Brain Pickings

Pictorial Webster’s: A Visual Dictionary of Victorian Curiosities

Cards, stamps, and what zebras have to do with Victorian craftsmen.

We love visual thinking. And we’re all about curiosity. Naturally, we’re head over heels with painter, artist and bookbinder Johnny Carrera’s Pictorial Webster’s: A Visual Dictionary of Curiosities — a charming, chunky volume of over 1,500 engravings from Webster’s 19th-century dictionaries.

Cleaned, restored and curated in a captivating and unusual reference guide for modernity, these engravings are both novel and iconic, radiating the enigmatic luster of vintage Victorian aesthetic. From to Aardvark to Zebra, the alphabetically arranged gem is both archival record and aesthetic feat, a treat for history geeks and design aficionados alike.

Also from the series, 26 delightfully nostalgic wall cards, one for each letter of the alphabet, reproducing the engravings from the book on sumptuously heavy card stock with superb typography.

And for a lovely final touch on this visual exploration of vintage curiosity, check out the Pictorial Webster’s Stamp Set, an extraordinarily authentic collection of actual historic engravings, embellished with all the details of line execution, shading, and perspective you’d expect from meticulous Victorian craftsmanship — not your average rubber stamp clip-art.

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Creativity for Sustainability: Glove Love

All gloves are off in the war on climate change, or what models have to do with natural history.

We love Green Thing. And now, their latest project is giving us all the more reason to. Launching at London Fashion Week this week, the GloveLove project reunites the world’s lost single gloves in a charmingly clever promotion for GT’s anti-waste initiative, All-Consuming — the art of wasting nothing and using everything.

Each newly paired set is washed, repaired and re-packaged by hand with recycled nametags and labels that explain the stories behind each glove.

Glove Love is brilliant, romantic, original, funny and green.” ~ Emma Thompson

The effort is backed by socially-conscious celebs like Eva Green, Lauren Budd and Emma Thompson, and has already received hundreds of glove donations from both everyday folks and the lost-and-founds of organizations like Transport for London and Britain’s Natural History Museum.

GloveLove is a lovely illustration of the idea that creativity is a powerful tool for propelling sustainability — and one more inspired way for Green Thing to put their money where their mouth is in backing their “Creativity vs. Climate Change” mantra.

Give a glove to contribute to this wonderful project, and the good folks at GT will even let you know when your glove has been paired up and found its glovelover soulmate. Or, get yourself a brilliantly, colorfully mis-matched pair with character and a story for the non-price of £5.

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Short Film Spotlight: Greenpeace Global Voices

What the streets of Delhi have to do with the halls of Copenhagen.

Today, we bring you an exclusive pre-premiere of the new Greenpeace International Global Voices short film from director Philip Bloom. [Correction: As Philip kindly pointed out, his role was DP -- the spot was actually directed by Lucy Campbell-Jackson.]

Set to launch on MTV in the next few days, the beautifully shot spot promotes Greanpeace’s MyVoice initiative. Quiet and unsensationalistic, the ongoing project illustrates the powerful impact of global warming through the individual voices of the diverse people whose everyday lives are affected and threatened by this environmental apocalypse.

There’s a certain Chris Jordanesque approach to the problem — knowing that global warming is already claiming 300,000 lives each year is one thing, but seeing and hearing the visceral human element behind it, the personal story buried in the alienating stats, is quite something else.

The effort is part of the TckTckTck campaign, a global partnership for citizen-powered climate action, leading up the the United Nations Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen on December 7. Visit The Climate Orb to submit your story and join the movement.

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