The origin of “ampersand”

Evolution of the ampersand
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.

Winter’s Song

When I started working out the design for my book Summer in Vermont, I also was playing around with a set of haiku I’d written about winter. Turns out I have a lot of them, probably owing to the how novel winter, cold and snow have been to me since moving to Santa Fe from California. The Vermont book got finished first, but I continued working on the one about winter, especially when, in the week or so it took me to assemble the book, I got tired of standing at my work bench.
I wanted to keep exploring the idea of having a surprise at the end of the book, in the form of a pop-up or shadow box. And I wanted to use the new cutting machine I’d bought. The result is another miniature book, Winter’s Song. Like the Vermont book, it’s 8 spreads — that’s one below. You can see all the spreads here. The last page folds out to reveal a final haiku and pop-up, papercut illustration.

Spread from my book Winter’s Song

Pop-ups and Papercuts

Winter’s SongAbout a month ago, I splurged and bought a cutting plotter — it cuts and scores shapes one has designed in Illustrator. I’ve wanted to make a few pop-up books, but all the hand-cutting has been a big deterrent.
I’ve spent the past several weeks learning the foibles of the machine. My first “pop-up” was a simple papercut to illustrate one of my haiku — that’s it to the left.

Threshold: Another Turkish Map Fold Example

Threshold by Casey GardnerThis book, Threshold by Casey Gardner, is another of my growing examples of books using the Turkish Map Fold. It looks like she’s printed on both sides of the fold, and incorporated text on the sheet that holds the map fold. The book is letterpress printed, and revolves around a story inspired by Ovid’s tale of Daphne and Apollo in The Metamorphosis.
On her website, Casey also has a book inspired by a game she played with a friend that is like the prompt challenge I did earlier this year. Casey says:

…one day my friend Nance O’Banion and I decided to begin a game where we’d write a bunch of words down, then each time we saw each other, we’d choose one randomly. The next time we met, we’d give each other a completed project based on that word.

You can see the book she did in response to the word “ignite” here — click on the arrow keys above the first photo to see many more detailed images.