Pound-for-pound, hole-for-whole, this well may be the most beautiful book ever written on holes--it is at the very least one of the most beautiful botanical works ever published, which is saying a lot ...

Rare, scarce, interesting, and unusual books for sale, mostly in the history of physics, math, and technology. The bookstore site is part of a larger daily blog for the History of Holes, Dots, Lines, ...

(This is an expanded version of an earlier post from 2008, more than 4000 posts ago. I'm reposting it here on the top of the heap today because no doubt the only person who would see the revised ...

I really do love these bits of unusual Americana, something from the early ages of iconic Americans that give a quick glimpse into an average day of a famous-someone way before they became who they ...

This paper is one a small archive of background and draft papers and proposals by the Vannevar Bush group working on the question of the control of atomic weapons and the formalization of the American ...

Nicolas de Larmessin (1640-1725) was an enormously creative and productive artist, and in his way created a genre similar to the great and ancient Dance of Death/.Danse Macabre/Totentanz--though his ...

The presumption of this Illustrated London News article ("On the Impulse to Fly Commercially", 18 October 1919) on the growing popularity of commercial flying for business and pleasure was correct, ...

There was a time in the late 19th century when it was seen that Thomas Edison could do just about anything--so much so that the Brits in The London Punch gave him tongue-in-cheek credit for inventing ...

[Source: via Chronicles of America series at the Library of Congress, here, and first seen via the interesting Pinterest collection of Trevor Owens, here.] Some five years after Percy Lowell filed his ...

A Daily History of Holes, Dots, Lines, Science, History, Math, Physics, Art, the Unintentional Absurd, Architecture, Maps, Data Visualization, Blank and Missing ...

Nicholas Saunderson (1682-1739) was an extraordinary mathematical talent—he was also blind (from about the age of one), and invented, principally for his own uses, what I think is the first ...

J.W. Conway launched this missive into the world in 1935--at a time when left-handedness was deemed to be unacceptable and curable--adding his anti-left-handed sentiments to a teetering pile of other ...