{"id":98568,"date":"2016-05-25T09:25:26","date_gmt":"2016-05-25T13:25:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=98568"},"modified":"2016-05-25T11:00:51","modified_gmt":"2016-05-25T15:00:51","slug":"this-guy-wanted-to-sell-you-some-furniture-and-other-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/05\/25\/this-guy-wanted-to-sell-you-some-furniture-and-other-news\/","title":{"rendered":"This Guy Wanted to Sell You Some Furniture, and Other News"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_98570\" style=\"width: 610px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/fcbccc047.png\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-98570\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-98570\" class=\"wp-image-98570\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/fcbccc047.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"600\" height=\"523\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/fcbccc047.png 630w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/fcbccc047-300x261.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-98570\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">An 1881 ad for the Brooklyn Furniture Company.<\/p><\/div>\n<ul>\n<li>After he published the <em>Tractatus<\/em>, Wittgenstein traded philosophy for gardening, and developed a fixation on home design that may have led him back into philosophy\u2019s embrace: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/daily\/2016\/05\/24\/wittgensteins-handles\/\" target=\"_blank\">To details like the door-handles, in particular, Wittgenstein accorded what [the biographer Ray] Monk calls \u2018an almost fanatical exactitude,\u2019 driving locksmiths and engineers to tears as they sought to meet his seemingly impossible standards<\/a> \u2026 Monk argues, more than once, that this design project brought Wittgenstein \u2018back\u2019 to philosophy \u2026 But I doubt that the return to philosophy was prompted by social connections, which were always a mixed bag for the antisocial Wittgenstein. I prefer to believe that the prompt was in the <em>handle<\/em>. For when Wittgenstein returned to philosophy, the idea that drove him beyond all others was that the nature of language had been misunderstood by philosophers \u2026 Words did not, he had come to believe, primarily provide a <em>picture<\/em> of life (the word \u201csnake\u201d representing, or sounding like, an actual snake); they were better conceived of as a part of the <em>activity <\/em>of life. As such, they were more like <em>tools<\/em>.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Jacob Harris was scoping out some nineteenth-century newspaper ads (don\u2019t judge; this is how some of us get our kicks) when he stumbled upon an ad for the Brooklyn Furniture Company composed entirely of typography\u2014a direct predecessor of the ASCII art that would come more than a century later. \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/technology\/archive\/2016\/05\/the-ascii-mystery-face\/483698\/\" target=\"_blank\">The face resembles modern ASCII art, but it was published at a time\u2014March 20, 1881\u2014that seemed impossibly early<\/a>,\u201d he writes: \u201cIn many newspapers, these early examples of text art vanished not long after they arrived \u2026 Apart from the two advertisements I had found, the style apparently never caught on in the <em>Times<\/em>. But why not? To answer that, I looked more at the <em>Eagle<\/em> where I found the earliest ads\u2014and where they survived for several decades longer than everywhere else. They are there in 1881, when one bold advertiser filled an entire page with ASCII text. They are there in 1888, when the <em>Eagle <\/em>advertised its election night almanac in the familiar large letters. They are there all the way up to July 3, 1892, a day the same Brooklyn Furniture Company again ran a half-page ad with their address in large ASCII letters. And, then, on July 5th, they were completely gone, replaced by modern layouts and fancy typography. Those upgrades likely explain, at least in part, what happened. ASCII art flourishes most when technology is limited; you don\u2019t need Print Shop anymore when you can do digital layout on your computer and have an inkjet printer.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>\u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2016\/05\/29\/magazine\/how-everything-became-the-highest-form-of-praise.html\" target=\"_blank\">The gift and curse of American hyperbole, truthful and otherwise, has lately been distilled in a single omnipresent word. In 2016, everything is \u2018everything.\u2019 That\u2019s what the Internet is telling us, at least<\/a>. Or yelling at us, in capital letters, with blaring hashtags attached. \u2018@Beyonce\u2019s #MetGala dress is EVERYTHING,\u2019 <em>Self<\/em> magazine proclaimed recently on Twitter \u2026 Internet one-\u00adupsmanship is a definitively 21st-\u00adcentury art form, but \u2018everything\u2019 carries a hint of yesteryear\u2014a whiff of the hot air that once swirled through medicine-\u00adshow tents and carnival grounds \u2026 The Internet has a way of placing all of us\u2014you, me, the online peddler of counterfeit Viagra, the editor of <em>The Paris Review<\/em>\u2014in the undignified position of those touts who haunt the sidewalks outside bad restaurants in tourist-\u00adtrap neighborhoods, thrusting menus in the faces of passers-\u00adby.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>In which Edward Docx attends the 2016 British Esperanto Conference: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.prospectmagazine.co.uk\/features\/the-language-that-never-was-esperanto-languages\" target=\"_blank\">There are few times in your life that you can be certain that you are doing what nobody else in the world is doing\u2014or has ever done\u2014or will likely do again. This was one of them<\/a>. I was sitting at a table of six, with a Catalan, a Brazilian, a Belgian, a Londoner and a Slovakian, while they munched and guzzled their way through their <em>kareos<\/em> and had what I can only describe as the most kinetic, exciting and involving conversation in Esperanto that Spice City (of Stanley Street, Liverpool) is ever going to witness. The animation. The jokes. The asides. The soliloquys. The antanaclasis. Oh, if only I had known what they were talking about I could have \u2026 I could have told you. But I was converted. The whole idea and application of Esperanto was so obviously amazing, so demonstrably persuasive, so self-evidently practical that I forget all over again about English; English; English.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>The Internet is a fine place to find good writing. But it\u2019s the <em>best <\/em>place to find moronic writing\u2014just try. It\u2019s such an effective moronic-writing delivery system that print media got jealous: \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/theawl.com\/maybe-everyone-should-be-quiet-for-a-bit-8c0bdbc86cb3#.th4byptz7\" target=\"_blank\">There are too many people filling every possible orifice of the Internet with their idiot opinions and comical prejudices and poorly constructed arguments \u2026 But: Have you seen what\u2019s not on the Internet?<\/a> You would think, what with the supposed influence of those who man the precincts offline, away from the free-for-all of our type-and-post world, that there would be safety in the smooth, heavy paper and creamy finish of print \u2026 And yet: THEY ARE NOT ALL THAT MUCH BETTER \u2026 It turns out most people don\u2019t have anything very interesting to say and they\u2019re actually a lot worse at saying it than we previously anticipated. Also, what no one expected is that shit flows upward, splattering the finer precincts we once looked to for wisdom with the same awful patina of chatty, \u2018relatable\u2019 garbage whose ultimate goal is to be passed around without anyone mentioning how gross your palms feel once you hand it off. We were warned and we didn\u2019t listen and now we\u2019re all paying the price.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After he published the Tractatus, Wittgenstein traded philosophy for gardening, and developed a fixation on home design that may have led him back into philosophy\u2019s embrace: \u201cTo details like the door-handles, in particular, Wittgenstein accorded what [the biographer Ray] Monk calls \u2018an almost fanatical exactitude,\u2019 driving locksmiths and engineers to tears as they sought to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2512],"tags":[22500,18067,216,19025,22501,22498,22499,687,11729,12735,17272,14050,2393,75],"class_list":["post-98568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-the-shelf","tag-ascii","tag-ascii-art","tag-design","tag-esperanto","tag-everything","tag-handles","tag-jacob-harris","tag-language","tag-ludwig-wittgenstein","tag-the-internet","tag-tractatus","tag-typewriter-art","tag-words","tag-writing"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Before ASCII Art, There Was \u2026 This 19th-Century Furniture Ad<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This and more in today\u2019s roundup.\" \/>\n<meta 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