You’d be hard pressed to find books on how to draw specific things these days, never mind a book on how to draw tanks. This book was passed to me from some friends in Scotland who had picked it up from somewhere I am likely to never even know. It is part of a small [...]

Museums are taken for granted in this country. By and large, they are mostly free to get in (well the big ones are) and those that aren’t free are usually worth the few bob that lie in the crevices of one’s wallet – Especially this one. Most small curiosity museums couldn’t survive here without some [...]

I had a day off work today. Whilst eating my breakfast I caugh the last the part of what was supposed to be an ‘educational’ program for schools about reusing the things around us to make things. Apart from a midi acid trip of a soundtrack, there wasn’t one redeeming feature that I could think [...]

As a bit of an amateur botanist, I have spent most of this week pawing over my shiny new book (thanks Ruth!): The Taschen Book of Plants. This large-format, hardback is a satisfying collection of the original four hundred year-old copper plate etchings and illustrations of the plants from the  gardens of Eichstatt castle in [...]

Since way back in the days of ‘A Tribe Called Quest‘, the soulful jazzy tones of Q-tip’s hip-hop have been one of my most reliable choices for the start of long car journeys and barbecues alike. There is something quite soothing about his lyrical flow that was reignited with the (still) unreleased studio album ‘Kamaal [...]

There is something quite alluring about these schoolastic textbooks that I stumbled across today. They’re colourful, typographically interesting and visually quite bold. I’m also not sure whether it’s simply the fact that they’re fairly ‘vintage’  that I give them extra merit. It seems to me that most publications from the early 80′s and late 70′s [...]

There is nothing more irritating to the female of the species than seeing grown men giggling around a comic – especially if it’s about war. That is of course, unless you are one of those rare, tolerant and usually rather quirky ladies who actually finds a comic on a man to a be an alluring [...]

Right-wing ‘city rag’ and doom-harbingers, the Evening Standard have decided that in these days of free papery and digital finger-poking, it would be prudent to shake its down-beat winter coat off and come at us from a different angle with a short series of apologetic advertising posters. London-based ad’ agency McCann Erickson produced the curiously [...]