Friday, August 5, 2016

Revolution in the Mailbox: From Linköping to Christiansburg and more

Many goodies were waiting in my real mailbox when I returned from London. Here's a sample. And to my correspondents, please excuse my tardiness in replying; more plans and responsibilities this month will probably make it a while before I get down to typing letters.

First, there's good news from Linköping, Sweden:




Next, and speaking of telegrams, the good news continues with an impressive mill-typed message from a certain typospherian. (A mill, for those who don't know, is a capitals-only typewriter used for transcribing telegrams.)




Also in my mailbox was this "antholozine" from Poems While You Wait, a dynamic team of street poets in Chicago.



The book collects some of the group's best poetry, all typewritten, and also includes a reflection by Eric Plattner on the demise of Chicago's Independence Business Machines. I'll extract one page here.



Finally, my thanks go to the correspondent who sent me a copy of the first issue of Footnotes, a new Swiss periodical about type design. Among other things, this issue includes a 1962 article by Alan Bartram on typewriter typefaces. Here is one page that includes some very interesting proportional typefaces used by Underwood on its rare Raphael.



3 comments:

  1. Welcome back Richard!
    Did you make it to Bletchley Park, the home of Alan Turing and Britain's World War II code breaking, and the worlds first computers?
    Thanks for sharing your interesting trip with us, and cool correspondence from the typosphere!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks! I did not make it to Bletchley Park, but I enjoyed the glimpses of early computing technology, including some of Turing's devices, at the Science Museum in London.

      Delete