Category Archives: Booklore

Entries and posts that relate to the creation or consumption of books

Beasts and the Nature of Prayer

Posted on March 25, 2010 by Francois Lachance

Robert Bringhurst A typographic mind is just as alert to the invisible as to the visible. It is a mind with at least four feet: one in the visual, one in the manual, one in the lingual and one in … Continue reading →

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Lambent Ambience: Home Fires

Posted on February 26, 2010 by Francois Lachance

I have read it from a 1999 printout under the title “The Alchemy of Ambience” housed on a Finnish WWW site (at the Aalto University bookshop). It’s no longer there. Have found its 1994 abstract on the International Symposium on … Continue reading →

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Double Double and Twirl

Posted on February 23, 2010 by Francois Lachance

I saw the bloom in the spring garden — bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis ‘Flore Pleno’) — and I thought of the poem and book with the title The Double Dream of Spring by John Ashbery and I love the lines: For … Continue reading →

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The Surrender of Losing Count

Posted on February 17, 2010 by Francois Lachance

The page numbering stops at 50 in Betsy Warland’s open is broken but the counting doesn’t. The table of contents gives the notes section to be at page 55 and if one counts there is indeed between poem and notes … Continue reading →

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Staple Balm

Posted on December 14, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Matthew McKean in the obituary for Marshall Berman in the Globe & Mail provides a short paragraph on Berman’s love of books. Inside the kitchen cupboards of the Upper West Side apartment where he lived for decades, he stored his … Continue reading →

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Tangelo Tangents

Posted on November 14, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Pedlar Press has done a lovely job with the books by May Chan The Fifth Girl and Dried Tangerine Skin with design by Zab (who introduced the Rubber Bit typeface in the headings to Maureen Scott Harris’s Drowning Lessons). In … Continue reading →

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Plastic Figures

Posted on October 31, 2009 by Francois Lachance

When I first encountered this essay in Open Letter I was stymied. It began with a long footnote on Eric Auerbach and his essay “Figura”. It is when I encountered the essay again in Nilling that I was at ease … Continue reading →

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A Path to Paths

Posted on October 20, 2009 by Francois Lachance

idolize, idealize it’s done in imagining it, poetry, can suffer we are not saved by appeal to the plural there is still a sense of an organism at play, an ecology at work I hope never to idealize poetry — … Continue reading →

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Calligram II

Posted on September 20, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Karl Petit. Le Dictionnaire des Citations du Monde Entier. (1960). Entertaining displays of typographic fantasy adorn the alphabetically arranged sections of the book. The “G” page offers three words The link between gastronomy and glutton seems evident (it’s an inverse … Continue reading →

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Calligram I

Posted on September 19, 2009 by Francois Lachance

The book is a collection of quotable passages. It is arranged alphabetically and each of the sections begins with a display of bravura typography. For example, take the E. Here transcribed from the French for the visually impaired: Justified right … Continue reading →

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