Geekdad and the Fright Brothers
The good people over at Geek Dad have just posted a really nice interview with me and Larry about Benjamin Franklinstein Meets the Fright Brothers.
Inventor’s Letterheads
Working on the Benjamin Franklinstein books with Larry over the past year or so, inventors have been on my mind a lot. That’s why it was so interesting to come across these samples of letterhead from two of history’s greatest, Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. The two were not great friends, and it’s interesting to see how their personalities came across in the way they chose to correspond with the public. (I know which one I’d rather receive a letter from.)
The Deckle Edge
A deckle edge is when the pages of a book are cut in a ragged way so that they seem to be trimmed by hand. Turns out the tradition of creating those edges is pretty interesting:
The deckle edge dates back to a time when you used to need a knife to read a book. Those rough edges simulate the look of pages that have been sliced open by the reader. The printing happened on large sheets of paper which were then folded into rectangles the size of the finished pages and bound. The reader then sliced open the folds.
There’s a great article on this tradition at:
The All-purpose Pronoun
If a writer wants to use a gender-neutral pronoun to write a sentence, what should he/she/they use? Despite its many virtues, the English language doesn’t have a good solution to this problem.
It’s complicated, but maybe it doesn’t need to be. The New York Times On Language column tackled this recently, and the story behind why we traditionally use he might surprise you…
Writing: A joy or a chore?
The British newspaper, The Guardian, recently asked a number of well known authors a fairly simple simple question: do you enjoy writing? More than a few do not, but they keep doing it anyway.
I get this. Winston Churchill’s once said that “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Substitute writing for democracy and way to make a living for form of government and I think you’ll describe how most writers feel about their jobs.
