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What an Art Editor buys off Amazon…

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

I am, and always have been, an internet binge shopper: I won’t buy anything for months but then I’ll log on to some site (Amazon being the one-stop port of call of choice at the moment) and test my credit card for endurance over a couple of hours, usually during a rainy afternoon. So, during my latest session, I managed to buy:

1)    Everything currently in print by William Gay. If you love William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy this is a writer you should definitely seek out.

2)    Tales from Outer Suburbia, by the wonderful illustrator Shaun Tan

3)    The thing that has just made my working life soo much easier: The Type Selector

Genius! - the equivalent of a Pantone swatch book, but for typefaces. Such a brilliant idea and yet so simple, like most brilliant ideas. No more squinting at the type scroll bar in inDesign, or leafing through voluminous reference encyclopaedias. Where have I been for the past three years? This was published in 2006 and I have only noticed it now. My only gripe is that it should contain even more fonts. It now sits prettily (I am a bit of a neatnik) next to the Pantone sampler.

Christina Griffiths, Art Editor

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