"Simply the thing I am shall make me live."--from Jorge Luis Borges, "Shakespeare’s Memory" It would be a Purgatory, or worse, to suddenly wake up one morning with another person's memory--worse yet ...

At first glance this detailed and dense map looks foreboding and somehow off-putting--at least for me, and that was before I understood what the numbers represented. The blue numbers on this section ...

I think that it is difficult to overstate the importance and long-term significance of Dr. Seuss' (Theodor Seuss Geisel, 1904-1991, son and grandson of brewmasters) contribution to childhood. I think ...

Nels Quevli, the Mason City, Iowa author of the oddly-titled What Should be Done with the Bodies of the Dead (1936), does indeed have a point that rises above his oddly-titled, laugh-imminent pamphlet ...

The earliest use of the term "super computer" seems to com from the New York World, ("1920" though actually 1929), and was applied to a unique instrument made by IBM for Columbia University. The The ...

Here's an interesting combination of sweat and electricity--an enormous electrical device that was on display in an exhibit of "natural magic" at the Colosseum in Regent's Park in 1839. The large disk ...

In a continuing thread on Steampunk themes I've organized some of my 1930's-1950's cover art into themes--first up were examples of waterborne-Steampunk, which was followed by an airborne-Steampunk, ...

Lewis Carroll created a lovely, simple cipher in the midst of his Alice and Snark and Logic and Sylvie publications. It really is just a simple bit of polyalphabetic substitution, bu tit gets the job ...

This fantastic timeline of the U.S. Civil War (History of the Civil War in the United States, 1860-1865) was compiled by J. Kellick Bathurst, drawn by Edward Perrin, and printed by the Courier ...

Since I had a go at early illustration earlier today in this blog I thought to write something about a book that is probably one of the most beautifully printed books not only of the Renaissance but ...

What's the dealing with indigo—the missing “I” in ROYGBV—anyway? And what about cyan? And what about those blocks of colors at the bottom, at this time in print history waiting for the appearance of ...

Rare, scarce, interesting, and unusual books for sale, mostly in the history of physics, math, and technology. The bookstore site is part of a larger daily blog for the History of Holes, Dots, Lines, ...