Ampersandy snippets

Gosh, I haven't posted anything about ampersands for simply ages, have I? Here are a few bits and bobs to redress the balance a little.


Susan at Green Chair Press has been branching out a bit and come up with these interesting wooden ampersand necklaces . You can buy them here.

This collection of cool ampersands is taken from this nice little article on the subject .

Here's another ampersand enthusiast discussing 'ampersands with attitude': 'Sweeping curves, flirtatious finishes and bold statements - these are the things that make ampersands an exciting character to use and, better still, to design.'


Finally, the perfect plate for ampersandophiles

Oh, but while on the subject of typography: this little film won't amuse everyone, but it certainly amused me!

A bit of Friday ampersandering

The arrival of the proofs from hell (I simply couldn't bear to look!) curtailed my working afternoon, so to cheer myself up I've been finishing off the week by sniffing out a few nice ampersands:

Like this pretty lavender-coloured glass ampersand from SpareRoomStudio on Etsy.

An ampersand pendant from luv4sams, also on Etsy.

This Ampersand t-shirt seems to be in men's sizes only, unfortunately, or I'd wearing one right now!

Here's a gorgeous ampersand from the Zapfino typeface .

This characterful 'wrought iron' one is from the website of Rustique Interiors - a very interesting looking shop in Dalkeith, selling 'Refab Furniture' and 'found objects of desire'.

This satisfyingly chubby ampersand is from the Pistilli Roman font.

And finally, here's someone else who's got a bit of a thing about ampersands.

Crafty ampersands for a Wednesday afternoon

More delicious ampersandery discovered this week:

First, it's the ampersand hat.

This is by Susette from Knitting Letters: A to Z, which is the most fabulous site, combining typographical erudition with gorgeous textile designs. Every post also includes dozens of design-history and other relevant links.

I am an Ex-Knitter. Knitting was something of an obsession 20 years ago but my enthusiasm petered out when I realised that knitting baby clothes was definitely Not My Thing. Exploring Susette's site, I found myself genuinely inspired, for the first time in ages, to take up my needles once again.

The Knitted Alphabet has got as far as M, so there will be plenty more letters emerging over the coming months, and I'm really looking forward to watching the project develop.


And here's a pendant to gladden the hearts of ampersand lovers - it's based on a wooden Scrabble tile and comes from BrownEyedPeas on Etsy.

And finally, also on Etsy, here's the Ampersand Clock by Infinity Arts.

Oh, and here's an interesting article on the history and construction of ampersands on the Hoefler & Frere-Jones website.

Wandering through Ampersandland on a Wednesday night

I landed this week on a fantastic new blog - The Ampersand.

It features some wonderful ampersandery, including the ones below, by Susan Angebrandt (which regular readers might recognise),

a transient, organic tree-bark ampersand by Cumbrian graphic designer/typographer/photographer Sarah France, and a jolly little dancing ampersand from for the love of type.

There are also a few examples of ampersands the world might be a better place without.

(Unlike this absolutely essential chocolate ampersand - why was there only one in the box?!)


A highly recommended blog for the feed-list of ampersand lovers everywhere.

(And for anyone whose ampersappetite still hasn't been sated by that lot, there's also the Flickr Ampersandland pool, which should keep you going for a while!)

Ampersands for a Friday Night

Friday night after a particularly beastly working week (which started on bank holiday Monday . . . sigh . . . and much to the detriment of my poor neglected garden).

But the week is over, so get out the corkscrew - it's Party Time for Ampersand lovers!


A large zebra ampersand at this nightclub in Manchester.

Or - very much more my style:



This wonderfully laid-back, bibulous &, which is the logo of this wine merchant. (Many thanks to a regular reader for alerting me to this one.)

Post a poem to win a poem

Regular readers will know that I'm a big, big fan of the Green Chair Press (upon which I have oft times mused: eg see here and here). In fact, landing on Susan's blog and website was, for me, one of the first big rewards of entering the blogosphere last summer, and I am now the proud owner of a number of Susan's beauteous creations - irresistible to the typophile, the letterpress enthusiast and the ampersand lover alike.

To celebrate National Poetry Month in the US, Susan is giving away one of her one-off Pattern Forms broadsides (see pic above). It’s a cut paper collage with a letterpress printed original haiku beneath it.

life forms patterns

haphazard & beautiful -

catch them as they fly by

For a chance to win, all you need to do to is post your favorite poem in a comment to this post on the Green Chair Press Blog by 29 April. The winner will be selected at random from the submitted poems and announced on 1 May.

Why not have a go?

Truly scrumptious . . . &c, &c

An exciting parcel from Green Chair Press arrived in the post during the week, all the way from California: my copy of the latest issue of the journal Ampersand, together with two of Susan's lovely hand-printed broadsides:


'Poem Fragment' from Christopher Morley's nostalgic poem 'Smells', which I loved when I first read it on Susan's blog and reproduced it here.


And 'Etc' - a pleasing arrangement of ampersands, printed from wooden blocks. As regular readers will know, I've Got a Thing About Ampersands. And for very good reason, too, in my view.

So, an altogether scrumptious delivery, which brightened up a trying week.

(images © Green Chair Press)

& lovers

Season’s greetings to ampersand lovers everywhere – and especially to my ampersand-inclined blog-friends Susan and Joel.

Wednesday wound up

I’m posting this when I should really be in bed, after a jolly long and hard day’s graft on a large pile of books. Another one off to the printers today, though, so hooray for that. Still can’t quite see the daylight the other side of the mountain, but . . . Tomorrow is Another Day. Except that it’s already tomorrow, so actually, it isn’t. Another Day, that is.

Prompted to post this early-morning miscellany by a number of things:



First, just watched Spooks on BBC3 (ie next week’s BBC1 episode). It does get sillier and sillier, but I still chewed my fingernails with all the suspense. Some of which was inevitably caused by simply not knowing whether Adam (Rupert Penry-Jones) would be wearing clothes this week or, as (twice) last week (in Spooks and in Joe’s Palace) . . . not. He wore a suit and tie all the time, disappointingly, but the programme still managed to be very gripping in a slightly over-‘thrilling’ sort of way. Didn’t it used to be more subtle and low-key than this?

A Musing on Joe’s Palace , Capturing Mary and the rest of the current Poliakoff season will follow in the next day or two.

Dreadful news from North Berwick. I simply hadn’t appreciated when I was up there admiring the Bass Rock in all its sinister beauty, and havering on about gannets and things, that the rock's vast and spectacular colony of these sleek, blue-eyed birds is under very serious threat. Gannets feed their young on sand eels, but with global warming and a very slight rise in water temperature, conditions in the Scottish waters are no longer optimum for sand eels (there is a diminishing supply of their favourite plankton) so they are fast disappearing from the area. The gannets consequently feed their young on other, less nutritious fish, including pipefish, which is a similar size to the sand eel but hard for young gannets to digest. Baby gannets are simply starving to death and, in some areas off the Scottish coast, whole colonies are failing to breed. You can read all about it in this article from The Scotsman (from which I also filched the photo, but all in a good cause).

My grandfather’s wartime memories are receiving a gratifying number of hits, and some of them are coming from StoryHeart, run by personal historian Tracy Urban in Vancouver. Tracy encourages and advises people who wish to tell their own personal stories, or to record the life-stories of others and turn them into book or website form, and she has very kindly added a link to my site from hers. I shall be creating a similar kind of book out of my grandfather’s memories – probably in an edition of about a dozen, for my mother and the wider family, including my children, who were born after their great-grandfather died. Of all my grandparents, he is the one I most regret not having lived to see my children – he would have been so proud of them, and they would have adored him, too.

Finally - it's good to know that I'm not alone in believing that italic ampersands* are far more attractive and interesting than the standard 'roman' variety. There's a simple but good illustration of this over on Textwrap.

* Or les esperluettes, as I try to remember to call them in the interests of euphony and general pretentiousness.

Les esperluettes

Well, it’s amazing how quickly one can develop a reputation these days. (Although I seem to remember my mother warning me about that when I was about 14 and was trying to sneak out to a disco in clothes she deemed ‘unsuitable’ – so perhaps it isn’t that new a phenomenon!)

Happily, my new-found reputation is a fairly harmless one (so far), and it stems from the tenor of my blog postings. Walking back from the marshes on Saturday evening, I met a fellow dog-walker, with whom (as one does) I exchanged a smile and a nod and then, just as he’d passed, he suddenly said, ‘oh, I know you! You’re . . . that woman off the internet who’s obsessed with typefaces!’. Er, yes, I suppose I am . . .

And then there are the kind people who send me links to sites of interest. Last week I received an especially welcome one from one of my Northern Correspondents, alerting me to the unlikely feast of ampersands (a subject dear to my heart) on this shopping centre’s website, from which I have nicked some of the illustrations for this posting (but all in the interests of advertising, so I’m sure that’s OK, isn’t it? – please visit Gyle Shopping Centre straight away and tell them I sent you, and then I shan’t feel so bad!).

Another link that’s come my way is the one below, which takes you to a video of the making of this amazing balloon installation by Conor Nolan and David Wall – a couple of designers working and living in Dublin.

Watch the video (takes a little while to load, so be patient – it’s worth it).

I have some old wooden letterpress ampersands standing around the place – I love the feel of them as well as their appearance, but I’m also rather taken by the decorative possibilities of these plastic ampersands.

On a sadder note, the illuminated rotating ampersand in this outdoor sculpture in Seattle is part of the phrase 'Love & Loss'. You can see a schematic version of it, which shows the elements - tables, pathways and a painted tree - more clearly, here.

Here’s an amusing exercise on an ampersandish theme - part of the typophile.com forum, which is well worth delving into and also brings this page of discussion and links on the subject. From which you will see that my own ‘obsession’ with typography in general and ampersands in particular is a very mild case indeed. In fact I’m beginning to feel almost normal.

And so to an ampersand poem. It's just a little thing, but it's undeniably true. I emailed the poet, Patrick Winstanley, to ask whether I could reproduce it in full here, but I haven’t heard back from him, so you’ll have to click here instead.

I wonder what filling an ampersand chocolate would have inside. Something really delicious and bittersweet, I suspect. Hmmm. Food for thought . . .

And finally, I just discovered the absolutely gorgeous word L'esperluette (O-level French vocab didn’t extend to such things – or, if it did, I’d forgotten). So much more mellifluous than ‘ampersand’, isn’t it?

I'm going to go away and practise saying it now. Which will enhance my reputation no end ('that woman off the internet who mumbles to herself in French').

Ampersands &c

Looking at that photo of the bookshelf with the sea-junk on it yesterday reminded me how much I love ampersands. As you may have noticed, I have a couple of nice old wooden ampersand printing blocks. If one sniffs them very carefully, behind the beeswax polish, one can still smell the printer's ink.

The ampersand has a venerable history. Marcus Tullius Tiro, who was Cicero’s slave and then, as a freed man, his secretary, is credited with having invented it around 63 BC.

And the phrase 'et cetera' was expressed in written and printed form as '&c' long before it was abbreviated to 'etc'.

There's an interesting potted history of the ampersand here, including an illustration of part of a page from a Venetian book of 1600, in which 14 ampersands of five different designs are liberally inserted into the text. And the Adobe site gives more examples of the huge variety of ampersands, old and new, which are still available to typesetters and designers. I've set some of my own favourites here (click to enlarge) - as you will see, the best and most intricate ampersands are usually the italicised versions.

I find the whole world of letterpress printing completely intoxicating. As a child, I played around with my father's Adana printing machine, which was brought out with great ceremony four or five times a year in order to print invitations (on strange deckle-edged cards tinged with pink or green, which seemed outdated even in 1966), headed notepaper, and on a few occasions, Christmas cards.

At school I went to Printing Club in the art room at lunchtimes, and learned to 'compose' - drop metal type into place with tweezers, backwards, on a metal 'composing stick' and then wedge lines of type into a block for printing, hammering it all in with a little wooden mallet to get it nice and tight. And the the ink . . . . ahhhhhh, the ink. That smell is so deeply ingrained it has quite possibly worked its way into my DNA. Why on earth did I give it all up? Must have been the distractions of O-levels or A-levels or boys or something, probably. I don't really remember. Now I'm merely an observer - an occasional collector of books from the likes of the Jardine Press - and a sniffer-out of all things inky.

I discovered this enchanting blog recently, and on it, amongst other delights, a link to this excellent short film about letterpress printing, which celebrates the sheer physicality of the impressing of paper with ink by metal, the glorious machinery involved and the human endeavour of it all.

Comparing it with what I do - sitting here, 'typesetting' books on a screen and turning them into pdf files which get sent over the internet to be digitally 'printed' somewhere far away - brought to mind the difference between train travel today and the days of the great steam locomotives: the blandly efficient and the gloriously 'alive'; the noise, the smell, the human pride in powerful machinery, properly mastered and achieving its purpose perfectly. Ooooh, it's easy to get quite carried away!