There is something very satisfying the the purity of the humble circle which book covers over the years have made full use of. To see more book covers like those shown below then these two blogs are a great resource.
http://seenbooks.blogspot.com/
http://acejet170.typepad.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/joekral/sets/72157594264351021/
The Power of The Circle
Jamie Lynn Spears is not the first teen to have a baby
Please try to contain your shock.
When we launched our Lifehacker Top 10 series back in March we had no idea what a big hit it would be. That Letterman guy’s really onto something! While we’re milking this whole “best of 2007 list” thing, we compiled the top 20 most-viewed Lifehacker Top 10 lists of 2007.
With roots stretching back to Aesop’s Fables and the oral folk tradition, the allegorical tales of Reynard the Fox (‘Reineke Fuchs’) emerged in the 12th century as a storytelling convention, becoming conspicuously popular in Germany, France and Holland.
One of the common structural themes around which the assorted…
Reineke Fuchs
I can’t think of a better way to end 2007 than with this lovely drawing by our old friend Rembrandt.
Your faithful blogger has recently become obsessed with the New Yorker magazine complete archive that you can purchase on a single hard disk. (Why it’s not just up on the web as a subscription service I’m not quite sure, but to have instant access to every New Yorker article ever published, I’ll take it.)
As someone who regularly fades in and out of various note-taking modes, I enjoyed this segment from a 1934 profile of Hollywood producer Darryl Zanuck and his one-time boss H. C. Witwer:
…
This week’s issue of The Stranger is about the size of a pamphlet, so my cartoon is on a one-week hiatus. Instead, dear blog-reader, here is the back cover art for the book collection, featuring full-color versions of a few non-nudity ads. (In my original design, one of the ads showed a woman in a strap-on, to which my publisher said “Mm, nah.”)
“Lustlab Ad of the Week” is a comic adaptation of one of the week’s kinky personal ads in Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger, and I post them…
The holidays are nearing an end, but this year instead of balling your holiday lights up into a unwrappable knot, give yourself a break for next year and put those lights away tangle-free. Reader Chad Bailey says that our previously posted figure-eight method for wrapping headphones works like a charm for storing your holiday lights, but since wrapping lights is a bit different from wrapping headphones, the instructions are a bit modified. Basically, it works like this:
Wrap your…
Interesting links from around the web to help you through your weekend Study Hacks withdrawal…
A Stocking Full of Holiday Productivity
Thus endeth the Shephardes kalendere,
Drawne into English to Gods’ reuerence:
And for profite and pleasure shalle Clearkes to here,
Plainly shewed their intelligence,
Our is done, now readers do your diligence,
And remember that the Printer saieth to you this,
He that liueth well may…
The Gimble is a nifty tool. It’s not the most versatile book holder (it won’t work with larger books), but it’s small, modestly priced, and cleverly designed and named. I like using it to hold books open while I’m typing out passages.
Why gimble? The OED definition of gimbal helps out:
A contrivance by means of which articles for use at sea (esp. the compass and the chronometer) are suspended so as to keep a horizontal position. It usually consists of a pair of rings moving on pivots…
Design by Jennifer Carrow
A few weeks ago it was David Drummond week, featuring posts here and here. This week (well, OK, a little more than a week) seems to belong to Jennifer Carrow, who designed The Best Intentions as well as this smart and funny jacket for this study of the benefits of melancholy. 
I love how the heavier title type introduces the smallest bit of asymmetry and makes the frown a little more droopy. Someone’s got their Occam’s razor nicely sharpened :-)
…
Against Happiness
Typos are bad enough when they result in gibberish like “procedurw,” but words that are close together and technically correct—like “manager” and “manger"—will easily slip by Word’s spell check. If you find yourself making those kind of situational typos often, the Productivity Portfolio blog can walk you through creating an "Exclude Dictionary” to have Word’s checker prompt you whenever it finds certain words. That way, you’re the one who decides whether you meant the guy who deploys…
At the margin, that is.
Information in the modern world is virtually free, and well-defined tasks can be outsourced very cheaply, if need be. Don’t specialize in those.
Bias is everywhere, and overcoming bias yields great gains. Empirically, our biases stem strongly from our nationality, our language, and our cultural background. (It is, by the way, remarkable how much libertarianism is an Anglo-American phenomenon.)
To overcome those biases we should travel, spend some time living…
Weighting in at the size of a business card, the tiny Thumb Calendar makes it possible to keep a calendar on you at all times. The Thumb Calendar is two sided and in order to use it, you must cover the dates that are not directly below the month header with your thumbs. The designer only has a PDF version for 2007 on his homepage, but you can grab a 2008 version from Flickr (linked below). The Thumb Calendar is a free download and makes a great addition to any purse or wallet.
Design by Vladimir Zimakov
The Aesthetic Poetic’s Douglas Haddow brought his interview with designer and illustrator Vladimir Zimakov to my attention. Check it out to see some more of Zimakov’s work and read about his influences (Paula Rego! Yesss!!); his Moby Dick cover is below. There’s more great work at his site.
Moby Dick
Last time I moved I threw out my back repositioning Grandma’s china cabinet for the 10th time. My latest (and hopefully last) moving experience was a dream because of the Lay-It-Out furniture templates. These unique life-sized paper furniture templates are the shape of your bed, sofa, tables, chairs, rugs, billiard table. After trimming them to the appropriate size (measurements are in inches and centimeters), we placed them on the floor and – as I was directed to the appropriate…
Mark Hurst at Good Experience wonders today about the words used to classify olive oil — pure, virgin, and extra virgin: “I mean, what’s the difference between ‘virgin’ and ‘extra virgin’ in any other context?” Mark’s conclusion: “Olive oil suffers from name inflation.”
Which reminded me of the strange array of words used to size olives, something I first learned about (and still vaguely recall) from a Marshall Efron skit on The Great American Dream Machine.
You can find the…
There’s the First Law of Kipple… ‘Kipple drives out nonkipple.’
…Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday’s homeopape. When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you to go bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up there is twice as much of it. It always gets more and more.
No one can win against kipple, except temporarily and maybe in one spot.
- Do…
At a loss for a gift this holiday season? Screwing over friends and family and buying crap just for yourself? Bad with your money in general and need to splurge on something pointless to help bloat your credit card bills? Dirt poor and reckless?
We could care less what your situation is, really. We just want to point out that a lot of our comics-related junk is still available from SLG Publishing and you could still spend your goddam money on it if you had half a brain. And maybe you’d get…
![[Marvel Comics #83]](http://brownstudy.micro.blog/uploads/2019/66596efc92.jpg)
