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!

Have you ever . . .

. . . jotted down a name or number on the back of your hand with a biro in the absence of a scrap of paper?

Here's someone who took things a little bit further!



It took eight hours of writing, five permanent markers and was done to draw attention to a campaign to promote writing on designated graffiti spaces rather than other people's property.

And it took three baths and two showers to clean it all off!

Which reminds me of a small domestic nightmare which took place on the evening before the start of a new school year seven years ago. SD#1 and SD#2 had played happily together in the garden all day long. A game of pirates. I called them in for a bath.

Son had a drawn-on moustache, copious 'stubble' and a large black eye-patch. Face paints! How sweet.

Except that it didn't come off in the bath.

'What did you do this with?' I enquired . . . not terrifically calmly.

'CD marker pens', came the reply.

Several hours, a lot of soap, and even some light scrubbing with a nail brush later, the remnants of the eye-patch were still visible.

So off he went to his first day at a new school with a black eye and a faint moustache ...

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.

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!)

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?

You have another chance . . .

. . . to watch Stephen Fry on Gutenberg.

Friday, BBC2, 9 o'clock.

I insist that you do so.

Essential viewing for bibliophiles - Fry on Gutenberg

You won't often find me glued to the sofa, gazing intently at the telly on a Monday night, of all nights, but yesterday was different. I was there. I was firmly and willingly affixed. And what had caused this abrupt change in my habits was this:

Stephen Fry's hour-long exploration of the life and legacy of Johann Gutenberg. Beautifully, filmed and directed, this was an absolutely first-rate piece of television. Fry was at his most engaging (which is saying something - he was just adorably perfect for this programme) and clearly enthused and passionate about his subject - no mere frontman for another's script here.
Fry demonstrated how, through his invention of the printing press and moveable type and his subsequent creation of his famous Bible - 180 copies, 12 printed on vellum, and first displayed at the Frankfurt Trade Fair in 1454 - Gutenberg was the father of mass-production.

In the documentary, Fry travels round France and Germany on the trail of the ultimately rather tragic Gutenberg, learns how to make paper, and actually handles (albeit through cotton gloves) one of the original copies of the Bible (the thrill this gives him is palpable - we can almost feel the goosebumps he experiences). Back in the UK, he works with a team of craftsmen to found some type (he gets to make a letter 'e'), construct a replica of Gutenberg’s machine and then print a replica page of the Bible on authentic linen paper made by Fry (and including his own little 'e').

The lingering shots of the work in progress, the newly cast letter, the double wooden thread on the press, the hand-illuminated pages of one of the original Bibles were gorgeous and the editing was perfectly judged. It was a truly excellent piece of television - almost, as Fry described Gutenberg's Bible itself, 'more beautiful than it needed to be'.

So please, special please, if you didn't watch it, do try to catch it on the BBC iPlayer here. (It's available to view online for six more days, or you can download it for 30 days.)

Before I go . . .

Just off with my girls for a few days at my parents' in sunny Berkshire. Taking some work (as always) but also a stack of books, and confidently expect to disappear for many hours between the covers of a good few of them, as well, no doubt, as dipping into random volumes plucked from the shelves in the spare bedroom.

I'll be off air for a while, but I leave you, gentle readers, with this fragrant [very] mixed bouquet of seasonal links to some sites which have caught my attention in the last day or two.

The test launch of BookRabbit – a new and different kind of interactive online bookstore, which hopes to inspire a more personal and user-friendly relationship with its customers and also encourages buying in local independent bookshops as much as it does ordering online. Every book details page will have a link to booksellers, so readers can check to see if the book they want is currently available from a local store. As Keiron Smith, MD of SamedayBooks.com and the Chertsey and Worthing Bookshops explains:


“real books should have a real presence - I love nosing at other people's bookcases, the weird juxtapositions of books people choose to keep and have gathered from many sources seems to me to be both a real window into someone, their passions, and also has the ability to make connections between books that couldn't be further from the 'if you love you'll like' manufactured link. Our simple idea was that people could upload bookcase images and display them as part of their profile, then make them browsable by clicking through the books on them into other books and other bookcases . . .”

It all sounds like a terrifically good idea and I’m looking forward to giving it a whirl when it goes live later this month.

Painful book-world contrast here with the sad, sad, awful stuff going on at The Friday Project ,which news has provoked some justifiably sympathetic comments from supporters who understand the knife-edge relationship between risk and reward, success and failure when steering a fledgling business, and some equally justifiably raw and venomous remarks from writers and freelancers who are wondering how, exactly, they are supposed to eat and pay the mortgage if they never get paid for the work they’ve done for TFP. Having been on both sides of similar fences (though thankfully not this particular one), my own sympathies are profound, but pretty much equally divided in this instance.

A reminder on Asylum of how intoxicating it was to read the complete novels of Carson McCullers, straight off, one after the other in my early twenties. I’ve never re-visited them but I feel it’s time I did. Ditto the 1968 film of her most famous book, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, which I hazily remember from one TV viewing in the 70s as being excellent, but which annoyingly seems only to be available in Region 1 DVD format (and I don’t have a swanky multi-region player, grrrr).

Thanks to Diane for the link to these fab Woodland Trust Wellies £5 from each sale goes to the WT. I'm very tempted - they make my boring old green Hunters look dull, dull, dull.

I enjoyed India Knight's thoughts on Carla Bruni : ‘She is the kind of minx who might sleep with your husband simply to annoy you, or to amuse herself, or because she was bored. Worse, the husband would then be in some kind of desperate erotic thrall for all eternity . . .’

There's sumptuously illustrated typographical wallow over on the irresistible I love typography , which I insist that everyone visits right this minute, it's so good.

A previous Sunday Type post on ILT had alerted me to Holli Conger’s Type Junkie photos on Flickr. Holli’s typography photos can be purchased on Etsy .

And while wandering around inside the box of delights that is Etsy, here's GemmaBeads' quirky jewellery, which recycles old typewriter keys . Creates the same kind of ambiance as the work of Clare Hillerby, I feel - and equally perfect for people exactly like me (or similar). Santa please note.

It was a predominantly dull, grey (and occasionally white) old March, here in the UK, so how uplifting to the spirits to enjoy these vibrant images of Holi (or Phagwa), the festival of colour that takes place in March every year in India and Nepal, over on COLOURlovers (a great place to lose oneself for many happy hours, whether or not you can actually spare the time).

Finally, if you didn't catch this BBC iPlayer trailer on 1st April, you still have a few more days to view it.

Well that’s more than enough to be going on with. I’m off to tackle the daunting results of having washed and dried ten loads of family laundry without having subsequently folded or sorted – let alone ironed (as if . . .) – a single crumpled item of it. Ho hum.

Although I won’t manage to get online, I am taking a creaky old laptop with me, so hope to have some time to tap in a few musings on recent good reads – among them Waterloo Sunset, Talk to the Hand, After You’d Gone , The Memory Box and the novel that’s currently taking the bookblogosphere by storm, Daphne.

Edible letterpress

Mmmmmmmm, yummy! - just found this link to Typolade chocolate type on Susan's Green Chair Press blog, and simply had to share!

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)

Typographical musings on a greeney-bluey theme

Received an emailed newsletter this week from Myfonts , listing their Top Ten Fonts for 2007.

Myfonts stocks over 58,000 fonts and a quick surf of their new fonts page is always an inspiration.

Here are some from the Top Ten:

And while on the subject of typefaces, I should mention how very much I am enjoying those of my (‘surprise’ – ahem!) Christmas presents which came all the way from the Green Chair Press in Burlingame, California.

The gorgeous, luminous greens and blues of Susan’s short-run broadside ‘What Matters in Life’ complement the message of the silver-inked letters, which I have a feeling is going to be a pertinent one for 2008. (This scan doesn't do it justice at all, unfortunately.)

And here are the coasters (more bluey-greens).

And lastly the calendar, now sitting in chic splendour on my desk.

January’s (greeney-blue!) haiku reads:

‘first dream of the year
I keep it a secret –
smile to myself’

There are only 199 copies of these calendars in the world, apart from mine, and it amuses me, in an idle way, occasionally to wonder about the other people lucky enough to have one, and the other desks upon which my calendar’s siblings sit.

Finally, the very best thing about starting this blog last summer has been making the online acquaintance of so many interesting, friendly, generous and inspiring bloggers from all over the world – some of whom I feel I’ve known for ages, though it has only been a few months. Susan at Green Chair Press is one such, and another – whom I 'met' more recently – is Cathy, over at Teacher Features: Thoughts on Bookmaking with Kids , which is the blog of the San Fransisco Centre for the Book. If you have children or are involved in teaching arts subjects, then I would very much recommend a visit – it’s bursting with ideas and resources on book-related projects for children of all ages.

& 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.

Life forms patterns . . .

Hooray! Susan Angebranndt's 2008 letterpress-printed calendar is now available over at the Green Chair Press blog.

A year of patterns and poetry, designed by Susan and printed on a hand-fed (and foot treadled) vintage 1890s platen press. You can buy it here.

Each month features a haiku poem written for the season:

life forms patterns

haphazard and beautiful—

catch them as they fly by

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').