Artwork from Kellogg's first ad, placed in 1906, and an early package.

Explosive Cereal!

W.K. Kellogg was a pioneer in the art of advertising. He decided from the get-go to stake everything on advertising and spent much of his new company’s working capital just to buy a full-page ad in the July 1906 issue of the Ladies Home Journal. Drum roll, please. B-r-r-r-r-r-r-r... The results were astonishing. By the end of the first year, Kellogg had shipped out almost 180,000 cases of corn flakes and grocers were lining up to carry his product.

CC or BCC? That is the question.

The term cc, used today in all types of correspondence, especially e-mail, signifies an additional recipient. It's an acronym that stands for "carbon copy," or "courtesy copy" for those too young to have had any experience with the not-so-timeless invention known as carbon paper. It was originally used to indicate that a carbon copy of the original typed document was supplied to additional recipients.

Bcc is a term meaning a blind carbon copy of a physical message or e-mail, and instructs that an additional hidden copy is to be sent to another recipient without the primary recipient knowing.

	First italic typeface, an Aldus Manutius/Griffo co-production. Notice that the initial typeface didn't have any capital characters.

Who actually invented
italics anyway?

The father of italics is Aldus Manutius (1449-1515), a remarkable man, famous mostly as a printer and a publisher. His typefaces were all designed by the brilliant Francesco Griffo, and this was no exception. You see, italics began as a typeface before it became a type style that could be applied to other typefaces as it is today.

The style, as anyone might have guessed, is based on handwriting, though history isn't clear on exactly whose penmanship inspired the style. So, in 1501, their italic typeface made its maiden voyage and flowed gracefully across the pages of an edition of Virgil (see picture).