"The typewriter was invented at least fifty-two times, as one tinkerer after another groped toward a usable design. One early writing mechanism looks like a birthday cake, another like a pinball machine."From Joan Acocella's entertaining review of Darren Wershler-Henry's new book “The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting” in the New Yorker. The review is titled "The Typing Life: How Writer's Used to Write" It is worth the click over.Some nuggets:-Mark Twain was the first important writer to deliver a typewritten manuscript.-Jack Kerouac could type a hundred words a minute.-There was a silent typewriter that hit the market in...
Another University Bookstore Goes to the Chains
First it was Sonoma State University now it is the University of Kentucky.The family owned and independent Kennedy Book Store has had the contract for the UK Book Store for the last 6 years. Kennedy Book Store has been a "campus mainstay since its was founded in 1950" by... Joe Kennedy, who remains the company president."What the University wants for the right to run the bookstore:a 10-year lease and $3 million to $4 million toward renovation of the 16,250-square-foot store.Kennedy offered $2 million and wisely "could not go beyond that given uncertainties that could arise during a 10-year lease"They are...
Another Helen Hanff Convert
“I am a poor writer with an antiquarian taste in books and all the things I want are impossible to get over here….”So begins Hanff's now legendary correspondence with the staff of a small London bookshop called Marks & Co. The BBC made it into a television play in 1975, Hollywood covered it in 1975 & 1987 with Anne Brancroft playing Hanff and Anthony Hopkins and Judy Dench playing the Noel's.Leigh Buchanan has a piece on Jewcy titled " Good Book Hunting: The writer who taught me about obscure objects of desire". It is her homage to Helen Hanff and...
Internet 1.0: The Mundaneum
In 1895, Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine, two Belgian lawyers, established the Repertoire Bibliographique Universel (RBU).Their goal: To develop a master bibliography of the world’s accumulated knowledge.They designed a classification system called the Universal Decimal ClassificationAfter seeing what systems were out there, like the Dewey Decimal and the British Museum systems, Otley realized that their weakness was their inability to go any further than getting the reader the one book they were looking for. He was thinking Hypertext.For the 1910 World's Fair in Brussels the pair created an installation entitled The Mundaneum. A "city of the intellect" that was...
The History of Financial Speculation: A Collection Hits the Market
This is what your brain looks like on stocks:Christopher Dennistoun, a British antiquarian book dealer and stock trader, has a amassed what arguably could be the largest collection of printed material on the history of the stock market and financial speculation.There are over 700 items in the collection including:-a London jobber’s sheet published in 1698 by John Castaing “at his Office at Jonathan’s Coffee-house” that posts the prices of marketable securities all over Europe, from Hamburg to Cadiz.- The 1898 book “The Game in Wall Street and How To Play It Successfully” which offered one of the first stock charts,...