December 2010 – Green Chair Press Blog

Jeannine Mosely’s Origami Bud

My friend Tracey sent me an article about Jeannine Mosley, who’s been folding paper since she was 5 and has never gave up her origami habit. I really love the ones to the left. (You can make your own, it’s called a “Square-Based Origami Bud” and the instructions are here.)
Mosely is an expert on minimalist origami, in which one is restricted to just four folds. She has constructed an entire alphabet—both upper and lower cases—of minimalist origami letters (unfortunately I can’t find a picture of them).
She also builds 3D structures, like the Menger’s Sponge out of 66,048 business cards. You can see photos of the process of building the structure here and here.

Octothorpe & a Typography Blog

What do you call the symbol on the left? And do you ever use it? I’d say “pound” and I type it fairly regularly when doing scripting for websites I work on — most commonly to introduce a comment in the script. But it’s got lots of other names: hash, octothorpe, hex and even more uses (see here on wikipedia).
Why am I thinking about the octothorpe? As I notice more and more twitter feeds on the blogs I read, I wonder why the twitter folks picked # to preface tags. I went off to figure it out, and found a nice typography blog on British newspaper, the Guardian, website. They recently ran a post on the rise of the usage of the octothorpe. Check out all the posts here.

Facsimile of The Macclesfied Alphabet Book

Two years ago I wrote about the Macclesfield Alphabet Book and the British Library’s attempt to buy this beautiful book. They raised the funds, bought the book and are now selling facsimiles. It’s described as

… an exquisitely beautiful 15th-century English ‘pattern’ book, probably used by artists for the transmission of ideas to assistants, or as a sample book to show potential customers. Only a handful of such books survive. The manuscript contains 14 different types of decorative alphabets. These include an alphabet of decorative initials with faces; foliate alphabets; a zoomorphic alphabet of initials, and alphabets in Gothic script. In addition there are large colored anthropomorphic initials modeled after 15th-century woodcuts or engravings, as well as two sets of different types of borders, some of which are fully illuminated in colors and gold. The manuscript was acquired by the British Library in 2009. It had been in the library of the Earl of Macclesfield since about 1750, and until recently its existence was completely unknown.

Below is a scan of one page. Many more here. You can buy it, for $50-$60, here.

Illuminated Poetry

As part of a poetry festival in Madrid, Luzinterruptus stuffed 1000 envelopes with poems and small lights and hung them in a garden outside the festival. On the final night of the event, people could take an envelope as a keepsake or address the envelope to a friend or loved one. Luzinterruptus collected the envelopes and sent them off. You can see pictures of preparing the poems and lots of photos of the installation here (the site is written in Spanish, but there’s an English translation if you scroll down).

New Wood Type for Letterpress

This past fall, Bill Jones bought the original patterns for around 100 typefaces from the now defunct American Wood Type Manufacturing Company as well as a large pantograph for cutting wood type. He’s set up shop in his garage and has started producing “entire fonts, alphabets for collectors, sorts and fill-in characters to complete a font, and ornaments.” He’s now offering 5 fonts on his website, Virgin Wood Type. Jones writes about making one of the fonts, Rugged, here. A while back, I wrote a post about another guy making wood type with a pantograph — that post has links to pictures of cutting the type as well as a youtube video.

Star Gazing Along a Meandering Path

About a month ago, I read an article in the NY Times about the 16th century astronomer Tycho Brahe, who died under mysterious circumstances in 1601 — was he poisoned by a rival astronomer, Johannes Kepler, or did his bladder burst? The article about the attempts to solve the mystery is quite interesting, and turns out Brahe wasn’t such a nice guy.
One reason I noticed the article in the first place is that I had used Brahe’s star chart of the 1572 supernova in the constellation Cassiopeia (to the left) in a little book I made some years ago, Jean Follain’s poem “Music of Spheres” (see bottom of this post). One of the things I like best about living in Santa Fe is that I can see the stars and planets at night. Reading the article and finding my book again reminded me to go check out our night sky — which I’ve been doing regularly since then.
So I suppose it was bound to happen that I’ve been running across star-themed things and articles for the past few weeks. I think my favorite are these Constellation Eco Cards — “Each card contains an astronomically accurate representation of one of the ten most prominent constellations found in the Northern and Southern hemispheres; the diameter of each star on your card is directly related to that star’s brightness.” Another one, appropriate for this time of year, is this star ornament you can make yourself.

Music of Spheres
by Jean Follain
translated form the French by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Hass

He was walking a frozen road
in his pocket iron keys were jingling
and with his pointed shoe absent-mindedly
he kicked the cylinder
of an old can
which for a few seconds rolled its cold emptiness
wobbled for a while and stopped
under a sky studded with stars.