The mark above is a cattle brand, and a particularly fantastic one at that. I first saw it in Per Mollerup’s marvellous book, Marks of Excellence.

Cattle brands have been around since the days when the Egyptian pharaohs were doing their thing, but they really came of age in the late 19th century in the United States, where in 1880 there were almost 40 million head of cattle.

With that many cows wandering around, you need to make sure people know which ones are yours – particularly with rustlers about eager to make off with your livelihood. That was done with brands burnt into the cattle’s hides with hot irons – as Ramon F Adams says in the introduction to Manfred R Wolfenstine’s comprehensive history of cattle branding, The Manual of Brands and Marks, ‘A brand’s something that won’t come off in the wash’. Here’s a plate from that book, showing drawings of one of Wolfenstine’s irons.

All cattle brands are registered with the county or state in a brand book, which records the name, design and placement of each mark. They can be made up of letters, numbers or symbols, and all manner of combinations of each of those. They are read from top to bottom, and from left to right. Branding irons were traditionally made of steel (if made by hand), or copper or stainless steel (if manufactured commercially), and heated over a wood fire. Individual letters and numbers were generally between three and five inches high, and 1 1/2 inches wide.

Various alphabets were designed specifically for branding, including standard, flying, running, hooked, bradded, forked, barbed, dragging, walking, swinging and rocking:

An alphabet that featured letters and figures on their sides, ‘too tired to stand up’, was described as ‘lazy’.

Now that you know that, you should be able to decipher the brand:

The brand is 2 Lazy 2 P, or ‘Too lazy to pee’. I love it for its staggering narrative economy. The idea of someone being too lazy to even take a pee is damn fine in itself (though for them to use that to identify themselves and their cattle is a little bonkers), but to compress the idea into two numbers and a letter is just brilliant; and brilliantly unforgettable.

[This is an extended version of Alistair's Pictoform piece in the latest issue (G191) of Grafik magazine.]

The Last Werewolf is the fantastic new novel from Glen Duncan, published by Canongate. We picked it up in Foyles the other day, having popped in there for a quick browse. We hadn’t heard of the book before, but a few things made us pick it up and buy it.

First up, we’ve naturally got a bit of an interest in all things monstery, thanks to Hoxton Street Monster Supplies – so the title alone was enough to make us take a look.

Secondly the dust jacket, designed by Peter Mendelsund (check out his Jacket Mechanical blog – lovely stuff), is foil blocked with a diffuser foil, which reflects a spectrum of light, so that grabbed the ‘ooh, look, shiny!’ part of our brain. Similarly, the pages of the book have a gold gilt edge – that’s a sort of metallic covering on the outside edge of the pages, traditionally used to protect the pages of books from dust. That gives the book the feel of being something special – a feeling that stuck with us all the time we read the book, sitting particularly well with the subject matter too – not something you’d ever experience on a Kindle. (Nor, interestingly, would you know that these design elements existed if you just looked at the book on Amazon, given that they only ever show a front cover shot, often created from the design artwork before it’s actually printed, so without any special printing processes.)

Thirdly, the back cover had a quote from Nick Cave:

‘A magnificent novel, beautifully crafted and full of genuine suspense, that tears the thorax out of the horror genre to create something that stands rapturous and majestic and entirely on its own’.

All of that was enough to get us to hand over our cash and start reading. And it’s a fantastic book – partly a philosophical examination of desire, existence and mortality; it’s also a classic horror novel, though it plays on its genre expectations at the same time as embracing them.

Our only quibble in fact is with the typesetting of the book. The book is set in Perpetua by Palimpsest Book Productions, but they’ve used a cut of the font which doesn’t have ligatures:

There’s not really much excuse for that kind of behaviour, and it made us groan every time we stumbled across one.

Ligatures, for those who don’t know, are the combined letterforms that are used where two characters would otherwise butt up against each other uncomfortably, as with the fi in ‘fine’ above and below. Most commonly ligatures are created for the combinations ff, fi, fl, ffi, and ffl:

The book has its own website, which feels wildly at odds with the design of the book, which is a real shame, and a missed opportunity.

Those are minor gripes though – we loved the book, and highly recommend it.