New on Etsy: Greenolive Textiles from Australia handprints fabrics with designs “based on prints from their collection of old wooden type blocks.. (and).. is inspired by a graphic designer’s love of typography and wooden type.” They are sold by the “not-quite-fat quarter.” They have more abstract designs too. Check out their shop here.
 Nikki Dahlke bought one of my flipbooks, and that’s how I found her blog Only Flipbooks! where she displays movies she’s made of flipping the flipbooks she buys… That’s one of the books she shows off, to the left.
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 To end the week, a lovely-to-look-at ampersand, from the Ampersandland pool of photos on Flickr.
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A few weeks ago, Marty Weil asked to interview me for his blog, “ephemera: exploring the world of old paper.” On Etsy, the tag line for my shop is “Green Chair Press: letterpress, books, ephemera,” but formulating answers to his questions made me think anew about “ephemera” and if I really made such a thing. The current common definition seems to be paper items — posters, broadsides, tickets and the like — that were originally meant to be tossed after use but along the way become collectibles. Saying I make things that are too good to throw away does seem a bit presumptuous! You’ll find more of my musings if you read the interview here.
Finding an illustration for this post was a challenge! So I resorted to my own “ephemera” collection — perfume bottles (I wrote about them and collecting here) — including several ads torn from old Vogue magazines. That’s one of them to the left, illustrated by Marcel Vertes, from 1949.
The traditional reference mark is the asterisk *. The lesser known reference marks are much nicer — the dagger and double dagger. Hoefler and Frere-Jones have a blog post about reference marks, with examples — the ones on the right are from one of their new font, Sentinel.
They’ve written about other punctuation marks — see my blog post about those.
And in case you’re wondering about the title of this post, it refers to the anatomy of the dagger: the quillon is the guard that separates the hilt of a knife from its blade, and the choil is the notch where the blade meets the quillon.
Ork Posters, the people who do the city neighborhood posters, have branched out a bit with this new map-like poster “Gotta Have Heart.” See it here. I like it in black & tan, but it comes in color (red, pink, orange) too.