<story><title>Why 18th century books looked like smartphone screens (2014)</title><url>http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2014/02/_thats_one_of_t.php</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>benbreen</author><text>This is an interesting essay - I definitely think there&amp;#x27;s a lot to be learned about graphic design from 18th century print culture, especially people like William Hogarth with his &amp;quot;Line of Beauty.&amp;quot; Incidentally, John Overholt, who offers up a comment excerpted at the end of the piece, is one of my favorite people to follow on Twitter. He&amp;#x27;s the curator of early modern books at Harvard&amp;#x27;s Houghton Library so it&amp;#x27;s basically a series of gems that he unearths in the stacks:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;john_overholt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;john_overholt&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Why 18th century books looked like smartphone screens (2014)</title><url>http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2014/02/_thats_one_of_t.php</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>avian</author><text>&amp;gt; The point being, of course, that the ergonomics of smartphones as reading devices are not only kind of rad, but historically so.&lt;p&gt;You can also turn this around and say that smartphones throw away three centuries worth of ergonomic improvements in reading. I personally find smartphones completely unusable for any kind of longer text.</text></comment>