Odd Bits
Books Across The Seas
Rationing, food shortages, and the clever ways people got around them are major themes in books about the British home front in World War II, fiction and non-fiction alike. Packages from friends in the United States made life easier for a lucky few. (C.A.R.E. packages came after the war.) I recently learned that books from…
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From the Archives: Semicolon
Some recent back and forth with a long time blog reader about paper, punctuation and other writerly subjects inspired me to go back to Cecilia Watson’s Semicolon, which I reviewed in August, 2019. Here’s what I said then. I am pleased to report that the book is just as good as I remember. If…
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From the Archives: A Brief History of the Pencil
In yesterday’s newsletter (1), I went down a research rabbit hole, looking for the difference, if any, between using blue pencils and red pencils as an editing tool. (Plus the pencil’s use by military and authoritarian censors, which is the place where I leaped into the rabbit hole.) In the process, I went back to…
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