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| I would like to acknowledge and/or apologize for the many elements of homage (some would say pastiche) on this site and in "The Black Ribbon" itself. All design elements of this page may be attributed to or blamed on me, Miss Cleolinda Jones. Text: All text images on the site were created with a suite of PhotoImpression editors (none of that fancy, convenient Photoshop for me) using the fonts Caslon Antique and Pablo LET, unless otherwise specified. (My favorite source for fonts is 1001 Fonts, which has a searchable database and a function where you can even test-drive your font before you download it. You may also find Font Finder WS useful.) All text, including narratives and letters, is my original creation, which is not to say that the ideas are particularly original, but that no one else has ever arranged words in this order before. Probably not, anyway. Photos and graphics: Unless otherwise labeled, all images were found through Google image searches (and possibly run through a sepia filter). If I have used an image that belongs to you, please contact me and I can either remove it or provide you with a credit on the site, whichever is your pleasure. July 25, 2003 I ought to mention here that Sparrowgrass is a real venture and really was shut down (or at least its website was) for said fraudulent practices. "A Ray of Pure and Radiant Light" is a real (bad) poem that I wrote at a tender age, but you didn't hear that from me (it was actually published in a volume by the National Library of Poetry; I tangled with Sparrowgrass over a different, much better poem.) Also: all apologies to a Mr. Stefan Tanevski, whose poem partially appears on the left side of the scan (see August 1). Special thanks go to Miss Whitfield of Providence, RI, for recovering the second-to-last photograph from Mr. Russell's crushed and mangled camera. August 1 Mr. Bennet's hand is the Adine Kirnberg font, while Miss Whitfield's is the popular Dear Joe font. Apologies, as mentioned above, go to Mr. Tanevski for the incidental inclusion of his poem in the scan. August 8 The typographical (fontographical?) information from last week is the same here. A quick note on the story excerpt: �Eustacia Montmorency� and �Miss Minchin� are direct name-drops from Frances Hodgson Burnett�s A Little Princess (originally titled Sara Crewe, as it turns out). Gorey and Tennyson you can figure out (I hope). I was casting around for a name for the unfortunate family and �Crimpleshanks,� the cat from Joan Aiken�s children�s story �The Queen with Screaming Hair� came to mind. Change a vowel, and you get something verging on the onomatopoeic. (Number of minutes it took me to spell that last word correctly: three.) As for the sad circumstances of the Crumpleshanks, I turned to the book that got me started on the Victorian era when I was about 14 or 15, Daniel Pool�s What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist - The Facts of Daily Life in Nineteenth-Century England, a book that has what must be one of the longest titles given to any modern book, anywhere, ever. August 15 I stole a large number of graphics this week and would like to give credit for them--not from anyone's personal graphics, mind you. But still. The butterflies are from Sticker Planet, as is the floral border at the bottom of the PWR contents page. Granted, a web page seems like an unorthodox use for stickers, but there you go. The roses on either side of the title are Victorian scrap art that I found on Google (all right, that may have come from someone's website, but I think it was offered as free clip art). The bookmarks use Tissot's "October" and "Dans la serre," which you can see in their original forms at the Art Renewal Center (motto: "All Bouguereau, all the time"). The other bookmark, "And that's for giving away the ending!," uses a random illustration from an actual story paper of the era. You can see a metric jackload of those at the excellent Stanford site Dime Novels and Penny Dreadfuls, which houses a massive collection of some of the funniest artwork and captions I've ever seen. Finally, The borders used on the bookmarks are from the Magenta company, also found at Sticker Planet. As for the fonts, the froufrou PWR title font is Spring, from House of Lime; the main text font is Cheboygan. I used Cheboygan and Faerie (the latter from Railhead Design) on the bookmarks. A word on the two pen-and-ink illustrations (on the second bookmark and the PWR cover) from Dime Novels and Penny Dreadfuls: the funniest thing about the bookmark picture (well, to me, anyway) is the caption: �Cleo followed Jack until they reached the middle of the bridge, where the railing on one side was broken. There was a swift plunge, a cry of mingled rage and horror and then the black waters closed over their victim, and the lonely mountain torrent rushed on as before.� Speaking as a Cleo myself, I have doubts that Cleo was trying to �help� Jack. Also, Jack falling? Priceless. The DN&PD site is also where I did my research for appropriately hilarious story titles. I didn�t do half as good a job on my cover, though�I wanted it to look more like a magazine cover than a newspaper front page, since a newspaper look wasn�t really within my means at the time. However, I may yet change the format. We�ll see. August 18 Once again, the postcard graphics came from a Google search; I�m getting better at saving the links to the images I run off with. The Miami postcard was taken from this page; the New Mexico, from this page (and taken under the assumption, perhaps incorrect, that these sites did not originate the images, as they appear to be vintage postcards). I had an even better Paris postcard in the same style that I ended up not being able to use, to my everlasting chagrin. If anyone knows who produced these postcards, I'd love to start collecting them. Lots of fun �handwriting� this week: Nurse Rowland�s: Note This Clayton�s: Douglas Adams Handwriting (which, as I read on the font creator�s site, was actually created from an Adams handwriting sample) Peacock�s telegram: plain Courier New Delphine�s: Synchronous Youngblood�s typewriter: Butterbrotpapier Mrs. Peacock, by the way, will turn up again in a future installment sometime in October. August 22 Again, a telegram in Courier New. Here�s the weird thing: I wrote the letters way back in early July. Come late August, the fall semester starts in real life (grad school), and� there really is a tuition hike. I can�t tell you how many times this has happened to me�something I�ve written (usually about a character I�ve secretly based on someone) will actually come true, and it usually happens to the person I �wrote about,� even though s/he had no idea I was writing it. (The �something� is usually a divorce.) This time, the character was based on me, and you see what happens. As for the word search, I generated that here. The search is nothing too special, really�just wanted to have an extra for today. What it really does is set up a punchline for a future installment. |
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