What Edmund Wilson regrets he cannot do – it's a 21-item preprinted list, in authoritative-going-on-funereal small capitals, with a futher handwritten addition.

• Language Log, following the New York Times, considers the charms of telegraphic language. The subjects covered in the codebook discussed are impressively wide-ranging; I want to know whether HUB ("Please recommend a competent housemaid") ever ended up in the same message as EVIDENTIAL ("A gunpowder explosion occurred").

• This is an old joke – there was a version on display in Waterfield's bookshop in Oxford a decade ago – but the reflection of the neon sign in the photograph adds something, I think.

• Mark Athitakis on Raymond Carver and "workshop prose".

• Printed ephemera meets urban myth in the company of Luc Sante.