Line o’ Type — John Hendel celebrates 125 years of Linotype at The Atlantic:
A German immigrant named Ottmar Mergenthaler invented [Linotype] in the 1880s and continued to promote and expand its use until dying in Baltimore in 1899. The Linotype’s power involved transferring a line of text (typed with meticulous care by a Linotypist onto a special 90-key keyboard) to a sheet, creating a “line o’ type” that could be rapidly printed onto many subsequent pages, thanks to the genius of matrices and hot metal.
A Good English Butler — Dwell Magazine spends 30 minutes with designer Dieter Rams:
Never forget that a good product should be like a good English butler. They’re there for you when you need them, but in the background at all other times. Besides a few millionaires in London, most of us don’t have butlers.
The butlers of today are our products and our furniture.
And on a related note… Erik Spiekermann talks about typography and crowd-sourcing a logo for human rights with Deutsche Welle:
Typography is the famous crystal goblet – you drink the wine, you don’t think about the glass. I can make things a little bit warmer or colder, or squarer or rounder, but I am a servant to the words… I like to say, typography is like air – you only talk about it when it’s bad. It’s taken for granted, but we would certainly miss it if it wasn’t there.
Lying Liars — Ian Leslie, author of Born Liars: Why We Can’t Live Without Deceit, on the connection between lying and storytelling:
[T]here is a gushing river of verbal creativity in the normal human mind, from which both artistic invention and lying are drawn. We are born storytellers, spinning narrative out of our experience and imagination, straining against the leash that keeps us tethered to reality. This is a wonderful thing; it is what gives us our ability to conceive of alternative futures and different worlds. And it helps us to understand our own lives through the entertaining stories of others. But it can lead us into trouble, particularly when we try to persuade others that our inventions are real. Most of the time, as our stories bubble up to consciousness, we exercise our cerebral censors, controlling which stories we tell, and to whom. Yet people lie for all sorts of reasons, including the fact that confabulating can be dangerously fun.
See also: Cynthia Crossen on the allure of unreliable narrators for the WSJ:
Today, unreliable narration does seem to be in vogue. Could that be because so many people are chronicling their lives online now, and we can see how unreliable most personal narratives are? As David Fromkin wrote in his history of civilization, “The Way of the World,” “Life is a story that each of us tells to his or her self; and it therefore is a tale told by an unreliable narrator.”
And finally…
Author Umberto Eco on the books we haven’t read for The Guardian:
There are more books in the world than hours in which to read them. We are thus deeply influenced by books we haven’t read, that we haven’t had the time to read… And yet I’ve a fairly accurate notion of what I haven’t read. I have to admit that I only read War and Peace when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then. The Mahabharata – I’ve never read that, despite owning three editions in different languages. Who has actually read the Kama Sutra? And yet everyone talks about it, and some practise it too. So we can see that the world is full of books that we haven’t read, but that we know pretty well.