Veðráttan, 24. árg 1947. Ágúst, bls. 30.

I frequent the social media Twitter. One of the many great accounts I follow there is the fantastic bot Slembitímarit. Made by my accomplished friend @pallih. Every hour, on the hour, The bot tweets a random page from the Icelandic archive of magazines, timarit.is.

Occasionally it chooses pages with data on them, usually tables, maybe from half a century ago, or more. These are often beautiful hand-crafted tables which I have no way of conveying to regular sane people why I love so much.

I wanted to make a study of one of these. See what choices went in there to create the result. Does it lose something when converted to modern computer typesetting?

I've picked a page from a 1947 issue of Veðráttan, a monthly overview of the weather in Iceland made by the Icelandic Met Office. I've tried to recreate it faithfully, but fixed a few things:

• Precipitation does not need fractions.
• Removed footnotes in favour of abbreviating place names.
• Columns use a fixed rhythm.

The end result looks quite nice, in my own humble opinion.