Typewriter Topics

The connoisseur's guide to the typewriter, entertaining and practical What do thousands of kids, makers, poets, artists, steampunks, hipsters, activists, and musicians have in common? They love typewriters—the magical, mechanical contraptions that are enjoying a surprising second life in the 21st century, striking a blow for self-reliance, privacy, and coherence against dependency, surveillance, and disintegration. The Typewriter Revolution documents the movement and provides practical advice on how to choose a typewriter, how to care for it, and what to do with it—from National Novel Writing Month to letter-writing socials, from type-ins to typewritten blogs, from custom-painted typewriters to typewriter tattoos. It celebrates the unique quality of everything typewriter, fully-illustrated with vintage photographs, postcards, manuals, and more.

This book captures the intensity of the relationship between writers and their typewriters from the 1880s, when the machine was first commercialized, to the 1980s, when word-processing superseded it. Drawing on examples from the United States, Britain, Europe, and Australia, The Typewriter Century focuses on "celebrity writers," including Henry James, Jack Kerouac, Agatha Christie, Georges Simenon, and Erle Stanley Gardner, who wrote prolifically and mechanically, developing routines in which typing, handwriting, and dictation were each allotted important functions. The typewriter de-personalized the text; the office typewriter bureaucratized it. At the same time, some authors found a new and disturbing distance between themselves and their compositions while others believed the typewriter facilitated spontaneous and automatic typing. The Typewriter Century provides a cultural history of the typewriter, outlining the ways in which it can be considered an agent of change as well as demonstrating how it influenced all writers, canonical and otherwise.

Very rare, superbly illustrated volume features every known model up until 1923. Over 280 varieties include the Yu Ess, Dactygam, Dollar, and Ford as well as better-known products of Hammond, Oliver, Remington, L.C. Smith, and Underwood. Company histories and period advertisements. 165 halftones. 95 black-and-white line illustrations.

Base Ball is a peer-reviewed book series published annually. Offering the best in original research and analysis, it promotes study of baseball's early history, from its protoball roots to 1920, and its rise to prominence within American popular culture. This volume, number 12, includes thirteen articles on topics ranging from the career of pitcher Harry Coveleski, Philadelphia baseball pioneer Thomas Fitzgerald, and a baseball power couple, James and Harriet Coogan, to early Brooklyn baseball, the game in Canada during World War I, and the amateur teams sponsored by typewriter companies.

Both a visual feast and a reference book in the style of Brandon Stanton’s Humans of New York, Typewriter Rodeo collects custom, typewritten poems from “rodeos” worldwide, portraits of recipients, and their personal stories. Typewriter Rodeo began in Austin, Texas, when four poets brought their typewriters to a maker fair and began offering spontaneous, custom-composed poems to an enthusiastic crowd. The event quickly blossomed and rodeos began popping up all over the world.

Includes its Report, 1896-19 .

First Published in 1973, The Writing Machine presents a comprehensive history of the typewriter. Michael Adler not only investigated the history of the machine but also started collecting typewriters, because of the difficulty of discovering what these old machines looked like. Then he found there were other collectors all over the world who supplied him with such a wealth of data that he had eventually to limit the scope of his ‘history’. There are hundreds and hundreds of makes and models of ‘conventional’ front-stroke, type bar machines with four-row keyboards, but they were virtually all the same. It is the unconventional ones that are interesting, and it is on these that the author concentrates. The book is amusing as well as informative, and it ends with a complete catalogue of ‘unconventional’ typewriters manufactured up to the 1930s, when the ‘conventional’ machine had become universal. This book is a must read for anyone interested to learn about the writing machine.