Simon Garfield RSS

A fountain pen is called that because you no longer had to dip your nib into the ink. Instead there was a reservoir for holding several days worth of ink. The ink just kept on flowing out – like a fountain.#

I always love finding instances in history books of people moaning and worrying about new technologies or the decline of the next generation.#

Here’s one of a man moaning that the steel nibbed pen isn’t as good as the quill and that it’s worsening children’s handwriting:#

But not everyone approved [of steel nibs being used to write over the quill], no matter its quality or place of origin. In 1862, an unnamed correspondent for Scientific American found that all pens with a steel tip were barbaric, and all who used them hoodwinked. The greatest casualty was handwriting. 'Do not ninety-nine persons in a hundred use steel pens,' the magazine writer complained, 'and has more than one out of the ninety-nine the effrontery to say he can write with them? Lord Palmerston was quite right: the handwriting of this generation is abominable; and as new improvements in steel pens go that of the next will be worse. There is neither grace nor legibility in the angular scrawl that prevails now.' (p49)#

I often reference the book I'm reading in posts. It's good to have a central place to see all my posts about a book, so I was adding a unique ID. For example, B204. An ID is a lot shorter than having to write out the book title and author. However, it also doesn't tell the user anything about the book, and my tags list was getting clogged up by these IDs.#

So, I got Claude Fable 5.1 to build a separate metadata system for books! They're like tags, but just separated out for books. And it means I can show the title, author, year published, and also cover art!#

It needs a bit of tweaking, but it will do for now.#

Note: please ignore the books attached to this post. I'm just testing out the ability to hopefully add multiple books to a post.#

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I hate reading the Introduction chapter of a book, and will often skip them. They’re usually dull.#

So I love it when a book simply doesn’t use the word “introduction” in its introduction. It tricks me, quite happily, into actually reading it.#

The book I’ve just started has done it – "The Pen: A Human History" by Simon Garfield.#

And you know what? I enjoyed the intro chapter.#