Following the trend of focussing on dip-in-and-out-able resources for these oh-so-sticky summer months, I’m looking to Torbjörn Lundmark’s quirky QWERTY: A Note on the Type today.
Like Jill Krementz’s book of photographs and Adair Lara’s sentences of evidence that you are indeed a writer if such statements are true of you, this is not necessarily a practical resource, but it is informative in a “oh, that’s neat” kind of way.
Although some might argue that point. Perhaps you travel in circles in which it is imminently useful to know that the letter ‘B’ stems “from a hieroglyph depicing a house. It was an architect’s floor-plan of a simple and unpretentious one-room place: an Egyptian bachelor flat, if you like.”
Maybe you attend parties at which other guests there would like to know that the most frequently used key on a keyboard is the space bar, or that the @ symbol first debuted on keyboards in the late 1800s but usage dwindled until 1971 when Ray Tomlinson conceived of using it to address emails to servers and addressees.
If you think you have an occasion to repeat rhymes like this, “Virgules, slashes, slants and strokes, Mean/lean the same to different folks”, or “If plus means ‘boom’, and minus ‘bust’, Then, sad to say, I’m quite non-plussed” then you should rush out for a copy of this immediately.
It’s Good Fun for Writers.
Torbjörn Lundmark’s quirky QWERTY: A Note on the Type (Penguin, 2002)