Recovering the Doves Type

If you're a bibliophile like I am, you might have noticed that the endpapers of hardcover editions usually include a note about the typefaces used in the book. (For a more general layman's overview of the history of typography, I recommend the book Just My Type by Simon Garfield.) While the origin stories of typefaces might seem a relatively dry topic, they sometimes make for fascinating tales of adventure and intrigue. To wit, that of the Doves Type, one of the most influential typefaces of the past couple of centuries:

http://creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2015/february/recovering-the-doves-type

The improbable saga of their recovery seems like something straight out of a Sherlock Holmes novel! (If compelled to choose one, I'd compare it to The Sign of the Four.)  But it's the ending that strikes me; after such a journey, the "treasure hunter" and type designer Robert Green notes that he'll never sell the portion of the typeface that he kept for himself, saying, "It’s too precious. I feel very attached to it now I’ve retraced Cobden-Sanderson’s steps and stood on that very same spot of the bridge." I can sympathize with a sentimental attachment to a piece of history that becomes an obsession! It's fundamentally human to assign value to artifacts of culture, even those that seem a small and incidental portion of a more significant work.

Sochi 2014: Where can I buy a rainbow flag?

I've been watching the Winter Olympics this weekend (mostly for the figure skating, which is wonderful). I've also been keeping abreast of Putin's crackdown on LGBT rights and the subsequent displays of pride and solidarity from other countries. Here's an excellent little video by The Guardian, wherein a number of British celebrities learn how to say "Where can I buy a rainbow flag?" in Russian:

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/video/2014/feb/07/learn-russian-protest-anti-gay-laws-sochi-winter-olympics-video

Neil Gaiman! Stephen Fry!

Because damn it, Putin, you're not going to bring Russia into the twenty-first century without some twenty-first century values -- among which are equal rights for all citizens, including gay ones. (Yes, we have a ways to go on this issue in the US as well.)

BBC: Royal Pardon for Alan Turing (Finally!)

Two days ago, fifty-nine years after he was driven to suicide by discrimination and the overwhelming solitude of misunderstanding, Alan Turing finally received a royal pardon for violating the so-called "gross indecency" laws of his time:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25495315

Though his downfall was perhaps not as well-publicized and posthumously noted as that of Oscar Wilde in the century before his, it was no less a travesty for humanity. (And to think that society had not budged an inch on homosexuality between 1900 and 1954!) Turing was one of the finest cryptanalysts in history, as well as one of the founding fathers of modern computer science, and he was just forty-one years old when he died. One can't help but wonder what great and wonderful things he might have accomplished in his later years had he lived.

I am reminded, somewhat, of the story of Johnny Gunther, immortalized in his father's memoir Death Be Not Proud. Gunther was another extremely promising young man who died even younger, as a teenager, after a valiant struggle with brain cancer. Untimely "early" deaths, like those of Turing, Wilde, and Gunther seem especially tragic because of the injustice of the situation (particularly with Turing and Wilde, whose deaths were entirely preventable) and the abruptly curtailed possibilities of their later lives. Entirely due to human stupidity and prejudice, Turing was never afforded the opportunity to reach his full potential. I can only imagine, for a person brimming with ideas, curiosity, and the drive to contribute meaningfully to the sum of human knowledge, to hold in his hand the poisoned apple and think that such an exit was preferable to the future that lay before him...

The royal pardon is too little, too late, but at least some six decades later, we recognize and regret the human cruelty that hounded Alan Turing to his death, and move forward as a society with an awareness that we did not have before.

Knights vs. Snail in Medieval England

A whimsical curiosity from the British Library's medieval manuscripts blog (the librarians post some fascinating stuff -- the rest of the blog is definitely worth a peek too):

http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2013/09/knight-v-snail.html

The motif of knights fighting giant snails is apparently quite common in medieval illuminated manuscripts, though nobody knows why, or what it was supposed to have signified. (There's even snail jousting! And monkeys!) Was it all just marginalia? Bored monks -- who were only human, after all -- having a bit of fun with their transcription? Did snails moonlight as agents of Satan when not making nuisances of themselves in the monastery vegetable patches? Even among the eminent scholars at the British Library, nobody knows.

While the world of medieval archivists puzzles over this mystery, the rest of us get some Easter eggs in our manuscripts. Happy Monday, everyone!

Cover-a-Week #29: "Greensleeves" (traditional)

A Tudor era piece:


http://youtu.be/dMS42q0wPF8

The original is very long (not to mention that there exist many versions of the song, which was often learned orally, in true balladeer fashion), so I took the liberty of cutting a few verses.

BuzzFeed: A Tale of Three Bookshops

This is what bookshops in Britain do on Twitter:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/aarong31/three-bookshops-had-a-twitter-fightand-it-ruled-dmhw

To all the bookstores in the US (but especially indies): please have an internet pissing contest. It would make my day. (@McNallyJackson, @StrandBookstore, and @StMarksBookshop, I'm looking at you!)

Cover-a-Week #15: "Scarborough Fair" (traditional)

For May Day (a week ago, yes), I thought I'd dial a few centuries back in time and play a seasonally appropriate song from 1600s England:


http://youtu.be/O8BnL41eN08

It was originally written as a duet, consisting of two lovers making impossible demands of each other (in the true spirit of courtly love!). Since it would probably sound a bit schizophrenic with a single vocalist -- not to mention, that version is twice as long -- I've cut a few verses.

This would be a great song to waltz to, I think.

World War II in Real Time, 72 Years Later

If I used Twitter, this is one of the Twitter accounts I would most likely be following:
https://twitter.com/RealTimeWWII

It's a "real time" update feed on the events of the Second World War, transposed exactly 72 years into the present day. It includes such gems as:

Athens rumour: Greek soldier Konstantinos Koukidis refused to raise swastika over Acropolis; instead leaped to death wrapped in Greek flag.
— WW2 Tweets from 1941 (@RealTimeWWII) April 27, 2013

and

Noel Coward, UK actor & spy, reports from London: "At the Savoy. Pretty bad blitz, but orchestra kept on playing." twitter.com/RealTimeWWII/s…
— WW2 Tweets from 1941 (@RealTimeWWII) April 20, 2013

and

Royal Canadian Mounted Police are hunting 28 escaped Luftwaffe airmen, prisoners from UK who've tunneled out of a PoW camp in remote Ontario
— WW2 Tweets from 1941 (@RealTimeWWII) April 19, 2013

This is such an amazing project, not least because (I imagine) it takes a lot of research to put together. It appears to be a labor of love, or at least of deep fascination. I especially appreciate that it features events not typically covered in textbooks, true and relevant quotations, and lesser-known arenas of the war.

Cover-a-Week #9: "The Three Ravens" (traditional)

"The Three Ravens" is an old English folk ballad first written down in the early 1600s, and later (more famously) collected among the Childe Ballads. It's a wonderful, grim little piece, and I thought I'd have a crack at it:


http://youtu.be/lFP9dDMpsmw

I'm rather fond of Renaissance-era music; I have Greensleeves and Scarborough Faire on my list of songs to learn.

NYTimes: Richard III, Lost and Found

In recent news -- making both archaeological and regular news headlines around the world -- the bones of Richard III were discovered under a parking lot in Leicester:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/05/world/europe/richard-the-third-bones.html?hp

I'm inclined to be more sympathetic towards Richard III than literature portrays him (Shakespeare's play was an instrument of the Tudor smear campaign against the Plantagenets). He probably suffered from "younger sibling syndrome," as did many "spare heirs" of monarchs in the Middle Ages -- see Scar vs. Mufasa in The Lion King (and play "spot the Shakespeare references"). This was also probably exacerbated by his uninspiring physical appearance -- see Tyrion Lannister in George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. (Especially in those days, physical birth defects were seen as portents of ill fortune.) Richard came by the throne in a slightly roundabout way that involved some unsavory tactics; certainly, he can't have been completely innocent in the Princes in the Tower episode. But he was by and large a competent administrator who contributed significantly to the nascent English legal system and, notably, lifted most public and private censorship of written work -- not a move to be taken lightly, especially given the political turmoil surrounding his ascension and reign. He was ruthless, to be sure, sometimes excessively so, but his were much more violent times. (Nasty, brutish, and short would be about right.) Richard III was not, among his peers, particularly remarkable in his ruthlessness -- which the Tudors, Shakespeare, and partisan historians conveniently forget.

Anyhow. I imagine it must have been a fascinating experience for the modern-day descendants of Richard III, a few of whom contributed some DNA to the project.

A Dispatch from the Garret (a.k.a. NaNoWriMo 2012)

As most of you know -- and if you didn't before, you probably noticed the widget in the sidebar here -- I'm doing NaNoWriMo again this year.

This is my first time really doing NaNoWriMo in New York. My first two years of it were during high school, which I attended here in the City, but this is the first year in which I'm really participating in the community and its range of social activities (mostly meeting other writers and pounding away at our laptops in coffeeshops, which is actually social in a weird way). It's been a lot of fun -- I hope the community doesn't dissolve after November, which I'm told often happens. I hope to make some friends by the end of this.

I'm also quite excited about my novel. I'm trying something new this year. I've done a lot of fantasy novels of various stripes; this year's is historical fiction, which entails a lot of research. I didn't do nearly enough before the month started, as I realized by the second week or so; I expect to spend quite a bit of time the next few months reading up on the construction of early Gothic cathedrals, and British evacuees during the Blitzkrieg, and the inner workings of art museums. I can't wait! I've got this lovely old textbook on medieval English sculpture waiting on my desk.

And so, back to writing. (I'm already behind!)

BBC: V (for Vendetta) as a Cultural Symbol

In light of the Occupy movement's and Anonymous's adoption of the Guy Fawkes mask as a rallying image, Alan Moore, the creator of the original comic V for Vendetta writes for the BBC on the cultural cachet that the vigilante V holds in the collective consciousness:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16968689

The tagline should be V's quotation about how he's not a man, but an idea -- and ideas never die. One of the problems that the Occupy movement, at least, will have to confront, is precisely that it's an idea, an exercise of populist sentiment. Its lack of leadership and a practical agenda might well deflate the movement. The advantage that V had is that his idea was embodied in a single person, with his own goals and vision, his own coherent plan of action. He was the figurehead, if not the de facto leader of his own revolution. Occupy doesn't have that single person, than coherency. It has the mask -- many such masks -- but not the single visionary behind it.

Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog

One of my English professors held a Middle English workshop last week, and showed us this:
http://houseoffame.blogspot.com/

It's brilliant and hilarious in a really nerdy, English-major-y way. (Chaucer himself was quite funny, and the blog does him justice.) I've been reading it a bit obsessively the past week. Go have a gander -- I promise you'll laugh. (If you have trouble with the Middle English, there are some translation resources in the sidebar.)

Why being an English major is more fun (and more scandalous) than you'd think

I'm looking at my book lists for this quarter, and one of the required readings is called 'Tis a Pity She's a Whore. (It's an English play from the reign of Charles I, and I'm told it's quite good.)

They would never have gotten away with that in grade school.

BBC: Parakeets Intimidate Garden Birds

Much like many other non-native species introduced into a very different habitat, parakeets appear to cause problems (thankfully, non-lethal ones) in the local ecosystem:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/13524396

We used to get a lime green bird or two in our backyard every year (we might still, but I unfortunately don't have extended periods of time to spend gazing out the kitchen window anymore). My sister and I were always very excited to see them -- to see any colorful bird, really, considering we usually get sparrows and pigeons. Bluejays and cardinals were great, too, but the green ones were really something. As children, we never surmised that they might have been former house pets, though even then, we knew they had to come from elsewhere. We'd kept parakeets before, but they were budgerigars -- blue and white ones -- and looked significantly different.

This sort of story is increasingly common, what with increased human encroachment on previously virgin lands, and especially in this case, human tastes in animal companions. It's striking to me how much humanity influences its surroundings on a tiny, daily level. Reminds me of this BBC article I posted half a year ago.

BBC: Royal Roses Planted at Windsor Great Park

It seems like everyone is terribly excited about the upcoming nuptials of Prince William and Catherine Middleton. (I can see how it's exciting, even though the British monarchy has no real power anymore.) Related to the hoopla, I found an article on an interesting botanical tradition behind royal weddings:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-berkshire-13152315

The Catherine rose is quite pretty, though I think the breed name really isn't quite distinctive enough. There have been so many British princesses and queens named Catherine (Henry VIII alone had two wives of that name) that I don't think, in a few decades, anyone will remember that this rose was named for this particular Catherine. (The Royal William rose, methinks, is only slightly less drably named.)

Nonetheless, it seems like a particularly beautiful thing to have a rose named after you. In this case, it's within the dictates of royal tradition, but I imagine that, for a botanist, to name a rose after someone she loved would be much like writing him a love letter or buying him a ring, only orders of magnitude greater -- like an astronomer naming a star for someone.

Happy Guy Fawkes Night!

To all you pyromaniacs out there (given the friends I have, there have got to be some pyros), a very merry Bonfire Night to you.

Seeing as the United States haven't been colonies for well over two centuries, we don't really celebrate Guy Fawkes Night out here. But we should, because bonfires are awesome, and so are fireworks and toffee apples. Also, that particular succession crisis (that entire century or so was practically one big succession crisis) was very interesting, especially since it was spiced with religious conflict and ethnic tensions. And explosives.

Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot, 
I know of no reason 
Why the Gunpowder Treason 
Should ever be forgot.

BBC: Jane Austen's Style Might Not Be Hers

Frank sent me this article last week:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11610489

As much as it bursts a childhood bubble (Authors are crazy geniuses! Which, come to think of it, is still mostly true for some authors.), I know that most art, most literature, doesn't happen in a vacuum. And having been on the inside, as it were, I've seen just how much (or little, if the author's really good) editing goes into the making of a book. I shouldn't be so surprised that a lot of editing went into Austen's books.

Except, well, I am. I've always thought of her as one of those pioneering women in the arts world, for all that her writing is somewhat the "chick lit of the Regency era". It comes as a bit of a shock to my inner high school English student that her (male) editor had such a hand in making Pride and Prejudice or Persuasion what they are.

Today

is the 271st anniversary of the beginning of the War of Jenkin's Ear, which is possibly the strangest-ever name for a war that I've ever encountered. I shouldn't be amused, because a sailor's ear (Capt. Robert Jenkins of the Rebecca) was sliced off by his Spanish counterpart (Capt. Julio León Fandiño of the coast guard), but it's a little too ridiculous not to laugh.

Of course, that was merely the instigating incident, much as the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was the spark, but not the underlying cause of the first World War. It was mostly a conflict between two colonial powers for control of the high seas and trading rights.

Today

is the 168th anniversary of the Treaty of Nanking, which concluded the First Opium War, famously ceded the territory of Hong Kong to Britain.

Of course, Hong Kong was repatriated many years ago. I vaguely remember the big hoopla in 1997, when we all watched the ceremony on the television, and there was a lot of noise and celebration and dancing in choreographed patterns (it seems that every major Asian celebration includes dancing in choreographed patterns).