Entries Tagged as 'Books'

Grooks

Grooks Cover Image

Piet Hein (1905-1996) was a Danish poet and scientist with wide ranging interests. He is known to a wider public for his thousands of short, aphoristic poems called Grooks (Gruk in Danish) and creations like the games of Hex, Nimbi, Qrazy Qube, and the Soma cube. He advocated the use of the super ellipse curve in city planning, furniture making and other realms. He also marketed housewares based on the Superellipse and Super-egg.
(from Wikipedia.)

I came across the Grooks of Piet Hein a few years ago, and I was recently reminded of how much I really liked these clever poems.

Here is a sampling of Piet Hein’s Grooks.

T.T.T

Put up in a place
where it's easy to see
the cryptic admonishment
    T.T.T.
When you feel how depressingly
slowly you climb,
it's well to remember that
    Things Take Time.
THE ROAD TO WISDOM

The road to wisdom? - Well, it's plain
and simple to express:
    Err
    and err
    and err again
    but less
    and less
    and less.

…read more →

Read The Fine Print

Compact Edition of The Oxford English Dictionary

The Compact Edition of The Oxford English Dictionary
Complete Text Reproduced Micrographically (in slipcase with reading glass).

500,000 words, 290,000 main entries, 137,000 pronunciations, 249,300 etymologies, 577,000 cross-references, and over 2,412,000 illustrative quotations in one book. Weighs in at 15.3 pounds.

A direct photoreduction of the entire 20-volume set, with nine pages of the original on every nine-by-twelve inch page.

Painstakingly written by an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters.

Published by Oxford University Press, USA. Available here.

(via cooltools)