02:26 pm | The Pelikan Steno is an unusual fountain pen designed for use by steno writers. Most modern fountain pens have fairly stiff nibs. They bend slightly when you press down on them, which makes...

01:45 pm | For a while, Pitman shorthand was the most widely used system of shorthand in the English-speaking world. It was used throughout the British Empire, which included Australia, India, Canada, and large chunks of...

05:59 pm | There was a time when bookstores and office supply shops had rows of books on shorthand systems. These days, you won’t find any in a regular bookstore, although a handful of titles are...

04:44 pm | This site was written for geeks, and if you are one, you will already know that the Fisher Space Pen was invented by Paul Fisher for use in the space program. It uses...

02:37 pm | Leah Price’s fascinating essay from the London Review of Books looks at the history of shorthand, and the similarities between shorthand writers and modern-day programmers. “Like the open-source movement a century and a...

02:27 pm | In the 1982 cult horror film Big Meat Eater, nerdy butcher Bob Sanderson works to promote Adanaco, the “new universal language” he’s developed for his small English-speaking town. Inventing new languages, or new...