Arthur Symons

From A Prelude to Life (1905):
If there ever was a religion of the eyes, I have devoutly practiced that religion. I noted every face that passed me on the pavement; I looked into the omnibuses, the cabs, always with the same eager hope of seeing some beautiful or interesting person, some gracious movement, a delicate expression, which would be gone if I did not catch it as it went. The search without an aim grew almost a torture to me...I grasped at all these sights with the same futile energy as a dog that I once saw standing in an Irish stream, and snapping at the bubbles that ran continually past him on the water. Life ran past me continually, and I tried to make all its bubbles my own.

Nerves (1897):
A modern malady of love is nerves.
Love, once a simple madness, now observes
The stages of his passionate disease,
And is twice sorrowful because he sees
Inch by inch entering, the fatal knife.
O health of simple minds, give me your life,
And let me, for one midnight, cease to hear
The clock for ever ticking in my ear,
The clock that tells the minutes in my brain.
It is not love, nor love's despair, this pain
That shoots a witless, keener pain across
The simple agony of love and loss.
Nerves, nerves! O folly of a child who dreams
Of heaven, and, waking in the darkness, screams.

La Peste Marginalia

Slowing down time:

« Question: comment faire pour ne pas perdre son temps? Réponse : l’éprouver dans toutes sa longueur. Moyens : passer des journées dans l’antichambre d’un dentiste, sur une chaise inconfortable ; vivre à son balcon le dimanche après-midi ; écouter des conférences dans une langue qu’on ne comprend pas, choisir les intinéraires de chemin de fer plus longs et les plus commodes et voyager debout naturellement ; faire la queue aux guichets des spectacles et ne pas prendre sa place, etc. »
-La Peste. Albert Camus

Garamond Marginalia

Monotype Garamond

Monotype Garamond is a design of remarkable sophistication, and is certainly one of the most elegant interpretations of the Garamond type style. With its distinct contrast in stroke weights, open counters and delicate serifs, Monotype Garamond is exceptionally legible and can be set at virtually any size. The contrast between the Roman and Bold weights is nothing short of ideal.
Such an exemplary type revival is, of course, a tribute to the excellence of the model. As it turns out, the model in this case was inspired – but not designed – by Claude Garamond.
It was under Stanley Morison’s leadership, in the third decade of the twentieth century, that Monotype undertook the most aggressive program of typeface development ever attempted in Europe up to that time. The program encompassed original typefaces and interpretations of old designs. It would ultimately produce such faces as Centaur, Gill Sans, Perpetua, and Ehrhardt, as well as Monotype’s versions of Bembo, Baskerville, Fournier and of course, Garamond.
Cut in 1922, Monotype Garamond was the first of Morison’s celebrated typeface revivals. It was patterned after type from the archives of the French Imprimerie Nationale, the centuries-old office of French government printing (broadly equivalent to the US Government Printing Office, or Her Majesty’s Stationery Office in the UK).
The Imprimerie type was long believed to be the early-16th-century work of Claude Garamond. It was only in 1926, after “Garamond” fonts from Monotype and many other foundries had been released, that type historian Beatrice Warde discovered the type was the work of Jean Jannon, of Sedan, France. Jannon was a later designer who produced his work some eighty years after the fonts of Garamond. (In an added twist to this mistaken-identity plot, Warde published her discovery under the pseudonym “Paul Beaujon.”)
Jannon’s goal, much like Monotype’s three centuries later, was to imitate the style of the great masters of roman type and make their designs available to printers of his own day. Obviously, he succeeded. The French Imprimerie purchased his types and, over time, as the name of Jean Jannon faded, came to believe they were indeed fonts from the earlier master punch cutter.

VIS Marginalia I

In the midst of a 15-minute phone conversation with a partially deaf 80-year-old Stanford Law School graduate: "You call that rinky-dink soccer field a stadium? Is that what you call it? You know that Stanford killed my dream and shot themselves in the foot when they built that rinky-dink piece of crap? Now we'll never have the Olympics at Stanford. No, we won't, not with that piece of junk. That's what I call it, a piece of crap, because they killed my dream. We had a beautiful stadium with a track where we could hold the Olympics, and now..."
10 minutes later....
"I'm sorry, sir, I have to let you go. There are other visitors here..."
"No, my speech is finished."

At Hoover Tower:

A Stanford graduate student: "Is it true that Leland Stanford had two illegitimate Chinese children?"

A middle-aged female visitor in the elevator: "So what sort of reputation does Leland Stanford have on campus? Do people think of him as a crook or what? I mean, Andrew Carnegie gave money to libraries, but he was not a nice guy."