Jessica Helfand of Design Observer remarks on hand-drawn type. How in certain instances the air of its awkward inelegance can imbue something with much more character and genuineness than computer typeset reissues. Important meditations in a time when it's so easy to do it on the electric box.

It struck me that in the misguided spirit of (technological) improvement that seems to characterize just about everything, Al had gotten himself and his dead deer to a computer, going from Taxidermy Gothic to Times Roman Bold in one huge, sad sweep. And it's remained with me, this tale of lost typographic innocence: did someone come along and allege that Al's handwriting wasn't up to snuff? I noticed a different phone number: did he sell the business? And why did he retire the rarified four-headed logo from active duty? Maybe he sold it to pay for the deli-slicer.

Khoi Vinh provides an astute user-end account of thumbing through the DVD collection of the past 80 years of The New Yorker.

Due to copyright issues, many usability and otherwise outright obvious features have been removed from the digital archive — things like full-featured searching, copy and paste, and ascii (text) versions of the documents. Apparently, according to this Wall Street Journal article, The New Yorker had little legal wiggle room in how it could have delivered the goods:

When Congress revamped copyright law in 1976, it said magazine publishers retained the right to print collections and revisions of past issues. But when a magazine wants to republish a freelance work in a new and different format, the freelancer must be compensated accordingly, two more-recent court rulings have found. That means when republishing articles on DVD or other digital formats, magazines must pay freelancers again, get their permission to republish free — or preserve the original print context. The New Yorker's solution was to scan the original magazine pages onto DVDs.

These are like the issues Google Books (Print) and similar services have faced during the past year. Here's hoping that we'll see a well-balanced solution — good for both those perusing the archives and those who have provided the content for the archives — in the near future.