Andrew Martin on the ingratiation-strategies and the deceits of corporate identity.

Terry Pitts’s blog about these books: interesting, and not just for the Sebald content.

When it launched its website in July 1995, the internet seller Amazon seemed a wondrous thing. Here was a bookstore stocked with almost every title, and one that would reach parts of the country (the United States of America) that were far from any bricks-and-mortar shop. It was indeed based in Seattle, and its employees, one imagined, were mainly grunge-kids in baggy jeans and t-shirts, fetching and packing the books for minimum wages. The company seemed endearing to those of us who like brave new ventures.

James Mosley has welcomed the new year by adding two substantial posts to his blog Typefoundry: an update on his thesis about the appearance of sanserif letters in eighteenth-century Britain; and an explanation of why the inscription recently added to the National Gallery in London is all wrong. This latest post deserves wide circulation in the blogosphere – not to mention the wider culture of the UK.