Category: Wynken de Worde

>In today’s New York Times Opinion page is an elegy lamenting the decline of copy editors in the newspaper business and the lack of awareness about copy editors and the feats they make possible. What is it that copy editors do, you ask? Lawrence Downes sums it up: As for what they do, here’s the short version: After news happens in the chaos and clutter of the real world, it travels through a reporter’s mind, a photographer’s eye, a notebook and camera lens, into computer files, then through multiple layers of editing. Copy editors handle the final transition to an ink-on-paper object. On the news-factory floor, they do the refining and packaging. They trim words, fix grammar, punctuation and style, write headlines and captions. But they also do a lot more. Copy editors are the last set of eyes before yours. They are more powerful than proofreaders. They untangle twisted…

> In my earlier post about the glorious 1527 Latin Vulgate Bible, I commented on the density of the text block. My point then was that verses were not numbered, and that a reader needed to use the marginal alphabetical system to cross-reference different biblical moments. Now I want to look again at that dense, dark, gothic lettering to notice something else: the handwritten annotations. One effect of the dense text is that it doesn’t have easily visible placemarkers. In addition to making it hard to cross-reference, it makes it hard to skim. Where’s that reference to the Tygris river again? Look for it–not in the printed text, but in the handwritten notes in the margin. Just by the printed letter “C”–the word “Tygris.” Many of the notes in the margin act as placemarkers of that very simple sort. Here’s where Phison is mentioned, here Gehan, here Tygris, here the…

>I logged onto blogger intending to write something about a particular oddity of this technology: templates. The one I am using is Minima–it’s the first template in their list of templates, which makes it one reason to choose. But another is its relatively spare look–it’s not cluttered, it has a neutral color scheme. And I really like the headline font and layout. I chose a pleasant rust orange for the frame, rather than the default grey, which feels satisfyingly like I’ve personalized the site to suit my tastes. (See Virginia Heffernan’s recent piece in the New York Times Magazine on Google’s new “artist themes” and the web’s encouragement to personalize this.) But it has problems, too. Unless you’re more adept at html code than I am (I managed to write my own code back in the early days, but that was long ago), you cannot easily shape it to your…

>This morning on the way to the metro, I was listening to NPR’s Morning Edition and a story about the mayor of Karachi, who was asked whether or not Dubai and its spectacular growth was a model for the development and growth of Karachi. The mayor’s response was that he preferred Karachi to be the model. But then he went on to say something that caught my attention: Karachi should be the model for such growth, but of course they were “cutting and pasting” ideas from many different places in figuring out their development. I was struck by that metaphor of cutting and pasting and by how it has become much more prevalent in the last decade than it was when I was in school. When I was in high school–in the mid 1980s, not that long ago–I was on the school newspaper staff and we used to lay out…

> Today I discovered a very cool site that visualizes–indeed, maps–the spread of the early years of printing. I mean “maps” quite literally: this is a map with multiple layers that shows, year by year, the establishment of new printing presses. You can also show paper mills, and universities, and trade fairs. It’s a great visualization of the commercial relationships that spurred the growth of the printing industry. And it’s fun to play with, too! It’s The Atlas of Early Printing, done by folks at the University of Iowa’s Library, and it is a great resource.