"He was wedded to his sans serifs"

Jon Ronson's fascinating 2004 piece about Stanley Kubrick's collecting practices. (Via Brent, who saw it here.) Almost every sentence is grippingly excerptable, and the piece is full of wonderful phrases too, but here is a bit I especially liked:

"I was just talking to Tony about typefaces," I say to Jan.

"Ah yes," says Jan. "Stanley loved typefaces." Jan pauses. "I tell you what else he loved."

"What?" I ask.

"Stationery," says Jan.

I glance over at the boxes full of letters from people who felt about Kubrick the way Kubrick felt about stationery, and then back to Jan. "His great hobby was stationery," he says. "One time a package arrived with 100 bottles of brown ink. I said to Stanley, 'What are you going to do with all that ink?' He said, 'I was told they were going to discontinue the line, so I bought all the remaining bottles in existence.' Stanley had a tremendous amount of ink." Jan pauses. "He loved stationery, pads, everything like that."

"A fleshy, oddity-filled occupational subcategory"

I can't remember now where I first read about it, but Jeff Johnson's Tattoo Machine: Tall Tales, True Stories, and My Life in Ink was an impulse buy that didn't quite pan out for me - it is a good book, in its way, but not in my way, which I would have seen if I had looked at a page or two instead of someone else's description. I was expecting something truly gonzo and demented, with lots of grotesque details, but in fact it is more like something you would read in the New Yorker! More on Anthony Bourdain/David Sedaris lines, much less like Ken Bruen/Bukowski/etc. than I had hoped for....

Anyway, there was one chapter that I really did like - avert your eyes if you are squeamish about medical curiosities - these are my favorite three sentences, only the rest of the chapter is then mere elaboration rather than wonderfully grotesque piling-on of further examples - the chapter on oddities:

I'm not talking about the countless skin tags, warts, and missing toenails, or even the more exotic yellow, scale-encrusted dimple of an old bullet wound, or a gnarly third-world surgical scar. Boils, lesions, psoriasis, eczema, folliculitis, active volcano acne, blisters, whatever. These are nothing.

I'm talking about black sponges growing off the skin, flippers, stumps, spines that warped to accommodate a third kidney, hairy purple square-foot patches of alien flesh, a secondary anus.

"Bottles Boxes Baskets bags nets &c &c &c"

Jim Endersby, author of the excellent A Guinea Pig's History of Biology, has a nice piece in the TLS on the new edition of the correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks:

In his letter, Roxburgh [an East India Company surgeon and botanist] described some new plants he was sending, and emphasized “the astringent qualities of the Terminalia Myrobalana (Myrobal. Citrin.)”. The genus Terminalia had received its name from Linnaeus himself in 1767 (in the thirteenth edition of the Systema Naturae), but assigning the plant to the correct species was more difficult, as Roxburgh’s parenthesis shows. In 1774 the tree had received the name Myrobalanifera citrina from Petrus Houttuyn, professor of botany at Leiden, and it is now called Terminalia catappa. Yet it still goes by many different common names, including Indian almond, Bengal almond, Malabar almond, Sea bean tree and Umbrella tree; it has several Hindi names, including Baadaam, Deshi badam and Jangli badam; in Malay it’s Ketapang; and in Nepalese Kaathe badaam. And the University of Melbourne’s multilingual, multi-script plant names database (www.plantnames.unimelb.edu.au) lists dozens of others.

Putting an end to this botanical Babel had been a key motive for Linnaeus’s reforms, and while much clearly remained to be done in Banks’s time, the situation was greatly improved compared to that of a generation earlier, when each country’s botanists tended to use their own language and system of names. Roxburgh’s letter also makes it clear why accurate, unambiguous names mattered so much: “I think \[Terminalia Myrobalana\] will prove the strongest vegetable Astringent known”, he wrote, telling Banks that he used it to make ink and that it was also used by the Chinese in dyes and paints: “without it their colours would run like Ink on Blotting Paper”. He was therefore convinced that “it would prove a great acquisition to a Commercial Nation”. But only if the right plant, and the best variety of that plant, could be obtained and grown.