Marginalia
Marginalia is an early eighteenth-century scientific treatise on electricity and magnetism by the French abbé Jean Antoine Nollet, published in 1731 for natural philosophers and experimenters. Its plates show experimental diagrams: iron bars or magnets with radiating lines of iron filings tracing magnetic fields, and a map of Africa with curved lines. A designer might take from them the flowing, radiating linework of the filing patterns and the crisp engraved labelling of the apparatus.
