Weekend in Dorset

To Dorset, to Dorset to get some fresh air. Tentless camping in the Walkers' Barn at Toms Field and the best suet-crust Steak & Kidney Pudding of my life (Andrea, are you listening?) at the Kings Arms in Langton Matravers. And for the first time in my life, visits to the Blue Pool and Durdle Door. Pix by Miki Yamanouchi on the Sony Ericsson T68i phone camera. We'll be back too, for Purbeck ice-cream, and Best Bitter from the Ringwood Brewery.

Miki spent half Saturday night rereading Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four; I was immersed in Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style, discovering some of what I missed by choosing in 1975 not to study at the London College of Printing. I had no idea what a deep subject this. (Did you know, for example, that there are upper and lower cases for numbers as well as letters?)

I shall look into remapping my keyboard as he suggests. My fingers have learned mappings to enable me to type the powerful APL shorthand characters; they can certainly learn another mapping that will put all the European language characters at their — fingertips? Bringhurst is a poet as well as a typographer, and it shows up in this beautiful book, listed as Version 2.5. Some quotes.

Simplicity is good, but so is plurality. Typography’s principal function (not its only function) is communication, and the greatest threat to communication is not difference but sameness. Communication ceases when one being is no different from another: when there is no new information to exchange.

Originality is everywhere, but much originality is blocked if the way back to earlier discoveries is cut or overgrown.