Public domain reading

Reading is an instinctive habit, bordering on the subliminal. Advertising, by its very nature, takes advantage of this. Everywhere one goes in a city, a person is reading all the time. It is not just the noise of a city that is tiring, not just the hustling pavement, the on-again, off-again of lights and heaving traffic. It is all the reading that one has to do.


Reading is interpreting marks on a myriad of surfaces. And nowadays, not just the marks themselves but the font those marks are printed in. Take the noble 'ampersand'.

I was stooging around waiting for 4pm one day last week, when the Angus & Coote ampersand font sowed the seed for this post. Beautiful, isn't it? And Wikipaedia tells me that this mark is a ligature of the letters 'et' which ingratiated itself into the English language around 1837. Interesting the use of around to describe such a specific year.

Here are a few 'and per se and's in assorted fonts.

Show don't tell

At the beginning of last year, I joined the NSW Writers' Centre which is located on the site of the old Callan Park psychiatric hospital. I have done three courses with them now: one about a technique called 'show don't tell'; another on writing picture books for children; and today's course.


Today was not actually a course. It was the first in a monthly workshop group which critiques draft manuscripts. It was sooo worthwhile. It is astounding the different thoughts other people have about a story that the writer knows backwards, yet doesn't really know at all.