Books & Pads

Websters defines “small print” as text in which a company or other potentially liable body expresses things they don’t want to say but are forced to by law. In advertising and marketing, small print provides a company with an opportunity to contradict that written or said previously and to disengage legally from any promises it […]

On this day, 27 October in 1991, the new nation of Turkmenistan gained independence from the Soviet Union. Turkmenistan is one of the lesser known countries to Westerners, partly because under a slightly mad president, it was relatively cut off from the outside world for fifteen years. In fact for many, the exploits of this […]

  Librarians in the New York Society Library, the city’s oldest, have discovered that two books George Washington took out in 1789 have still not been returned. Adjusting for inflation, this means that the dead president owes some $300,000 in library fines. On 5 October 1789, Washington borrowed Emmerich de Vattel’s Law of Nations, a […]

  From: Guinness World Records: “The most books typed backwards and in their original languages using a computer with four blank keyboards and without looking at the screen is 68 (3,663,324 words, 20,680,060 characters , 24,154 pages, 266,741 paragraphs, 516,498 lines) and was achieved by Michele Santelia (Italia), in Campobasso, Italia, on 16 June 2009.” […]

Prospects for continued economic recovery looked a bit bleaker as it emerged that the Treasury borrowed another $4.3 billion last month, the first time Britain has been in the red in January since records began in 1993. Economists had expected a surplus of £2.8 billion in a month that should be bolstered by tax receipts. […]

See John Maynard Keynes – advocate of interventionist economic policy – and Friedrich von Hayek – defender of classical liberalism and free-market capitalism – battle out their economic thing through the medium of rap. Which skool of economic thought do you subscribe to? Chorus: We’ve been going back and forth for a century [Keynes] I […]

The shortlist for the Bookseller/Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year, 2009 has been drawn up. The public are invited to vote for their favourite and the winner will be announced on 26 March. Since last year, submissions for odd candidates have been accepted from the public. The book’s title, however, should […]

Is the standard of English in your office declining / weakening / waning / flagging? Do your reports need improving / sprucing up / smartening up / beautifying? The recently published Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary might help. This two-tome reference book, published by Oxford University Press, is the result of over 40 […]