General Interest

If you love reading and you love old handwritten documents, here’s a suggestion: some rainy Sunday afternoon, make yourself a cup of your favorite tea, curl on the couch with your tablet and read some of history’s most famous books in their original handwritten form.

One of the most recent to show up online is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, made available by the Shelley-Godwin Archive.

The collection offers both her notebooks and her working drafts of the book. Fortunately, the pages are accompanied by a helpful transcription of the text, exactly as it was written, because her handwriting looks like maybe she was dictating to Frankenstein’s monster.

And that’s only the beginning.

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I have to admit, as an American, my inner 12-year-old gets to giggling whenever one of my British colleagues refers to an eraser as a “rubber.”

That’s why I enjoyed this BBC piece translating common office terms for Brits working in America and vice versa.

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Let me just preface this post by saying: I take no responsibility for any ideas that anyone may or not get from reading this.

NBC News had an interesting story from Australia detailing how ornithologists were able to affect the mating habits of two subspecies of fairy-wrens simply by using Sharpie-like markers on them.

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This year marked the 20th anniversary Andre the Giant’s passing. And what do you do to commemorate a giant of a man? Why, you make a giant of a rollerball pen, of course.

Think Pens has produced an Andre the Giant rollerball pen that is a whopping 8.5 inches long and nearly twice as big around as an ordinary pen. On the oversized clip, “Andre the Giant.”

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We wanted to give a tip o’ the hat to teacher Hilary de Boerr and Class 4a at the Michael Hall school for their recent pen and ink project.

The students used bamboo and goose quills to make ink pens and mashed berries to make ink, which they put into ink pots made of clay. They fashioned their own paper utilizing an old Chinese technique, and then used their pens and ink to write new name tags for their desks.

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