You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January, 2008.
When I saw a link to this blog, called Cold War Calculators, I was expecting a collection of machines with an East German design aesthetic. (See Dieter Rams.)
What appeared were some paper devices, with rather striking graphics.
The one pictured here is for calculating the effects of nuclear radiation.
Following on from Neil Gaiman’s post, The Liar’s Diary by Patry Francis is now out.
(FYI: This is a book promotion by proxy. For further reading see here, and here.)
Typewriter collectors trawl ebay on a regular basis to find those hidden gems, those machines that owners think of as just junk. However, for all you typewriter owners of the latter camp, never, ever, ever remove the keys from a machine or advertise a machine as being great for removing keys from, to make jewellery or some such item.
A wailing post on the Typewriter Group Forum – called There Should be a Law Against This, with too many exclamation points to include here – bemoans a (recently withdrawn) Corona typewriter on ebay (Item No.: 160203612452), advertised in just this way. (In fact, on looking at the posting again, it is listed under ‘Other Art Supplies’.) What is unusual about this typewriter however, is that some of its keys are animal graphics.
As a design historian with a focus on early typewriters, I join the bemoaning and bewailing. These are the objects PhDs are made of. So before you decide the sell that dusty old machine as parts, think of us, the typewriter people – collectors, writers, historians and academics – and our love for the machine, under a myriad of pursuits. And put the screwdriver down. Now.
PS. Does anyone know why Corona created typewriters with animal graphics? Was this for the farming communities??
Update: Following emails to the ebay seller, the item was withdrawn and is now relisted as a machine in its entirety. Thanks to Travis.
In the mid-nineteenth century Jules Janin wrote that France had become “the Grand Nation of grocers”, in his introduction to L. Curmer’s physiognomic tome, his eight volume Les Francais peints par eux-memes (1840-42).
Whereas England was “A Nation of Shopkeepers“, as Napoleon is commonly noted to have said. (Although it is originally from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776))
Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life, edited by Jessica Riskin came out last year. And she is writing another book about ‘how people began to understand living creatures as machines, beginning with Descartes and continuing through Darwin’, whose working title is Mind Out of Matter. To read, to read.
I have finally finished my journal article ‘package’, ready for submission, and am finally back to researching and writing my PhD chapters. In climbing back into the worlds of nineteenth century bodies, I am immersing myself in physiognomy and have found two new resources:
- The History of Physiognomy: The Arts and Sciences of the Face 1500-1850, a Leverhulme Trust International Network, whose conference I have just missed but whose website contains a good bibliography of primary and secondary sources.
- Charles Eames directed a short film on Paris and the Spectator, in 1977, centred on the work of Daumier. (Does not seem to be available through the Eames Office website: to track down.)
Following on from yesterday’s post about photographic collections, here is Uppercase’s flickr set of her typewriter ribbon tins.
I am always on the look out for copyright free images, or any images which may be useful to my research. I am a recent addict to some great new image libraries which work to a different business model to standard libraries, called microstock libraries (e.g. fotolia, iStockphoto, ShutterStock). They are best described as amateur collections but run on a professional basis. As such the cost per image can be very small, especially when compared to more traditional picture libraries, where you can be paying hundreds of pounds for just one image. (Although as a PhD researcher, I am often allowed to use the images for free, as long as they are for my own personal/educational use.)
As an addition to my list, I will now be adding the Library of Congress’ flickr account which contains over 3,000 images, all copyright free.
Reading Lupton and Miller’s Design/Writing/Research: Writing of Graphic Design in my continuing exploration typography, I came across a reference to a committee formed by Louis XIV in 1693 to “idealize” the alphabet, which notes:
“Embracing the current passion for scientific method, the romain de roi imposed an orthogonal grid over the organic forms of traditional lettering. Italic letters were generated by shifting the grid, a procedure divorced from calligraphy and prophetic of the mathematical distortions enabled by nineteenth- and twentieth-century technologies. The grid was seen as an objective field on which to glimpse the ideal shadow of the alphabet, cast as clearly as the image on the gridded glass of a camera obscura.” (Lupton and Miller, 1999: 55)
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