Weird typewriters, real and unreal

Suddenly I find that my daily eBay search for typewriters is cluttered with hundreds of terrible AI-generated images, available to order as prints on canvas. When I say terrible, I mean 2023 quality, which could practically be considered medieval by today's AI standards. Who is generating these things? And who, if anyone, is buying them?

By the way, some folks seem to have gotten the impression that the MAINSPRINGS project is encouraging the use of AI. No! Some AI may be allowed if it's honest and artistically appropriate, but the point of the project is to invite imaginative explorations of encounters between AI and typewriters. Those encounters may be hostile (I expect most of them will be), and they can be dreamed up without any digital assistance.

Meanwhile, I got up at 4 am on Saturday to watch the latest Breker auction in Cologne. I even bid on a couple of machines, but was immediately overwhelmed by other collectors with deep pockets. Here are a few highlights (the prices shown are the selling prices in all cases; note the buyer's premium that must be added!).

That McCool was a relatively good deal. This Sholes & Glidden and Fitch brought much less than their estimates:

The really pricey machines were a Thürey and an Automatic:

The source of these images is screenshots from the Invaluable app, which makes it seductively easy to bid on auctions on another continent!

Typing at the Sign Museum

The American Sign Museum is ten minutes away from my house, but I'd never gotten around to a visit until my friend Sam and I were invited to type poems for guests at a bat mitzvah party there last night.

The museum is bigger than I'd expected. You feel like you're walking down streets that are crowded with advertising icons and neon.

Sam and I were very impressed with a display of glass panels from a Victorian artist's "specimen book." These are only about six inches across, and they show unbelievable craft.

A movie theater marquee advertised Naomi's bat mitzvah ...

... and tables were set up for a hundred guests. I hadn't been expecting such a big event!

My Voss and Sam's Remington were on duty for four hours. (The Remington is a 1923 machine that I offered through Urban Legend Typewriters over a decade ago. It's still going strong.)

Once the guests arrived, we got a steady stream of muses, mostly small kids who wanted poems on topics such as Pumpkin the Cat, Ajax the Dog, soccer, and squishies.

Sam and I listened respectfully and read the poems to our muses ... until loud dance music made it impossible to hear. Then the written list of people and their desired topics came in very handy.

All our poems were appreciated, but most of what I was able to create under these circumstances really isn't worth reproducing here. In case you're really curious, here's a poem about a lazy cat.

And I think these poems for adults are OK.

'

This first-year law student is hoping to go into immigration or fertility law:

This muse had heard of me and my book, which was nice to know:

We finished by writing poems for each other about the night's events. Here's Sam's. I didn't take a picture of mine, but believe me, you're not missing much.

I love "Watch us become." It was, in fact, a night for becoming: for Naomi to become a young Jewish woman, for her friends and family to become happy with dance and drink, for our typewriters to become conduits for new words, and for me to become a little more experienced in this practice of listening, making, and giving.

From type to font to type: a Crandall story

This was the book, self-published by Paul Lippman in 1992, that turned me into a maniac when I got hold of it in 1994. As soon as I saw the New Model Crandall on the cover, I was fascinated and hooked.

It took about a decade for me to get hold of a New Model Crandall myself. It's a rough specimen, not functional, but still wonderful.

In 2005, I got a notion that I could try to turn the typeface on its type cylinder (aka "typesleeve") into a digital font. 

I pulled out the cylinder, inked it, and rolled it carefully over a piece of glossy cardboard. Then I made the best scan I could, and arranged the characters into alphabetical order:

I worked with a template provided by a website that can turn handwriting into a font. After various experiments and adjustments, I had this:

This was the basis of a digital font I dubbed Lucien, in honor of inventor Lucien S. Crandall. You can download that font from my website and type like this:

I went on to use Lucien in ETCetera when I started editing it in 2006.

And now, the story of this typeface has come full circle: from type to font to type.

Ben Davidson, a maker of metal and wood type living in the Pacific Northwest USA, wrote to me in February asking if he could use the Lucien font as a model for a set of bamboo type for letterpress printing. I agreed, of course. 

Ben's wooden type is now ready! These are large letters, over an inch tall.

You can find the type on Ben's website, Columbia Gorge Book Arts.

Wherever he is, Lucien S. Crandall is smiling today—I'm sure of it.

You can read a lot about Crandall (and his four wives) on Robert Messenger's blog.