One of the many fun moments in this process: chatting with Hartmut Esslinger about why computers became beige/grey, how many shades of beige/grey are there (more than I expected), and what role did keyboards play in all this.
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Number of tabs opened in Chrome right now: 688. Most are related to the book and the visual research. I should probably start processing/closing some down? 0_Opic.twitter.com/p9u1DzVGYT
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Just another day in keyboard research land! (Art direction and photo by
@neobarnabas.)pic.twitter.com/WOwspoQuWQ
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My friend
@GlennF pointed out August Dvorak’s grave (in Seattle) kind of looks like a split keyboard. 0_Opic.twitter.com/B28gjtStci – at Mount Pleasant Cemetery
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Slowly, but surely: working on the visual side of the book.pic.twitter.com/cw20XlhEDh
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I was scanning a few photos today from a 1920s sales newsletter for Royal Typewriter Company for my book, and – since it took some effort to actually get it – I thought it would be nice to preserve *all* of it.pic.twitter.com/5TLY3OUHPV
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Scanning the oversized volumes on the library’s small scanners seemed like days of work. Instead, I set up a tripod with my iPhone in the library, grabbed my little Bluetooth remote.pic.twitter.com/in9KmXeNoZ
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Only a little over an hour later, I had all 376 pages photographed. I even took photos of white pieces of paper to see where the shadows were, and used it as a mask to fix uneven lights in the library.pic.twitter.com/MJ1LDTwCWl
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And now five years of Royal Standard – 50,000+ words – are on Internet Archive for anyone to read: https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Royal+Typewriter+Company%2C+Inc.%22 … (Sure, this is not the best quality possible, but much better than nothing – particularly since I also OCR’ed all the text, making it searchable.)
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I love feeling like a good historian/preservationist! And there are so many tiny things there that mean a lot, for example this “Royal progress in Poland”: https://archive.org/details/the-royal-standard-1924-9/page/n3 …
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(I know I haven’t sent many book updates recently, but I’ve been working hard on the typesetting and particularly visuals. Over 200 photos are already in the book, and I’m proud of many of them that I found, and some that I took. My goal is to send a newsletter within days!)
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In the meantime, please enjoy this photo of an awesome Typewriter Car.pic.twitter.com/qqoPOCVegv
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A portrait of a person slowly losing their mind in the infinite number of typesetting details.pic.twitter.com/4jAJM91Svc
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Four years ago, I wrote a Medium post about the Turkish typewriter. I wonder if without that post – and the positive reception to it – I would’ve ever embarked on my book project. I’m taking photos of that typewriter for the book today, and it feels like meeting a patron saint.pic.twitter.com/TsNRoBRYX1
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My newsletter is at 992 subscribers now – so close to 1,000!!! (Please sign up for fun keyboard stories, updates on book production, previews, and be the first to know when the book is ready!)https://www.getrevue.co/profile/shift-happens/ …
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It’s been hard to read other books for a while now. As I read, my mind keeps going to either “ah, this is nice, will people be so engrossed in my book?” or “this is so much better than what I’ve done.”
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Then, I keep pausing to write down new ideas, or places to rewrite, or turns of phrases to steal.
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And even without any of the above, I keep noticing typographical or typesetting details, and wondering about those, too.
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(For example, I am trying to read “A burglar’s guide to the city” and just spent 5 minutes wondering whether these decorative paragraph breaks were cute or not, as my eyes blindly followed sentences without my brain registering anything.)pic.twitter.com/IenJVeJlm3
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Always happy when I can take what seem like an unsalvageable photo, and through the magic of Lightroom and Photoshop turn it into an okay one.pic.twitter.com/NzAIEc5LJq
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Spent most of today photographing keyboards from
@keyboardio’s collection. (For the book.) After I was done, I realized I photographed 56 (!) keyboards.pic.twitter.com/T2xY9dW8rA
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Also, sometimes the best part of the keyboard is its connector.pic.twitter.com/IOWwP5BoAD
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Fun fact: Each keyboard received, on average, 670 megapixels.
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I woke up early to visit a faraway library before work, and scan one particular photo for the book. I grabbed the volume, and it opened at the exact very page that had the photo I wanted.
pic.twitter.com/sQmw1GAud5
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