Emoji are the first kind of symbolic element designed to read only online that’s also difficult, sometimes impossible, to reproduce accurately in print—or in a static electronic document, like a PDF. In this episode, I talk with Jeremy Burge, the chief emoji officer of Emojipedia, a site that exhaustively documents the past and present of those popular pictographs. He also helps chart the future as a member of the Unicode Consortium group that considers adding new emoji to the official Unicode set.

Jeremy and I talk about the issues of permanence with emoji: they can change appearance over time, they differ among graphical presentations in different operating systems and services (like Facebook and Twitter), and they largely require color output. How can you be sure what you see on screen is the same on another screen, and how can you possibly include emoji in a book, or archive

This podcast looks backward to understand the present and future, and there is nobody better on the business side than David Sax. The author of three books—on delis, on the revival of analog culture, and on the right way to look at entrepreneurship—David’s insights help give us insight into the joy people feel in letterpress printing and the way in which cottage businesses dominated the world, and still do. Printing and letterpress aficionados will particularly like his 2016 title, The Revenge of Analog.