January 2011 – Green Chair Press Blog

Abecegoogle (most popular search letter)

smäll has an alphabet poster ordered according to popularity for each letter in Google search. (Their site is in Spanish, try using Google translator to read it in English). Without thinking much, you would probably guess that the one letter words A and I are miles ahead of any other searched letter (over 25 billion each). It falls off very quickly, with S, T and E at 4 billion (smäll speculates that S is third as it’s the abbreviation of saint and street). Look here to see the number of searches for all letters and the numbers 0-9.
Maybe more interesting would be an alphabet poster of the most searched words starting with each letter of the alphabet. (Check out Google Zeitgeist to see some of the phrases that were used most in searches in 2010.)

Share the Love

Heart Flat Notecard Set of 6 — Green Chair Press

Share the Love Too mini note cards, Green Chair Press

In time for Valentine’s Day, I have a few new letterpress printed things in my shop. From left to right:
Mini note cards, set of 6 with envelopes.

Heart note cards with red and pink envelopes, set of 6

Another set of 6 mini note cards with envelopes.

The mini note cards are business card-sized — 3-1/2″ x 2″ — and the heart note cards are A2 (or 5-1/2″ x 4-1/4″) and all are blank on the back. You can see all my note cards, tags and mini cards here.

Typographic Maps of Ursula Hitz

This is one of Ursula Hitz‘s limited edition hand lettered maps (this one of Central London, see them all here along with fonts and other prints.
Found on the Ministry of Type where there are 2 thoughtful posts (here and here) about making maps of words.

Haiku Economics

Stephen T. Ziliak, a professor of economics at the Roosevelt University, has a piece in the January issue of Poetry called “Haiku Economics.” He starts off:

I’m an economist. Yet poetry is my first stop on the way to invention—discovery of metaphors. No matter the audience, a model is a metaphor. Not every economist understands that. Poetry can fill the gap between reason and emotion, adding feelings to economics.

Read his entire article here.

More Artist’s Books on Etsy

As I mentioned recently there are now many people selling their bookworks on Etsy. Elena Mary Siff has gotten some of them together to form the The Alchemical Codex Society: Book Artists of Etsy. She’s posted samples of their work here.
The book sculpture to the left is entitled Sleeper on Book Birdie by Daniel Lai. He has many more book sculptures here.

En Origami

It can sometimes feel as if the world is very small. The other day my friend Richard, who I know from one part of my life — bike riding and my jobs as a computer programmer — and who knows my interest in paper and folding, sent me a link to an article about a En Origami, a specialty font. When I went to read it, I discovered the author is my book arts friend Kate Godfrey! In her article, she explains how En Origami was constructed but ultimately she says it’s really only good as a titling font: “En Origami is a feat of typographic engineering, but it is severely limited as a font… A T-shirt for the local origami club might be just the job for En Origami.” There’s a sample below. And Kate has other font reviews here.