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Pamela D. Arceneaux, senior librarian and rare books curator at The Williams Research Center, is currently researching and writing about New Orleans Blue Books. But these blue books aren’t social registers or pricing guides like Kelley Blue Book for cars, they were prostitute directories for Storyville, where prostitution was legally sanctioned in New Orleans about a century ago. No one knows the true author nor publisher of New Orleans Blue Books, but weirdly, Will Bradley’s Mission Toys—ornaments designed in 1904 for the American Type Founders Company (ATF)—appear in some! Follow along as this curiosity develops. |
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I like to think of iPad drawing apps like the various physical drawing tools. Just as an HB pencil responds differently than a piece of graphite, so it is with different apps. While many drawing apps try to replicate these physical tools, Flowpaper embraces the digital medium with physics based drawing. |
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I’m not sure how I stumbled upon Nobrow, a small publishing company focused on graphic art, illustration and comics, but Luke Pearson’s comic style and storytelling quickly caught my attention. And before I knew it, I had ordered Hildafolk, Hilda and the Midnight Giant, Hilda and the Bird Parade and Everything We Miss. |
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My friend Mark Giglio crafts these beautiful kokeshi dolls out of scrap wood and hand paints them. He clearly has an eye for detail with his use of simple patterns and bold colors. He makes them when he has time and I’m still hoping to own one myself one day. |
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For those of you who are as obsessed with WNYC’s Radiolab as I am, you may have already heard the latest installment of the show on the topic of Bliss—oh-so-appropriately released a week before the holidays, a time when we were all probably feeling faaaaaaaaaaar from that. If you haven’t heard it yet, it’s worth a listen for various reasons. Design-speaking, one of the segments in the episode inspired me to dig a little deeper into the work of Charles K. Bliss, an Austrian-born engineer and semiotician, who in the late ’40s invented what’s now referred to as the Blissymbolic Communication System. |
