Since 1973 Michael Adler's first book, The Writing Machine, has been affectionately called "the bible of the typewriter enthusiast." The renowned typewriter expert's new book, is sure to stimulate the same enthusiasm all over again, bringing you new and as yet unpublished insights into the origins of the invention itself in a detailed history of the machine. Over 250 photographs illustrate this definitive text, which includes comprehensive directories of typewriter inventions, makes, and models, and a concise guide to their values with advice on buying and collecting. How much? When? Where? How good? How rare? Who? Why? If you are looking for answers to any or all of these questions, Antique Typewriters is the ultimate reference book for you - from the novice typewriter collector to "seasoned old hand" enthusiasts and historians.
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.
How Chinese characters triumphed over the QWERTY keyboard and laid the foundation for China's information technology successes today. Chinese writing is character based, the one major world script that is neither alphabetic nor syllabic. Through the years, the Chinese written language encountered presumed alphabetic universalism in the form of Morse Code, Braille, stenography, Linotype, punch cards, word processing, and other systems developed with the Latin alphabet in mind. This book is about those encounters—in particular thousands of Chinese characters versus the typewriter and its QWERTY keyboard. Thomas Mullaney describes a fascinating series of experiments, prototypes, failures, and successes in the century-long quest for a workable Chinese typewriter. The earliest Chinese typewriters, Mullaney tells us, were figments of popular imagination, sensational accounts of twelve-foot keyboards with 5,000 keys. One of the first Chinese typewriters actually constructed was invented by a Christian missionary, who organized characters by common usage (but promoted the less-common characters for “Jesus" to the common usage level). Later came typewriters manufactured for use in Chinese offices, and typewriting schools that turned out trained “typewriter girls” and “typewriter boys.” Still later was the “Double Pigeon” typewriter produced by the Shanghai Calculator and Typewriter Factory, the typewriter of choice under Mao. Clerks and secretaries in this era experimented with alternative ways of organizing characters on their tray beds, inventing an input method that was the first instance of “predictive text.” Today, after more than a century of resistance against the alphabetic, not only have Chinese characters prevailed, they form the linguistic substrate of the vibrant world of Chinese information technology. The Chinese Typewriter, not just an “object history” but grappling with broad questions of technological change and global communication, shows how this happened. A Study of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute Columbia University
Antique Typewriters & Office Collectibles teaches readers to properly identify and evaluate what they have, in terms collectors can understand. In addition to typewriters, the highly collectible ribbon tins are given a special section. The nearly 400 full-color photographs allow you to recognize good machines, learn the differences among models, and distinguish the worthless from the valuable. 8.5 X 11. 1997 values.
A collection of seventeen wonderful short stories showing that the legendary Tom Hanks is as talented a writer as he is an actor. “Reading Tom Hanks's Uncommon Type is like finding out that Alice Munro is also the greatest actress of our time.” —Ann Patchett, bestselling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Dutch House A gentle Eastern European immigrant arrives in New York City after his family and his life have been torn apart by his country's civil war. A man who loves to bowl rolls a perfect game--and then another and then another and then many more in a row until he winds up ESPN's newest celebrity, and he must decide if the combination of perfection and celebrity has ruined the thing he loves. An eccentric billionaire and his faithful executive assistant venture into America looking for acquisitions and discover a down and out motel, romance, and a bit of real life. These are just some of the tales Tom Hanks tells in this first collection of his short stories. They are surprising, intelligent, heartwarming, and, for the millions and millions of Tom Hanks fans, an absolute must-have!
Just the type of thing to thrill analog-obsessed note-takers, this box of notepaper mimics the shape of a real typewriter in petite proportions ideal for desktop display. Perforated sheets for notes—with watermarks just like vintage typewriter paper—pull out of the box top.
As a vehicle for outstanding creativity, the typewriter has been taken for granted and was, until now, a blind spot in the history of writing practices.
