ABSTRACT
Front: Bat Curry. Bats ( fú) are traditional Chinese symbols of good fortune ( fú) because the two words sound alike. Picture by the author, from the doors of the imperial bedchamber in the Hall of Spiritual Cultivation, Forbidden City, Beijing, 2011; cover design by the author, with Nicolas Perrin (https://www.btws.ch), and Elisabeth Brügger; Back, p. 198: Sartor, Jean-Marc Ménadier; after a painting by Marco Giovanni (1576-?)
PICTURES
Pages vi, viii: Computer Dreams, Vlad Atanasiu; 7-bit punched paper tape for computers; x: © 1935, Twentieth Century Fox, All Rights Reserved; 1: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer & Stanley Kubrick; 2: Talkback Thames; 6, 7: Janus Film; 8: Python (Monty) Pictures; American Broadcasting Company; 9: Columbia Pictures; Nero-Film; 10: Artisan Entertainment; 20: Star Film; 21: Anabase Production; 22: Société française de production cinématographique; 23: Warner Brothers Pictures; 24: Constantin Film Produktion; 41: Warner Brothers Pictures; 42: Frères Lumière; Nero-Film; Warner Brothers Pictures; Warner Brothers Pictures; 43: Universal Pictures; 44: Twentieth Century Fox; 51: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer & Stanley Kubrick; Twentieth Century Fox; 52: Athos Films; Universal Pictures; HandMade Films; Paramount Pictures; 53: Universum Film; Hyde Fundraisers; 54: Embassy International Pictures; Escándalo Films; Lucasfilm; 65: Office de Radiodiffusion-télévision française; 84: Mapleton Films; Granada Television; 85: Universal TV; 86: Sveriges Television & Matador Film; 89: Wiedemann & Berg Filmproduktion; 90: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; Magnolia Filmproduktion; Globo Filmes; Cinema City; Dreamworks; 91: Warner Brothers Pictures; 92: Dog Run Pictures; 133: Miramax Films; 134: Warner Brothers Pictures; Comacico; Continental Films; 135, 136: Warner Brothers Pictures; 196: Twentieth Century Fox
FONTS
Text set in Adobe Egyptienne (created 1956) and Adobe Frutiger (1976), both by Adrian Frutiger (1928-); titles in Linotype Optima (1952) by Hermann Zapf (1918-), Linotype Eurostile (1962) by Aldo Novarese (1920-1995), and Nick Fonts Moonshine Script (2004) by Nick Curtis (1948-); small caps in FontShop Olsen (2001) by Morten Rostgaard Olsen (1964-); and Chinese characters in DynaLab BiaoKaiShu
Book layout by the author a Kumagoro design The bear appreciates paper and adores ink (Edmond Locard)
Vlad Atanasiu bid farewell to an engineering school on the fringes of Transylvania to study Oriental civilizations and linguistics in France and the Middle East. After much travel for fieldwork and a book on statistics of calligraphy later, he earned his PhD at the École pratique des Hautes Études in Paris with a thesis on Mamluk and Persian paleography and went on to study cognitive sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As coordinator of the European project “Bernstein” at the Austrian Academy of Sciences he developed image processing and geographical information software for the analysis and history of paper. For ParisTech Telecom, Paris, he did research on writer identification. Presently he is teaching information visualization and studying for his second PhD, in the computer science field of document engineering, at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Vlad doesn’t bite before midnight.
