Thursdays with Walter, week 2

If you have a pen, they shoot you right at your chair.

For a mere four thousand dollars, you've got a dollar-fifty book all saved!

Money, it means nothing to me: save my book.

Think of microfilm as your friend, not a loathsome piece of curled-up plastic.

Instead of Blackberry thumbs, you had scroll-unrolling thumbs.

on hemp paper: You make nice paper, and you're in a mellow mood all day.

Parchment vs. Vellum, going ten rounds!

You can get pretty wiggy in this subject.

By looking at this, you've all agreed to give me one million dollars. It's an Aztec curse.

on elephant dung paper: If you think about it, the elephant's done the pulping for you.

Taking living hearts out of people? A little detail.

When you shook hands with the ambassador and got smallpox, that's not such a good deal.

Corrugated cardboard! Made into paper that looks strangely like corrugated cardboard!

We went through a whole blender doing this, but at least I have something to show for it. We're people who don't get out a lot.

Paper is used, as we know, for filthy lucre.

People who are stamp collectors...you thought catalogers were strange!

Is that animal glue? I'm glad I didn't use stamps in the 1800s.

They ran out of fonts and had to use circus flier fonts: Terrible! Ha! Shocking! Whee!

History has a way of sneaking around and hiding in the backs of newspapers.

on the history of the Remington company: Eventually they put their plowshares away and went to weapons, so they did the opposite of what the bible says.

It's like a washing machine, except it comes out paper instead of pants.

That's a switch: I get a rebate!

This has more information than you can possibly understand in your lifetime. That's what I like about the internet, too: you no longer feel like an idiot, because there's no way anyone could know everything.

on accelerated aging tests: If you sat in front of a sunlamp next to a nuclear reactor on a hot stove, there's a good chance you'd degrade.