Shiny shiny

17 Apr 2008, 9am

• Thirty years of Granta covers. Stupid flash interface (+ beside ⇥ beside ▸ means what now?) but a grand nostalgia ride all the same.
  
• ‘Stephen Fry and the Machine That Made Us’. On BBC4 last Monday night (UK residents can see it on the BBC’s iPlayer, for the rest of us it’s up on the usual, erm, channels). Surprisingly thorough documentary in which the Man with a Brain the Size of Hugh Laurie is humbled and amazed by all that went into the production of Gutenberg’s Bible. He cuts, smoke-proofs and casts type (well, an e), has interesting asides on what really goes into making vellum and on Gutenberg’s financial woes, makes paper from rag pulp, assists in the building of a press, prints a page, and, finally, dons the cotton gloves to leaf through a copy of the real deal. Fry’s shows are always a treat – his journey on the genealogy program ‘Who Do You Think You Are’ a couple years ago was truly moving – and this’n be no exception.
• French Laundry at Home. Similar in scope to the Julie/Julia Project of a few years ago. How nice is it to have someone going through a daunting cookbook recipe by recipe so you don’t have to. My own experience with The French Laundry Cookbook has so far been limited to failing at making the veal stock, but this site does give one courage.
• Soviet soft drink labels. Happened upon while looking around for info on the 1970s Pepsi/Stolichnaya barter deal. ‘Printing plants were centralized. There were two plants in Leningrad which were printing labels for ¼ of the whole country.’ Evidently only one standard die shape too.
• Thirty Tables of Contents. Strangely dry collection of TOCs published in pamphlet form by the AIGA last year. Other than Air Guitar, the Nabokov and of course the Bringhurst, I fear there’s not much there, there.

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