Showing results by author "Simon Garfield" in All Categories

A delightfully inquisitive tour that explores the rich history and the subtle powers of fonts. Fonts surround us every day, on street signs and buildings, on movie posters and books, and on just about every product that we buy. But where do fonts come from and why do we need so many? Who is...

In 1936 anthropologist Tom Harrison, poet and journalist Charles Madge and documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings set up the Mass Observation Project. The idea was simple: ordinary people would record, in diary form, the events of their everyday lives. An estimated one million pages eventually found their way to the archive - and it soon became clear this was more than anyone could digest. Today, the diaries are stored at the University of Sussex, where, remarkably, most remain unread.

Maps fascinate us. They chart our understanding of the world and they log our progress, but above all they tell our stories. From the early sketches of philosophers and explorers through to Google Maps and beyond, Simon Garfield examines how maps both relate and realign our history. His compelling narratives range from the quest to create the perfect globe to the challenges of mapping Africa and Antarctica, from spellbinding treasure maps to the naming of America, from Ordnance Survey to the mapping of Monopoly and Skyrim and from rare map dealers to cartographic frauds.

'This love letter to our four-legged friends is a delight . . . there is a good joke, an intriguing tale or a fascinating statistic on every page' Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday 'A fact-packed history of a 15,000-year relationship' Sunday Times How did we arrive at the moment when a dog goes to the...

All the Knowledge in the World is a history and celebration of those who created the most groundbreaking and remarkable publishing phenomenon of any age. It tracks the story from Ancient Greece to Wikipedia, from modest single-volumes to the 11,000-volume Chinese manuscript that was too big to print. It looks at how Encyclopaedia Britannica came to dominate the industry, how it spawned hundreds of competitors and how an army of ingenious door-to-door salesmen sold their wares to guilt-ridden parents. 

The pen is our oldest tangible connection between an individual mind and the world at large, enabling the grandest proclamations and our most intimate confessions. But the pen's own story is just as eventful as anything it has described. This is the illuminating story of how the simplest tool has shaped our lives. Simon Garfield takes us from a reed on the Nile to the home of Montblanc and Bic, and from the wartime trenches to the desks of Jane Austen, Sigmund Freud and Margaret Atwood.

As a boy, Simon Garfield started collecting "errors" - rare stamps flawed by printing faults and absent colours. As an adult his childhood obsession became a full-blown mid-life crisis. This amusing but painfully revealing account of a passion he was once only able to admit to people he could really trust traces his fascination for these tiny print slip-ups from the simple pleasures of boyhood to an attempt to create order out of chaos and finally the gradual decline and break-up of his marriage.

In Miniature takes a big look at small things. It is a celebration of the obsessive, eccentric and meticulous and welcomes us into the world of collectors, modellers and fans. Simon Garfield is a master of finding delight and fascination in unlikely places, and here we discover flea circuses, 1,000 tiny Hitlers, miniature crime scenes, model villages and railways, minuscule food and a dozen more intricately examined pursuits. Each object considered plots the course of a new miniature byway and in unexpected ways lets us see our world in a whole new light....

John Baskerville was a maverick lacquer maker and printer in Birmingham, a flamboyant dresser, a key figure in the enlightenment. Though it earned him little money, he was obsessive about both his typeface and its appearance on the page, using a new form of paper to show it at its best. His perfection culminated in his Bible, acclaimed as the finest ever made. The story encompasses one of the first women of typography, his wife Sarah Baskerville, and the many typefaces the Baskervilles inspired.

The story of Albertus is one of displacement (designer Berthold Wolpe was a German Jewish refugee who went on to design the masthead for The Times), but also one of permanence, for it has proved a fresh, vibrant and indestructible face for almost a century. In this unique celebration, the designer's children reveal the history of its creation and erratic brilliance of their father, while the book grapples with one of the fundamental artistic questions: what makes great art not only survive but flourish in each new age and medium?

This quirky and unique book examines how the computer transformed type into something that anyone could use and have an opinion on; how a typeface, correctly used, may sell us almost anything; and how new types with names such as Sunday Flicker, Pinky Stone and Irongate (to name but three out of the hundreds issued this year) each attempt to keep the alphabet exciting and new.