Miscellany № 20: On Typewriters

Recently I was lucky enough to take a break from editing the Shady Characters manuscript with an entertaining trip to New York City to visit Brendan Curry, my editor, and Penny Speckter, to whom dedicated readers will require no introduction. (More on that in a week or two, I hope.) In amongst the various punctuation-related news items that popped up since I was away, however, one story in particular caught my eye: the last new typewriter to be manufactured in the UK came off the production line at the Brother factory in Wrexham, Wales, at the end of November this year.1 It is the end of an era, and one that bears a little attention.

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Miscellany № 17

I visited London this weekend, continuing my niche campaign to explore the world of computer-to-Monotype interfaces. (If none of this makes any sense, take a look at my earlier post about the last working Monotype caster in Scotland.) Having seen Harry McIntosh’s system first-hand in Edinburgh, this time round I prevailed upon Phil Abel and Nick Gill of London’s Hand & Eye Letterpress to show me the system installed at their own workshop, of which much more in a future post.

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