The Speaking Picture Book Sings The Speaking Picture Book - the subject of a previous post - is one the freakiest, funniest items in the special collections of Cambridge...
What's Inside The Page? The idea that a page has an 'inside' seems counterintuitive, but it's become the norm in the digital era. Reading text on an electronic d...
Instructions for UseWhy would you need instructions for operating a page? That’s what this Norwegian comedy sketch - involving a Medieval IT Helpdesk - asks....
Thinking Inside the BoxI received d.p. houston’s poetry collection, Boite de Vers, in the post last week. It’s completely unreadable, but not in the sense that ...
Carry On in the LibraryIn the early 1960s Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell – then both obscure writers inhabiting the demi-monde of a scruffy and very much ungen...
Feeling The Page Weproductions, a small press operated by Telfer Stokes and Helen Douglas from the 1970s to the 1990s made a series of books that are by t...
Between the SheetsYou know that feeling when you're in the office, you get that mid-afternoon slump and you suddenly feel all drowsy? This strange item (18...
Peep HolesThis is Joseph Moxon's 1670 book Practical Perspective or Perspective Made Easie in Cambridge University Library (M.14.63). It's got pop...
Bullet holesHere's a book in St John's Library - Rerum Germanicarum tomi III. 1688 (F.7.25) - that has ACTUAL bullet holes in it. Or at least that's w...
Losing my marblesI'm a bit obsessed with the marbled leaf in Laurence Sterne’s novel, Tristram Shandy. It must be one of the strangest pages in literature...
Pages arguing with one anotherHeather Weston's Grey Matter: Arguing with Descartes is a strange book structure – the cardboard cover zig-zags to form an M shape, effec...
Anatomy of the page Ever felt like you're getting too intimate with the book? Here's some non family-friendly pictures of me poking around inside this ninete...
The earliest movable book? The Chronica Majora (MS26) in Corpus Christi College Library, Cambridge is hard to categorise. It's a history of the world from the creat...
Marbled fingerprintsLaurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy has a famous marbled leaf that's never the same twice, because marbled paper is always unique. This one...