February 4, 2010 by John McGrath - 2 Comments

The Audio Cyclopedia

vacuum tube schematic I used to work at the Woods Hole Institute of Oceanography, in a basement office within sight of where Alvin was built. The basement held another, less-heralded marvel: the free table. Whenever a lab was overhauled or a grad student moved on, they’d cull their detritus and dump it on the free table. Part of the pinko ethos that infects academia, no doubt, but a wonderful thing.

Usual fare ran toward outdated WordPerfect manuals, but you would sometimes find a collection of neatly piled Pyrex labware with a note saying “slightly contaminated.” Or a broken oscilloscope. Or five cartons of Hollerith cards. Pretty great to a technostalgic pack rat.

I especially loved finding specialized reference books. They’re usually de facto dictionaries, but the words are in situ, being put to good use as they’re being defined. One of my favorite free table gimmes was just such a book: The Audio Cyclopedia*, by Howard M. Tremaine. Probably bought in the seventies by someone working on sonar or recording whale songs, it’s a 1,700 page compendium of recording technology, in excruciating detail and with a weird Jeopardy! pose-everything-as-a-question prose style.

It is an absolutely tremendous source of of technicalese and audio industry terms of art, so yesterday I finally started a list I’ve been meaning to get to for a long time: Audio Argot, inspired by the Audio Cyclopedia. Please contribute, it’s an open list. Anything audio related fits the bill, I think—words needn’t come specifically from the Cyclopedia, but for those that do I’ll add a citation. Here’s the list.

* It seems to still be in demand. My scavenged copy is the 2nd edition, first published in 1969; the first edition was published in 1959 and it is not cheap.

October 23, 2009 by Grant Barrett

Wordnik word of the day: frisket

Today’s word of the day is frisket. We chose it because it’s fun to say, even though the meaning is a bit of printer’s jargon. It rhymes with biscuit and brisket. The Century Dictionary defines frisket as “a thin framework of iron hinged to the top of the tympan of a hand-press. For use, a sheet of paper is stretched and pasted over the frisket, and from this paper spaces are cut out to permit contact between the type and the sheet to be printed, which it serves to hold in place when the frisket is folded down upon the tympan, and to keep clean in the parts not printed.” If you want to learn more about old-fashioned printing, we recommend Practical Printing: A Handbook of the Art of Typography by John Southward.

A galley press.Image from Practical Printing: A Handbook of the Art of Typography by John Southward.

March 20, 2009 by John McGrath - 5 Comments

Beautiful Libraries

A little Friday fantasia: in September of 2007 Curious Expeditions collected dozens of pictures of stunning old libraries in a post titled Librophiliac Love Letter: A Compendium of Beautiful Libraries, which was just sent to me by my old pal Magnolia. They’re incredible.

I’ve spent my entire life surrounded either by clean-lined modernism or an almost equally spare New England aesthetic, and it’s startling to be reminded that baroque and rococo (barococo?) confections like this were ever built, let alone on this scale and in such profusion. Likewise, information is now so ubiquitous, and incorporeal, and cheap, it’s jolting to think of a time when it was rare, and heavy, and expensive, and so justified the building of palaces like this to contain it.

Curious Expeditions says they’ll leave it to someone else to post a list of beautiful modern libraries, like Louis Kahn’s library at Exeter. If anyone knows of one, please let us know in the comments.

April 1, 2008 by John McGrath

"Bookshelf" does Bookshelves; Back to Dictionaries for Errata

My idle threat to turn Errata into a blog about bookshelves has been shelved, since it was pointed out that there’s already quite a good blog about bookshelves.

Most “Bookshelf” posts are about designy bookshelves, though some cover bookish art projects, like Richard Wentworth’s delightful “False Ceiling,” pictured at right.

Best niche blog since Literally, A Web Log. Thanks Robert!

February 27, 2008 by John McGrath

Books in the Rafters

More fun for book fetishists, again from Apartment Therapy: books in the rafters. Exceedingly simple, exceedingly lovely.

Combine this with the bookcase staircase, bookinist, and dictionary wallpaper, and you’ve pretty much encased yourself in books. The missing piece: readable flooring.

February 25, 2008 by John McGrath - 4 Comments

Staircase Bookcase

This is the least practical staircase ever. Tabbed treads to throw off eye and foot. Stripped lines all over the place, and in every plane, to toy with your depth perception. Clearly an ankle breaker.

As for the books, they must get punted all the time. And a typical stair riser is not more than 7″ high, which means nothing but smallish trade paperbacks under there.

Still, it’s totally awesome, and I want one. Park a bookinist at the top, and you’re in the catbird seat.

January 17, 2008 by John McGrath

Book Ads in the NYTimes, 1962-1973

I missed it when it ran this summer, but in June Paper Cuts, the Times book blog, posted a slideshow of old book ads from what it called the “Golden Age” of book advertising.

Included are ads for a bunch of heavy hitters like Susan Sontag, Edna O’Brien, Cormac McCarthy, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, and Donald Barthelme. I’m not sure I’d call it a Golden Age–the books may be impressive, but the ads seem to have thrived then as now on hidebound cliché*. But there’s some good stuff there, and more than a few signs of the time: overt sexism, boomer self-importance, and everybody’s smoking.

Unfortunately a number of the images are poorly reproduced. Seems a shame, for a slideshow, especially one so otherwise intersting. Maybe we should all chip in a few bucks and get Paper Cuts a new scanner.

* A cliché, I know.