I have a table at the Pyramid Atlantic Book Arts Fair in Silver Springs, MD this coming weekend (Sat Nov 17, 1-6pm and Sun Nov 18, 1-5pm). Please do stop by if you’re in the area. Information about location and the rest of the event schedule is here.
I’ve got a table at the Bay Area Book Artist’s Book Arts Jam, in Palo Alto, California on Saturday — October 20 from 10am – 4pm. Directions and a list of all the exhibitors is on the BABA website. If you’re in the area, please stop by and say hello!
I ran across a blog I didn’t know the other day — dictionary.com’s hot word — with a post called What character was removed from the alphabet but is still used every day?. The answer is & and the post gives the history of the symbol as well as the origin of the word “ampersand”
The word “ampersand” came many years later when “&” was actually part of the English alphabet. In the early 1800s, school children reciting their ABCs concluded the alphabet with the &. It would have been confusing to say “X, Y, Z, and.” Rather, the students said, “and per se and.” “Per se” means “by itself,” so the students were essentially saying, “X, Y, Z, and by itself and.” Over time, “and per se and” was slurred together into the word we use today: ampersand.
The illustration above is from Wikipedia, and shows the evolution of the symbol, from Old Roman cursive, reed pen, 131 AD on the left to the modern one on the right.
Illustrator Fuchsia Macaree has created an a-z of untranslatable words in various languages. To the left is age-tori, a Japanese word meaning “to look worse after a haircut.” See them all here.
Due to a series of vexing computer and printer issues this past week, I didn’t make much progress on last week’s prompt challenge word, so I’m going to keep it for next week.
In the meantime, it’s PI Day tomorrow, March 14. I found this pi book by Pat Sweet on Etsy. She says:
This is a tiny book containing four recipes for Pi:
1. the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.
2. Wallis’ Product
3. the Gregory-Leibniz series
4. Viele’s Formula
– all running through the book in parallel , with increasing complexity. This sounds pretty dry, unless you’re a Pi-est, so I’ve sweetened the book with two magnificent endpapers, depicting a giant metallic PI lounging on a Hawaiian beach, and in a snowy Norwegian forest. The typeface was chosen to evoke memories of old elementary school textbooks.
Do check out all of Pat’s other fun miniature books here.
This recent post on Boing-boing wondered about something they’d seen in 2008:
Vanessa Mancini’s project to build a functional sculpture: a bathtub made from deconstructed books fitted together and then sealed so that one could “bathe in knowledge.” It’s a beautiful artifact, though I can’t find any evidence that it was ever finished.
The artist said, back then,
The idea is of immersing oneself in knowledge, books, truths, and ‘cleaning’ or ‘purifying’ one’s mind with from external, every day life bombarding from media, by reading ad reflecting on books…