Or, perhaps, the Monotype Bell[e]?

The brilliant Erin of A Dress A Day has pointed out some aggressively textual textiles for sale on eBay (and, presumably, elsewhere).

She’s made a circle skirt of this already, and is considering making a dress with numbered fabric for the trim. What else can you see being made out of this? Me, I’m thinking that the nasty side chair in my office desperately needs reupholstering. And then I might make some Scrabble™-style throw pillows. What other typefaces would you like to see made into fabric? Some of the Emigre patterns, perhaps? Got any rug ideas?

[Cross-posted at clusterflock]

Clever Francis visited Philadelphia recently and found a lot to write home about.

Straight quotes are bad enough, but a six-dot ellipsis? That’s a little too much Philadelphia Freedom for me.

Now go see the picture that goes with that.

You may have noticed that I’ve been doing a lot of linking to posts over at the clusterflock MMGB. Well, rather like when the owners of the candy store that I used to visit every day on my way home from junior high school offered me a job, finally (I declined, on health grounds), the friendly people at clusterflock have offered me a spot. I accepted on the condition that I not be expected to actually post anything new—I was told I could just cross-post content from here—but already today I’ve posted three entries, none of which is book-related.

So if you want more of the incredibly fascinating India Amos™ Experience, you’ll have to go over there. Which you should do anyway, because there are lots of clever, funny people in the flock, and it’s become one of my favorite blogs.

(Before I started posting there, I mean.)

We tend to work in pairs at my company, and I’m paired with H., whose job is basically identical to mine despite a difference in our titles (I have no idea why I’m “senior” to her). You’ve seen me refer to her as my “teammate” here. We don’t work on projects together, but we do commiserate and collude; sometimes we bounce ideas off each other; and when one of us is out of the office, the other holds the fort and deals with emergencies.

Over the years, somehow, despite being kind of an acquired taste, I’ve tended to get along with most of my colleagues, and it’s a source of great pride and delight to me that I’m still friends with, for example, people I worked with in a bookstore, making minimum wage, on the opposite coast, fifteen years ago. Most of my friends are former coworkers, in fact, and it’s one of the reasons I’m a lousy freelancer: I just get lonely. And then I go online. And that’s the end of my workday.

But although I can get along with most people in small-to-moderate doses, it’s not everyone whom I can really adore, you know? So I feel very lucky that my current teammate is the kind of person who posts signs like this when she’s taking a vacation day:

Also, she has snakes. [Heart]

Clusterflocker John Buaas points to 3QuarksDaily’s pointing to a very fine review by Billy Collins of the two-volume New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. Want.

This would have been the perfect Christmas gift for my father, who kept both the American Heritage dictionary and a slang dictionary on the shelf above his chair at the dinner table, and who would use any excuse to pull the books down and read some definitions to us. He wouldn’t just check the word that had raised a query in the first place, but would also treat us to any other interesting terms he leafed past along the way. (It goes without saying that I am very good at that parlor game in which you try to fool people by making up dictionary definitions that sound real. I probably learned the locution “of or pertaining to” around the same time as my ABCs.)

Collins’s article inspired me to look up the words to the Fall song “Slang King.” Who ever noticed, after all these years of listening to that album, that it contains the lines

Watch, the word had right
Biz by word processor
We’ll go together, slip down down away
Hyper, with the young designers
The young designers are always there
Always wanted to be there

Not I, for sure. No idea what that’s supposed to mean, but it seems like it ought to mean something. Any Fall-heads inclined to interpretation out there? Perhaps the dictionary would help.

Yay! I just received fellow DrawMonaut Elizabeth Perry’s selected days: 2005,

and not only am I looking forward to poring over the content, but also I’m very glad to have satisfied my curiosity about the printing. Because selected days is printed by online POD outfit Lulu.com, and I was very interested in seeing what the quality would be like.
Read the rest of this entry »

you, too, can be a world-changing microfinancier. After reading about microfinancing in Ellen Lupton’s post at the “Design Your Life” blog, I just made loans to two seamstresses—one in Uganda, and one in Mexico. Says Kiva.org,

You can go to Kiva’s website and lend to someone in the developing world who needs a loan for their business - like raising goats, selling vegetables at market or making bricks. Each loan has a picture of the entrepreneur, a description of their business and how they plan to use the loan so you know exactly how your money is being spent - and you get updates letting you know how the business is going.

The minimum loan is $25. You pay via Paypal, but 100 percent of the loan goes to the entrepreneur; Paypal does not take its usual cut. When your loan is repaid, you can either withdraw the funds or reloan to a new person.

I think it’s a cool thing.

If you liked the Heidelberg porn from a while back, you may also enjoy this charming short film by Chuck Kraemer about Firefly Press in Somerville, MA. It has moving people and voices in it!

It’s hosted at the Web site of portrait photographer Elsa Dorfman. There’s also a higher-resolution version (17 MB; but don’t wantonly hog her bandwidth—consider making a donation), as well as some background information.

(Via Coudal Partners.)

For those of you who haven’t been following the comments on the drawing thread, I’ve just set up a separate blog for DrawMo!.

DrawMo! (”Draw Month” or “Draw More,” depending on your fancy) is a project whereby interested parties will try to post at least one drawing per day during the month of November 2006. This will be a group blog, most likely, and there will be a Flickr pool for the results (using the tag “drawmo,” I suppose).

Four people have already signed on, and we’re choreographing the secret handshake right now. If you’re one of the apparently large proportion of India, Ink. readers who are currently being terrorized by an empty sketchbook, this may be just the thing for you.

Come on over! It’ll be fun!

Man, oh, man. Sheila (”my” Sheila?) just pointed Cooper Renner to a page of book bindings at A Caballo Artes del Libro, who got them from the Guild of Book Workers 100th Anniversary Exhibition site.

The Billy Budd one. By Jerilyn Glenn Davis. I’m in love with it.

Farmers by Sarah Creighton is also very nice.

Claudia Cohen’s Schriftgiesserei im Schattenbild.
To Remember Ray Frederick Coyle, by Jeannie Sack.
Livre D’Amour, by Peter Geraty.
De la Dominoterie à la Murbrure, by Joanne Margretha Sonnichsen.
Spaces, by Catherine Stanescu.

The page is still loading, and I think I’m hyperventilating . . .

(And I’m now even more disappointed by the staid case stamp I just did for a gift edition of one of our books. BO-ring!)