Month: July 2006

Farewell to the SparkyMobile

The latest offering in this Summer’s big clearance sale is the rarely used SparkyMobile:

SparkyMobile

I’ve been planning to have a big “Everything Must Go!” sale in September — and probably still will — but poverty is becoming a real issue at the moment, and I’ve been in a bit of a panic about how I’ll actually eat and pay bills and whatnot without liquidating a lot of stuff right away.

This Summer has been a nasty confluence of financial issues: the class I was supposed to teach was cancelled, my health insurance has gone up to a staggering amount of money per month, I’ve been getting a ton of dental work done, and so on and so on. Unless some of those overdue freelance paychecks start rolling in soon, things are going to get pretty bleak.

The maddening part is that I’ve cobbled together a decent plan for next year: loans, scholarships, a steady trickle of freelance income, and socialized medicine will keep me fed and housed will I go to school as long as I maintain modest habits. The unfortunate collapse of my summer budget scheme, though, has ensured that it’ll be a minor miracle if I can make it as far as the end of September, when my next chapter gets underway. For the moment I’m out of cash, out of credit, and devoting as much time as I can to finishing up a backlog of freelance work so I can get out the rest of those invoices.

after

All this could be yours! Cheap!

Although I splurged some on furniture when I fled from Astoria and settled back in Brooklyn, it’s been a pretty threadbare year. I’ve been pretty sure for most of it that I’d be leaving this Fall, with very little idea of when or where I’d settle down after school. With the future so cloudy, it’s pretty easy to unload so much stuff. Starting from scratch somewhere else seems slightly more appealing than picking up where I left off, or finding a way to haul an apartment full of stuff again. I’ve lugged an absurd amount of stuff from home to home ever since I left for college, and the effort of doing that over and over has made me a lot less sentimental about things than I once was. This will be the third time since coming back to New York that I’ve massively reduced the amount of treasures/crap that I own, and I have to admit that I really wish I could let go of all of it once and for all.

Letting go, though, has never been one of my skills, even though I’m a master of moving on.

Censorship in 17th-Century England

In Charles T. Jacobi’s Gesta Typographica (London, 1897, although I was only reading passages reprinted in 1964 at the Maidstone College of Art), there’s a mention of a decree made by the Star Chamber on July 11, 1637, that limited the number of master printers in in England to just twenty, and also limited the number of type-founders to just four.

It was a startling tidbit, which made slightly more sense after a little digging. The restriction of legally sanctioned printing to a handful of shops in London was intended as a way to make it as easy as possible for all publications in the kingdom to be monitored and censored by the court of Charles I, whose attempts to consolidate power led to the English Civil War. The 1637 decree was the most extreme of an escalating series of attempts to stifle dissent, often spread by means of pamphlets and books published by independent printers throughout the kingdom. Although small presses continued to produce seditious (in this case meaning anything not sanctioned by the crown) pamphlets and books, many unlicensed founders and printers were raided and arrested, and their equipment destroyed.

In terms of type history, I wonder how many punches, matrices, fonts, and examples were lost in all these purges. The literature I’ve seen so far only discusses the printers themselves, and doesn’t say much about the foundries, or doesn’t make clear if any of the printers had founders working with them under the same roof. It seems possible that entire strands of typographic development may have been snuffed out during this period.

(Note to self: Keep an eye out for other mentions of the censorship by the Star Chamber between 1632 and 1641, thereabouts.)