Alan Riddell (ed.): Typewriter Art (1975)

In this dazzling “tribute to the typewriter and its particular qualities,” Alan Riddell compiled 119 works by 65 practitioners from 18 countries. The opening pages are devoted to three pioneers of the 1920s — Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman, Pietro de Saga (the pseudonym of Stefi Kiesler, wife of the Austrian architect Friedrich Kiesler) and an unidentified Bauhaus student of Josef Albers’. They are followed by ‘typewriter art’, concrete poems and typewritten constructivist, systems art, op and gestural abstraction works by Stefan Themerson, Dom Sylvester Houédard, Paula Claire, Richard Kostelanetz, Jiří Kolář, Jiří Valoch, Josef Hiršal, Václav Havel, Henri Chopin, Tom Edmonds, Steve McCaffery and others. The book is a follow-up to the catalogue Typewriter Art, Half a Century of Experiment published in two editions for the exhibitions in Edinburgh, 1973, and London, 1974.

Edited and with an Introduction by Alan Riddell
Publisher London Magazine Editions, London, 1975
ISBN 900626992
157 pages
via Lori Emerson, HT Derek Holzer

PDF (33 MB)
Internet Archive (high resolution, added on 2018-12-27)

Bob Neill’s Book of Typewriter Art (with special computer program) (1982)

“Bob Neill, artist of the typewriter, was born in the Kent village of Aylesford and practises as a professional Hypnotherapist in the County Town of Maidstone. He first started typing pictures on his typewriter in 1960, having read about a woman in Spain who was producing this form of typewriter art. His first effort was a portrait of a magazine cover-girl which was published in the Star evening newspaper.

He then continued with his newly-discovered hobby, producing pictures and portraits which have been exhibited widely and published in various magazine and journals. A selection of his work appears in this book together with the secrets of Typewriter Art and a computer programme to enable some of the pictures to be produced on a home computer (such as the Commodore PET) using the BASIC computer language.

So many people have asked him how to start this new-found hobby that he come [sic] up with the idea of writing patterns for his pictures so that more people could enjoy the hobby of Typewriter Art. He has perfected the method over the years making it so easy that even children of eight have produced excellent pictures unaided.

Bob Neill’s Book of Typewriter Art gives you the chance whatever your age or artistic ability, to create for yourself fascinating pictures on the typewriter by following the simple instructions and patterns within these pages. What Bob Neill has worked out with painstaking care over the years can be yours to enjoy as you begin the absorbing and fascinating hobby of Typewriter Art.” (from the back cover, via Juliette Kristensen)

Images include that of Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip, Prince Charles, Princess Diana, a Horse, a Prarie Wolf, a Siamese Kitten, a Red Setter, a White Persian Cat (Full Body and Head Only), Telly Savalas (Kojak), Elvis Presley, a Tiger, a Bush Baby, a Mountain Scene, The Rose, The Nude, The Arab, The Pope and a Mystery Picture.

Publisher Weavers Press, Cornwall, 1982
ISBN 0946017018
176 pages
via Lori Emerson

PDF, PDF (55 MB)

Lisa Gitelman: Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (1999)

This is a richly imaginative study of machines for writing and reading at the end of the nineteenth century in America. Its aim is to explore writing and reading as culturally contingent experiences, and at the same time to broaden our view of the relationship between technology and textuality.

At the book’s heart is the proposition that technologies of inscription are materialized theories of language. Whether they failed (like Thomas Edison’s “electric pen”) or succeeded (like typewriters), inscriptive technologies of the late nineteenth century were local, often competitive embodiments of the way people experienced writing and reading. Such a perspective cuts through the determinism of recent accounts while arguing for an interdisciplinary method for considering texts and textual production.

Starting with the cacophonous promotion of shorthand alphabets in postbellum America, the author investigates the assumptions—social, psychic, semiotic—that lie behind varying inscriptive practices. The “grooves” in the book’s title are the delicate lines recorded and played by phonographs, and readers will find in these pages a surprising and complex genealogy of the phonograph, along with new readings of the history of the typewriter and of the earliest silent films. Modern categories of authorship, representation, and readerly consumption emerge here amid the un- or sub-literary interests of patent attorneys, would-be inventors, and record producers. Modern subjectivities emerge both in ongoing social constructions of literacy and in the unruly and seemingly unrelated practices of American spiritualism, “Coon” songs, and Rube Goldberg-type romanticism.

Just as digital networks and hypertext have today made us more aware of printed books as knowledge structures, the development and dissemination of the phonograph and typewriter coincided with a transformed awareness of oral and inscribed communication. It was an awareness at once influential in the development of consumer culture, literary and artistic experiences of modernity, and the disciplinary definition of the “human” sciences, such as linguistics, anthropology, and psychology. Recorded sound, typescripts, silent films, and other inscriptive media are memory devices, and in today’s terms the author offers a critical theory of ROM and RAM for the century before computers.

Publisher Stanford University Press, 1999
ISBN 0804732701, 9780804732703
282 pages

Review (Daniel Gilfillan, RCCS, 2002)

Publisher
Google books

Download (removed on 2013-11-12 upon request of the publisher)