Gill Partington

The Speaking Picture Book - the subject of a previous post - is one the freakiest, funniest items in the special collections of Cambridge...

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...

Why would you need instructions for operating a page? That’s what this Norwegian comedy sketch - involving a Medieval IT Helpdesk - asks....

I 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 ...

In the early 1960s Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell – then both obscure writers inhabiting the demi-monde of a scruffy and very much ungen...

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...

You 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...

This is Joseph Moxon's 1670 book Practical Perspective or Perspective Made Easie in Cambridge University Library (M.14.63). It's got pop...

Here'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...

I'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...

Heather Weston's Grey Matter: Arguing with Descartes is a strange book structure – the cardboard cover zig-zags to form an M shape, effec...

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 Chronica Majora (MS26) in Corpus Christi College Library, Cambridge is hard to categorise. It's a history of the world from the creat...

Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy has a famous marbled leaf that's never the same twice, because marbled paper is always unique. This one...