Twisted Library

The Twisted Life Of Clippy

Benjamin Cassidy | Seattle Met | 23rd August 2022

Clippy, the cartoon paperclip Microsoft used as an early user help interface, was branded by Time as "one of the 50 worst inventions ever". But critics forget that in the 1990s, reassurance was welcome to the majority who had never used a computer before. Clippy returned to Microsoft 365 last year thanks to a social media campaign, a throwback to "a more benign digital age" (3,054 words)

The Lost Library Of John Milton

Hannah Yip | Centre For Material Texts | 13th September 2022

Report from a scholar who spent eight weeks tracking down John Milton's surviving books. His commonplace book provided an invaluable list of suspects to cross-examine. His distinctive style of writing in books — with ink not pencil, rarely underlining, and using asterisks to mark key passages — makes his notes relatively easy to identify. Still: "In the end, I found very little" (3,481 words)

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