPhone. The first question in the interview cuts to the heart of the big issue with the kindle (at least for me): “Do you love reading or do you love books?” (My answer: reading.) The interview is posted 2 ways — as a podcast and a transcript. I must say that I really liked reading along as I listened, seemed to make me listen more attentively.

One of the prints I liked best in the printer’s swap I participated in earlier this year is this print of an iris by Hijiri. On her blog, she has several posts on the process of making the print, from inspiration to printing to finish…

I’ve been too busy with other stuff recently to think much about my own bookmaking projects. Last month my computer died unexpectedly (isn’t that always the way it works?) and I had to get a new one with an updated operating system. For a while it looked like I wasn’t going to convince my very old but much loved inkjet printer to work with my new setup and as I looked at large format inkjet printers as replacements, I began dreaming up new projects to try. But after more cajoling, my faithful printer is working again, so why spend the money and (much worse) considerable learning time on a new one?
But there must be something in the air, because small nudges to work on something new seem to happen every day. Yesterday my friend Kate sent a link to a contest at Lulu: Create a Mini Photography Book. Win $500. Even if I don’t enter the contest, their new mini books have interesting possibilities. They have 2 sizes, 3.75×2.5 and 5.25×3.5. The smaller one is $3.99 each for a 20 page book, and I probably couldn’t make a small edition for that price (see all the details here).
And then came a call for entries for Broadsided! The Intersection of Art and Literature, an exhibition of letterpress printed broadsides in October in Portland…. guess I better get busy!