1,172-Character Japanese Typewriter (video)
The average typewriter had up to 40 keys and could type around 60 characters. Originally made in Japan in the late 1940s, the Toshiba Typewriter Model...Continue reading
Category: Blast from the Past
The Internet Archive Recovers 490,000 Music Files “Lost” by MySpace
It’s not fair to expect a platform to host content for free forever (cough Flickr cough) but when MySpace deleted a dozen years worth of content...Continue reading
The First Edition of Encyclopedia Britannica is Now Available Online
The Encyclopedia Britannica is now little more than an entry in the annals of the history of encyclopedias, but at one point it was one of the...Continue reading
Guest Post: Science Fiction Was Around in Medieval Times – Here’s What it Looked Like
Science fiction may seem resolutely modern, but the genre could actually be considered hundreds of years old. There are the alien green “children of Woolpit”, who...Continue reading
Interactive Fiction is the Little Market That Could
There’s a post referenced in tomorrow morning’s link post that touches on interactive fiction. That piece claims IF is a new idea that is changing the...Continue reading
Guest Post: Eight Surprising Things it’s Time You Knew About Gulliver’s Travels
Happy 350th birthday, Jonathan Swift. Widely recognised as the leading satirist in the history of the English language, Swift found his way into the world 350...Continue reading
Old Coot Hates Modern Internet
There’s been no end, in the nearly a quarter of a century since the modern internet began, of detractors talking about how wonderful things were before it...Continue reading
A Time Capsule Associated With Jules Verne Has Been Discovered in the French Pyrenees
A French university has just announced what sounds like the plot for a new TV show. A multidisciplinary team of archaeologists and historians from the Paris...Continue reading
Guest Post: Seven Academic Books That Helped to Shape Modern Britain
To celebrate the diversity, innovation and influence of academic books over the course of modern history, seven specialists share the book they believe has been most...Continue reading
Guest Post: The Myth of the Disappearing Book
After years of sales growth, major UK publishers reported a fall in their e-book sales for the first time this year, introducing new doubts about the...Continue reading
The Gothic Novel: How Gothic Buildings Became Synonymous With Horror, and the Supernatural
Thanks to innumerable movies, Gothic architecture has long been associated with horror, Halloween, and the supernatural. The mere mention of Dracula or Frankenstein conjures visions of...Continue reading
Guest Post: How a Volcano in Indonesia Led to the Creation of Frankenstein
As the summer of 2016 draws to a close, we mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of one of the most famous novels in the...Continue reading
Publishing Industry Fads Have Been Happening for Nearly 300 Years
If you thought that the way the publishing industry jumps on the latest werehamster/interurban fantasy/cyclops detective/moody vampire/hipster zombie* fad is a new development, you would be...Continue reading
Blast From the Past: Hands On With Amazon’s First Accessible eReader, the Kindle Keyboard (video)
Yesterday’s news about the new Voiceview for Kindle accessibility feature has lead many news sites to proclaim that it is Amazon’s first accessible ereader. Given that...Continue reading
1985 Pop-Up Book Takes Us Inside the PC (video)
The latest pop-up books can take us on a tour of the White House or remind us of the phobias we’d rather forget, but that’s nothing...Continue reading