Robin Kinross

David Trotter writes that Helen DeWitt’s novella The English Understand Wool has ‘69 pages, many of them largely blank’ (LRB, 15 December 2022). This may be the occasion to puzzle about the LRB’s habit of describing the extent of a book with its last printed page number. Trying to imagine a sheet of paper with just one side is mind-flipping, and my mind is flipped every time I read that...

Alice Spawls refers to ‘Monotype printing’, but Monotype was a method of composing text, not of printing it. The main distinction isn’t between Monotype and computerised typesetting (as Spawls observes, a computer can run a Monotype caster), but between letterpress and lithographic printing: between printing from a raised surface and a flat one. Hot-metal typesetting was deposed by ‘cold’...

SIR: The exchange between Richard Webster and Edmund Leach (Letters, 18 February and Letters, 4 March) is further evidence of the continuing and useless conflict between the ‘human’ as found in literature and the scientific-technical. It is an argument that seems peculiar to British life – the Leavis-Snow ‘two cultures’ debate being only the most notable recent instance. The two positions...