James Mosley has welcomed the new year by adding two substantial posts to his blog Typefoundry: an update on his thesis about the appearance of sanserif letters in eighteenth-century Britain; and an explanation of why the inscription recently added to the National Gallery in London is all wrong. This latest post deserves wide circulation in the blogosphere – not to mention the wider culture of the UK.

When it launched its website in July 1995, the internet seller Amazon seemed a wondrous thing. Here was a bookstore stocked with almost every title, and one that would reach parts of the country (the United States of America) that were far from any bricks-and-mortar shop. It was indeed based in Seattle, and its employees, one imagined, were mainly grunge-kids in baggy jeans and t-shirts, fetching and packing the books for minimum wages. The company seemed endearing to those of us who like brave new ventures. Read more

Terry Pitts’s blog about these books: interesting, and not just for the Sebald content: here

Andrew Martin on the ingratiation-strategies and the deceits of corporate identity: here

Simon Esterson’s lecture on ‘British magazine design, 1960–200o’, at the St Bride Library, London, January 2008: an insider’s view: here

Postings in this journal column have been light over the last few months. This is partly just because we’ve been busy. But it is partly due to having opened a Twitter account (@hyphenpress). We don’t put out much there either, but the fascination of Twitter has certainly taken up energy that might have been put into this column. Ideally one should tweet there and post here, and there are some remorseless bloggers who only tweet to announce their new blog posts. The more interesting course seems to be to use Twitter for light, quick messages with real content, and these blog or journal postings for more extended and longer, more lasting things. That’s what we will try for.

What happens to books when they leave home and are taken out into the public realm? We posted on this here and here. Now see this wonderful blog on the theme: the Underground New York Public Library. It’s only a pity that the books being read are hyperlinked to that monstrous internet seller that shall be nameless.