Too Easy for Words: Kodak Instamatic

I was probably around 13 when I was given a Kodak Instamatic with the drop-in film cartridge. It was the mid-’60s and I had been using my dad’s Pratktica 35mm SLR camera. But I was really just a snapshot-taker and I remember thinking, wow, no longer a pain to try to load film into a […]

Gebrauchsgraphik

Founded in 1924 by Dr. H.K. Frenzel, an architect and designer, the Berlin-based magazine, Gebrauchsgraphik, focused on modern poster and advertising art, illustration, and typography. Among the first generation of European design publications, it beceame influential in the design world of the Weimar Republic. Many members of the avant-garde, including those associated with the Bauhaus, […]

From World to Simplex: Early Index Typewriters

The World 1 typewriter, patented by a Boston-based inventor, John Becker (with help from his brothers, George and Philip), was originally offered in 1886 by the World Typewriter Company in Maine. It was an inexpensive index machine aimed at the lower end of the market, an alternative to the pricer, bulkier, and more complicated typewriters […]

Brick by Brick: Tracy Kidder’s “House”

This year, Tracy Kidder’s House, a work of narrative nonfiction, is 40 years old. It’s worth looking back at it for several reasons, among them that a book like this would be unlikely to appear today. For those unfamiliar with Kidder, he’s one of the legendary American nonfiction writers. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his […]

The Brown Quick Fox…

I was listening to a July 2024 episode of Mignon Fogarty’s Grammar Girl podcast in which she talked about a rule-of-thumb concerning the order of adjectives. That’s something that most of us don’t think much about. We instinctively order adjectives in a way that “sounds right.” (I think of what Joan Didion once said about […]

The Yankee Index Typewriter

For any of us familiar with label makers (I still have mine from the ’80s), this typewriter will also look familiar. In the late 1800s, when typewriters were an emerging technology, an inventor named Robert Hawley Ingersoll developed this index model. The Yankee Typewriter (aka The Dollar) couldn’t compete with more conventional keyboard-style typewriters, but […]

Exploring a Grandmother’s Secret Life

As we reach the end of 2024, I’d say my favourite book of the past year is Sadiya Ansari‘s In Exile: Rupture, Reunion, and my Grandmother’s Secret Life. Ansari is a Parkistani-Canadian journalist living in London, UK. She set out to investigate a family mystery, one that her parents and other family members had been […]

Classics Illustrated

  Some of my favorite early reading as a kid were Classics Illustrated. They were perfect because I’d outgrown Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse comics and the superhero universe (as its now called) never appealed to me. I loved reading books but wasn’t quite ready for the serious classics, until I discovered them in comic […]

Swissa Piccola

The Swissa Piccola was a popular post-war typewriter, a continuation of one of the earliest truly portable machines. (At the time, people understood the need for a small, lightweight typewriter that was, in a sense, like a netbook or tablet of the era.) Its predecessor was the Patria, invented by engineer Otto Haas and produced […]

The Literary Legacy of Joseph Mitchell

“It is equipped with electricity, but the bar is stubbornly illuminated with a pair of gas lamps, which flicker fitfully and throw shadows on the low, cobwebby ceiling each time someone opens the street door. There is no cash register. Coins are dropped in soup bowls—one for nickels, one for dimes, one for quarters, and […]