Typewriter Art: A Modern Anthology [1st Edition] 1780673477, 9781780673479

Table of contents :
Title Page......Page 4
Copyright......Page 5
Contents......Page 6
Faster than writing with a pen......Page 8
Words as image......Page 23
Structure = Content......Page 43
Best lookers rather than best sellers......Page 128
Between poetry and painting......Page 173
Notes......Page 295
Index......Page 299
Picture credits......Page 311
Acknowledgements......Page 318
keitharmstrong......Page 78
Andrew Belsey......Page 113
Dirk Krecker......Page 207
Keira Rathbone......Page 235
Allyson Strafella......Page 258
Stephanie Strange......Page 277

Citation preview

TYPEWRITER ART : A Modern Anthology

TYPEWRITER ART : A Modern Anthology / BARRIE TULLETT

LAURENCE KING PUBLISHING

Published in 2014 by Laurence King Publishing Ltd 361–363 City Road, London LAURENCE KING EC1v 1LR, United Kingdom T +44 (0)20 7841 6900 F + 44 (0)20 7841 6910 [email protected] www.laurenceking.com Text © 2014 Barrie Tullett Barrie Tullett has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work. This book was produced by Laurence King Publishing Ltd, London. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission from the publisher. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-78067-347-9 DESIGN John Dowling / Mucho TYPEFACE A2 Typewriter by A2-Type, based on the Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter. FRONTISPIECE Dom Sylvester Houédard gripfreak (1972). (See also p. 52.) Printed in China

CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Faster than writing with a pen 01 THE PIONEERS Words as image 02 THE GOLDEN AGE Structure = Content 03 THE BOOK Best lookers rather than best sellers 04 CONTEMPORARY WORKS Between poetry and painting Notes Index Picture credits Acknowledgements

INTERVIEWS keitharmstrong Andrew Belsey Dirk Krecker Keira Rathbone Allyson Strafella

Stephanie Strange

INTRODUCTION / Faster than writing with a pen If ‘technology’ is that which is invented after we are born, and ‘stuff’ is that which has always been around, for those born now, computers, the internet and mobile phones are just stuff – in fact, it would be impossible for recent generations to imagine a world without these things. This was the world that the typewriter lived in.

The Remington Standard Typewriter manual (c. 1890) / ‘To Save Time is to Lengthen Life’: the typewriter offered a world of opportunities, a better way of life, a better way of living – a promise reflected in the sophistication of its design, its colours and its advertising. The Remington Portables of the 1920s were clad in such seductive shades as Ivory and Como Green, Tan and Pompeiian Red, Nyanza and Cellini Green, Colette and Endowa Blue, Light and Dark Orchid and Mountain Ash Scarlet. With its dream of possibilities, the Remington was surely the equivalent of ‘Designed by Apple in California’.

Blickensderfer head office (c. 1905) / A very modern world. The first commercially successful typewriters, made by E. Remington from a design by Sholes and Glidden, appeared in 1874 and were produced at the rate of two a year. With improvements made by Remington, the market began to take off a few years later, and by 1890 over 100 a day were being made; by the early 1920s, the demand was so great they were being made at the rate of seventy-five an hour.

The first commercial machine, the Hansen Writing Ball, was made available to the public in 1870; however, it was not until 1874 that the first truly successful machine appeared. Based on a design by Christopher Latham Sholes and Carlos Glidden, it was produced by the American firearms and sewing-machine manufacturer Remington and sat on the same base as their lock-stitch sewing machine. The typewriter quickly became a fundamental part of our cultural, social, commercial and industrial world. It was instrumental to the emancipation of women, opening up a whole new field for female employment; it placed the means of communication in the hands of the people, uncensored by political doctrine or regime; it allowed writers to write as quickly as they thought. These machines created a clean, universal format, allowing for the immediate, and modern, presentation and dissemination of thought in a way that handwriting never could. It was a revolution.

Advertisement for the Elliott Book Typewriter (1902) / ‘The recent introduction of the Book Typewriter, which will write in books of any dimensions, has indefinitely extended the field of usefulness of the Typewriter, and it may now be said that the machine is used in all classes of business, for all kinds of work, in all the leading countries of the earth.’ —Albert P. Green, All About Typewriters and Typewriting (Horace Marshall & Son, London, 1903).

Catherine Sargeant Photograph of Original Manuscripts (2007–2011) / Sargeant’s typewriter works were produced between 2007 and 2011. The nature of the typewritten process allowed her work to remain directly connected to her love of paper throughout every part of the creative process. For her there is also a very important connection with the way the typewriter gives something back when you strike the key – a physical reaction and interaction that word processors or computers lack. The photograph shows Sargeant’s working sketches, her ‘original manuscripts’; these then lead on to further work using different processes and materials.

The Hammond Typewriter / The Hammond Typewriter of 1884 had one exceptional selling point – the ability to change typefaces as and when required: ‘For every nation, for every tongue.’ By 1900 they boasted ‘all languages on one typewriter’; these included English, Irish, German, French, Russian, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Greek, Chinese, Swedish, Polish, Scandanavian (sic), Spanish-Portuguese, Roumanian (sic) and Bohemian. The choice of fonts was equally impressive, with no less than eight different typefaces to choose from, including a sans serif. It really was ‘the modern machine, with modern methods, for modern men.’

British graphic designer Ken Garland recalls going into London’s Camden Town with his wife in the late 1970s and buying a brand new typewriter, taking it home, placing it on a table and looking at it. Admiring it not just for its design, but for what it meant. It was as seductive and beautiful as the newest iMac is today. It offered the opportunity to connect with the world through correspondence, to write that great novel, to realize your potential. It was a beautiful thing – a machine that would take upon itself the drudgery of writing. As the Hammond Typewriter Company stated in its 1900 book Art in Typewriting, it was ‘the modern machine, with modern methods, for modern men’. Poet and novelist Robert Graves

said that a typewriter ‘of which you have grown fond seems to reciprocate your feelings, and even encourage the flow of thought. Though at first a lifeless assemblage of parts, it eventually comes alive.’ Now, of course, it is quite the opposite. A dead technology. An antique. A rather amusing piece of our cultural history that we can look back on and laugh at ourselves for having found so sophisticated and clever. It is now almost impossible to imagine a time when the typewriter was vital to our commercial and artistic life. Yet, despite the word processor, the PC, the iMac, iPhone, iPad and the myriad other tablets, phablets and devices designed to allow us to compose and disseminate our thoughts, it still retains an importance. It is still a signifier of the writer, the critic, the intellectual. In itself, as an object in our modern world, it is a potent visual shorthand. It signifies the move into the Modern Era, towards the mechanization of our lives (for good or ill) and is a symbol of progress that leads directly to the path of the PC. To have a typewriter as an ornament indicates a certain kind of person; to have a typewriter as a functioning object indicates yet another. A newspaper recently illustrated an article about whether the ability to post immediate comments online has meant the end of the critic with a falling figure – a Mad Men–style silhouette – with his typewriter by his side. Author Will Self has spoken about the attitude that the typewriter brings to creativity: ‘The computer user does their thinking on the screen, and the non-computer user is compelled, because he or she has to retype a whole text, to do a lot more thinking in the head.’ The god of the computer is a forgiving one; the god of the typewriter is not. Although, as French illustrator Renaud Perrin (see p. 82) says, it does ‘allow a place for accidents’, and there is something about the ‘honesty’ of the medium that draws one to it as well. As so much of our creative output is reliant on machines that take us into the virtual, perhaps it is no wonder that people are drawn back to a process that is so directly physical, that involves seeing and doing, and to the allure and unpredictability of the handmade.

Angie and Simon Butler, who curated the 2013 show ‘Typewriter: Print on Demand’ at the Bath School of Art and Design, both appreciate the typewriter’s form and functionality, which extends from the lightweight portable to the heavy office machine. As Simon says: They are beautiful things, a connection to a bygone era. Sometimes, especially on the office machines, there’s a residue of make-up embedded in the keys and the rollers, and you also get marks where the typists’ nails have struck the keys. All of these things, they reveal a

historical event, time, a moment, traces. It raises more questions than gives answers to. That’s the mysterious story – you make the rest up … It’s whatever you want it to be.

For Angie, Using a manual typewriter has unlocked a hidden part of me. It’s given me permission to be okay with, even celebrate, and appreciate, mistakes. Depending on what I’m doing, I usually either start again, or make the mistake into part of the work. I quite like [it] … when that ‘mistake moment’ makes you change your mind about your original idea, often to go on to produce something much better, and more creative. The sense of history imbued in a typewriter that you own is a marvellous feeling. So many stories.

The typewriter is designed to be used in a very simple way. A piece of paper is inserted into the back of the platen (the roller). This then feeds around to the front so that the paper sits behind a coloured ribbon, usually black, or black and red. As a letter on the keytop is pressed, a typebar is raised. This then strikes the ribbon to make the impression of a character on the paper behind it. The carriage return moves forward one space, then the typebar for the next character can be pressed. When the end of the line is reached, the carriage is returned (manually), the platen rotates to position the paper ready for the next line to begin and the process is repeated until the page is full. When the typewriter is used as a ‘printing press’, this becomes more involved. The paper is fed into the rollers numerous times, each at a different angle to allow the overprinting and fine-tuning of the image. Decisions are made as to how to turn a letterform, or combination of letterforms, into a variety of tones. The manual typewriter uses monospaced characters – every letter takes up the same space, as opposed to proportional fonts, in which, for example, a capital ‘I’ is a thinner character than an ‘m’. This feature allows for a letter to be printed, the carriage ‘backspaced’ and the same space to be printed over with a new character. Differing overlaying uses of punctuation and characters can create tonal values from a light grey to a black. Use of full spacing and half spacing may be an option as well; varying amounts of pressure on the keys will result in a different weight of ink on the page, the carriage return may be disengaged to allow a completely ‘free’ movement, and the ribbons may be changed to offer a greater variety of colours, depending on the model being used. Different typefaces may be available too, and switching to a different machine will alter the look and feel of the typography.

Ruth Broadbent String Wrapped (Typewriter) (2012–13). / Broadbent is a British fine artist also educated in sociology, French and the theory and practice of human rights. Her work uses sculpture and sculptural forms to question the identity, form and function of objects and, by extension, our own sense of identity.

With a typewriter, there is little margin for error: the striking of the wrong key or a lapse of concentration can ruin hours of work, and there is no invisible ‘undo’ option. Every mark is made and there for all to see – for better or worse. Photoshop and other image-processing software has filtered away the truth in imagery, but the corrections made to a typewritten text are all too visible. Tipp-Ex, correction tape or the use of a scalpel to pare back unwanted marks all require an amount of physical effort and finesse. The final typewritten product is unique. Even the most careful carbon copy is a degraded version of the original. As British book artist Joanna Gibbs (see p. 94) observes, those who grew up in the days before the home computer will have used typewriters as a practical method of production and they may well still see the

machines as a valid working method, rather than part of a conscious decision to reject the modern world, or perhaps as a recent discovery that yields a rather curious window into an analogue past. However, even if one uses the machine on an equal footing with other methods of typographic production, from letterpress to dry transfer lettering (Letraset, etc.), stencil sets or digital font libraries, as Gibbs says, ‘there is something unique about the typewriter. An alchemy that occurs each time one extracts the paper from the platen … a magic that allows a finished, considered, formal piece of work to retain the inherent vitality of the handmade.’ In contrast to our modern world, where everything seems to be multifunctional, typewriters were pointedly mono-functional. They did one thing and tried to do it very well. Despite this, they were seen as sophisticated objects, and the marketing of them was accordingly highbrow – in terms of shape and design, colour range (a rainbow of colours were on the shelves long before the Bondi Blue iMac and its fruitcoloured cousins) and advertising, the Olivetti campaigns probably being the most famous. Even the printed matter related to them – the typing manuals, instructions books and packing slips – had an aspirational beauty to match the potential of the product. This visual sophistication continues to have an effect today. For everyone from bloggers who typecast (those writers who manually type their posts, then scan and upload their entries) to those who are rediscovering the joys of sending letters rather than emails or texts, the typewriter remains a compelling object; as has become clear from the number of artists engaging with it as a medium of artistic expression in its own right, it is still every bit as valid and as innovative as it was when it first appeared, and every bit as challenging and rewarding to the artist, poet or designer. The definition of typewriter art can really only ever be a personal one. For some artists, it is an object to draw – from the machine itself, to the ephemera associated with it (typewriter oils, ribbon cases and so on) – or an object to make art from, whether that be the music of the Boston Typewriter Orchestra, or sculptural pieces and explorations, such as Jeremy Mayer’s figurative works, Tim Jordan’s assemblages or Ruth Broadbent’s obsessively string-wrapped Underwood (see p. 16). For others, however, the typewriter is a tool to draw with; a means of making art. It is this category that the following chapters will explore. Some

pieces have a definite and intrinsic linguistic structure that creates a visual meaning; others use a visual structure that in turn creates a new linguistic meaning. Alongside more abstract works of art, or pieces that try to represent the world around them whilst responding to the ordered and fixed spaces of the typewriter’s mechanisms, there are also those who use the keyboard as one would a pen or pencil when sketching, those that appropriate the vernacular of needlepoint, and those that produce repeat patterns that connect with abstract and op art. This book follows the development of the typewriter as a medium for creating work far beyond anything envisioned by the machine’s makers, from the earliest known works produced at the end of the 1800s, through the pioneers of the 1920s, to the exuberance of the concrete and kinetic poets of the 1950s, and on to a discussion of the relationship between typewritten text and narrative form. The final chapter explores why current artists are still choosing to use the typewriter despite its obsolescence as a writing tool, and presents some of the best work being produced today.

Jantze Tullett Lyons Refined Typewriter Oil (2011). / An applied and fine artist, Tullett draws inspiration from a wide range of sources: nature, printed ephemera, memories, obsolete technologies and both contemporary and traditional craft skills. Her interest in the world is translated into a wide range of outcomes, from drawings to inkwash

paintings to collages and sewn pieces. The beauty of manufactured objects is a constant source of investigation.

01 THE PIONEERS + Words as image In the introduction to his 1975 book Typewriter Art, the poet Alan Riddell stated that the first known example of typewriter art was a ‘drawing’ of a butterfly by Flora F. F. Stacey, from 1898. In fact, as the research of poet and typewriter art enthusiast Andrew Belsey has revealed, there is every indication that each decade from the 1870s onwards has produced a significant body of work. Pitman’s Typewriter Manual from of ‘decorative ornaments’ that the typist can use to embellish their texts. At the bottom right of this page is a small ‘drawing’ of a man in a hat smoking a cigarette. No special mention is made of this character’s appearance, so we can assume such things were quite common.

Paul de Vree (see also p. 24) Het leven is een bacarrat (‘Life Is a Lottery’) (1966).

Pitman’s Typewriter Manual + The first edition of this book, from 1893, contains a tipped-in sheet of suggestions for ornamental embellishments to be used by the typewriter operator. On the bottom right of this page is a small typewriter drawing of a man in a straw boater, smoking a cigarette. This is now the first known example of a piece of ‘art-typing’, and it takes no great leap of the imagination to assume that such caricatures were being made as soon as the first machines appeared on the market in the 1870s.

Stacey herself (see p. more accomplished and important figure within the field of ‘art-typing’ than that single image of the butterfly would suggest. Her success in the competition for which she produced that image seems to have driven her to even greater achievements. By were talking of her work as the benchmark by which others would be judged in similar typing competitions. This use of the machine as a tool for creative expression seems to have been overlooked historically, perhaps due to the fact that the artists would primarily be stenographers or typists showing their skills in competition with others in the same field. Most early artists were likely unaware of the historical context of their practice, leading to a lack of dissemination or critical approval. Those interested in the subject as a development of concrete poetry (see Chapter example, had little knowledge of, or perhaps interest in, those using the medium to create visual art, which meant that the range of work being produced internationally was not fully realized. It is only now, with the archiving and retrieval made possible by the internet, that a fuller picture is finally emerging. Riddell’s book, and the other key anthology from the same period – Typewriter Poems (1972) – feature some of the artists included here, but omit a great many of their contemporaries (see pp. 47, 64). Along with the Pitman character, early pieces include a collection of garden flowers by G. M. dating back to 1895 (see p. in the Stenographer’s Companion These form part of a well-established tradition of competitions run by magazines and journals that continued into the 1950s. Since the availability of the typewriter, in one form or another, dates back to around the late 1860s, we can assume that even earlier pieces exist, too. The History of the Typewriter (1909), by George Mares, tells us that even by that date, ‘numerous specimens of artistic work have been published, every line of which has been produced on the typewriter’.

Flora F. F. Stacey Untitled (1898). + It would appear that Flora Stacey was quite an important figure in the early years of ‘art-typing’. A brief article in the New York Times from 1904 shows three of her illustrations: a fairly complex peacock and two small figures. It says that Stacey is ‘an English stenographer. Who, some years ago, seeing a prize offered by a phonographic paper, entered for the competition, and has since applied herself enthusiastically to the idea.’ That same year, newspapers in Chicago and Syracuse (‘the typewriter city’) ran a call for entries for ‘Fancy Work on a Typewriter – a contest open to young men and women of the Herald Parish for the best executed design in typewriter characters’. It states that ‘the drawings must be “machine made” in the fullest sense of the term’. It goes on to advise potential applicants that ‘Flora Stacey, an Englishwoman, has done some remarkable work at machine drawing, and out of her experiences, which have been without competition, some facts helpful to contestants . . . may be given’.

G. M. Patterson Flower Study, from The History of the Typewriter, by George Mares (G. Pitman, London, 1909). + George Mares, in his 1909 book The History of the Typewriter, Successor to the Pen: An Illustrated Account of the Origin, Rise and Development of the Writing Machine, observes that, even by then, the typewriter had ‘always proved itself a willing instrument in the hands of the intelligent operator. Little that can be done with the pen cannot be repeated with the typewriter. It is a training school of art, the lightening caricaturist, the pencil of nature, and the portrait painter par excellence. Numerous specimens of artistic work have been published, every line of which has been produced on the typewriter.’

Although works such as Patterson’s flowers and Stacey’s butterfly are historically interesting – and even influential – they were created in a way that simply used the typewriter as a substitute for pen and paper, rather than responding to the limitations and opportunities offered by the machine. Riddell’s feeling was that work like this ‘denied rather than affirmed’ the instrument that it was made with. The most famous exponent of this representational style of work was probably the American Paul Smith, who was born in 1921 and began producing work in his teens. Smith’s work is all the more remarkable for the fact that he suffered from severe cerebral palsy and had very little fine motor control over his body, yet was able to produce rigorously detailed artworks. Having said this, the surviving pieces from this period of typewriter art’s history were created by people with a background in secretarial studies rather than art. Although we have no historical detail about their lives, their artistic education would presumably have been limited to what they had been taught at school, and the representational vernacular of their everyday surroundings. The ‘invention’ of abstract art was still another 10 or 15 years away.

Paul de Vree Gun Poem (1968). + The Belgian de Vree was a significant figure in the early years of sound and concrete poetry; he was a prolific painter, poet, film-maker, novelist, teacher and critic. In 1962 he organized the Exposition of Objective Poetry with the French sound poet Henri Chopin (see p. 121).

After the early days of the typewriting competitions and their figurative drawings, a more considered use of the opportunities the typewriter offered as a tool for spacial and design awareness came in the 1920s, when the Bauhaus began to use it as a way of exploring composition and the three-dimensional space of the page. These student experiments are

deceptively simple, as anyone trying to recreate them will soon discover. The students were able to create architectural forms through the use of line, perspective and tone. Very few of these works survive; some examples appear in Riddell’s book, but these are half-tones taken from a Bauhaus exhibition catalogue, the originals having been lost. The textiles students and staff of the school also used the typewriter as a starting point for creating printed patterns for clothing and furnishings. The physicality of these latter items has ensured their survival and they were included in the ‘Bauhaus: Art as Life’ exhibition at the Barbican (London, 2012), whereas the stock used for the compositional ‘drawings’ was probably more akin to sketch paper than heavy art paper, since these were merely classroom exercises; the acid in such cheaper paper eventually causes it to perish. (Even now there is a limit to the weight of paper that can be fed into a typewriter.) Another factor may have been their size. Since A4 (8 ¼ x 11 ¾ in) is by far the most common platen size, artists must work with an even smaller-sized sheet of paper in order to be able to turn it through 360 degrees. A small piece of typewriter art lacked the artistic and historical weight of an etching or a more substantial painting on canvas, and so did not enjoy the same historic value as those artforms. As a result, many would simply have been discarded. Typewriter artworks tend to be one-offs, too (the production of any form of edition requires a huge amount of patience, and all copies are but inferior versions of the original).

Hajo Rose Entwurf für ein Stoffdruckmuster aus Schreibmaschinen-Typen (‘Design for a fabric pattern using typewriter letters’) (1932). + A student at the Bauhaus during its industrial phase, Rose produced many designs for fabric prints, the patterns of which were created from typewriter characters. Throughout his career, Rose worked as a lecturer, artist, typographer and photographer.

Pietro Saga (Stefi Kiesler) Typo-Plastic (1925–30). +

Pietro Saga (Stefi Kiesler) Typo-Plastique VII Paris (1925), cover of De Stijl magazine. + Kiesler was deeply involved with the avant-garde of Paris in the 1920s, becoming great friends with, amongst others, Nelly and Theo van Doesburg. Her desire to follow the teachings of De Stijl and gain true objectivity led her to reject traditional fine art practice and create ‘typo-plastic’ images, made solely with her typewriter. These were later published in the magazine De Stijl under the pseudonym ‘Pietro Saga’. In 1926 she moved to New York with her husband, and their penthouse apartment once again became a meeting point for American and European artists.

H. N. Werkman Tiksel 16 (1923–29).

+ H. N. Werkman Tiksel 5 (1923–29). + A Dutch printer and typographer, Werkman is best known for his experimental letterpress works, especially those of his magazine The Next Call, but he also produced paintings, stencilled illustrations and typewriter pieces. Much of his work was destroyed during the fighting that took place in Groningen at the end of World War II, but the few pieces that survive show the range of his creativity and innovation.

In the mid-to late 1920s, the Dutch printer, typographer and artist H. N. Werkman (see left), famous for his experimental letterpress pieces in the magazine The Next Call, created some typewriter pieces he named ‘tiksels’ (from the Dutch tikken: ‘to type’; his letterpress-based pieces were called ‘druksels’, from drukken: ‘to print’). Due to the typewriter’s type size restrictions, the tiksels might at first seem to lack the opportunities for compositional drama afforded him by his letter-press work, but his use of overprinting to explore the structure of the page shows the same typographic eye and use of the page surface as a vehicle for abstract composition. These typewriter pieces investigate and exploit the grid that forms the basis of the machine’s function, and the release of the platen allows both regimented lines and free-form shapes to work together. As Alston Purvis states in his book H. N. Werkman (2004), the work exhibits ‘a remarkable control and harmony within the confines of a restricted medium’.

Unknown artist Queen Victoria (c. 1900), from The History of the Typewriter, by George Mares (1909). +

Unknown artist Bismarck (1898). + Early typewriter art appears to have had a very public place in competitions run by newspapers and magazines. The Stenographer’s Journal of 1898 has several examples in its pages, none of which are considered remarkable enough for the editorial team to comment upon – they appear as any other illustration might. The work ranges from observational drawings to pattern pieces that are more akin to cross-stitch patterns or samplers. It was noted at the time that ‘architectural drawings are especially adapted to this work of typewriter drawing’, and that the continuity of straight lines, curves and circles would be expected to approach those of the pen.

Roger Van Braekel Franklin D. Roosevelt (1943). + Although not a pioneering piece of typewriter art as such, Van Braekel’s illustration is a good example of the kind of work most people would have seen and been encouraged to produce as a hobby. As a thirteen-year-old boy in Nazi-occupied Belgium, Van Braekel, who always enjoyed drawing, copied this piece from an article in the magazine Ons Volkske. Newspapers and magazines of the period often carried patterns for typewriter ‘drawings’, and as late as 1984 Bob Neill published his Second Book of Typewriter Art with a series of ‘typing patterns’ that would allow one to create typewriter pictures of, amongst others, H.R.H. Prince William (at the age of one), the character Benny from the TV series Crossroads, and Adam Ant. Van Braekel originally considered architecture as a career, but eventually decided to study medicine and became a gynaecologist.

The final ‘established’ pioneer of the medium was the Austrian Stefi Kiesler, who worked under the pseudonym Pietro Saga (see p. 27). Kiesler contributed works to the magazine De Stijl – the journal of the Dutch art movement of the same name – and her typewriter pieces from this period, which she referred to as ‘typo-plastic drawings’, are extremely different from those created by Werkman. Kiesler’s work built on the grid structure of the machine’s mono-spacing rather than subverting or denying it. This sense of structure, combined with the black-and-red colour palette of the typewriter ribbons, must have been a perfect match with the ideology of Theo van Doesburg and the De Stijl movement, which called for visual compositions to be reduced to the essentials of form and colour.

Alongside these creative uses of the typewriter as a medium to explore the graphic space of the page, by the early 1940s there were already publications with articles on ‘keyboard art’, showing how one might create more traditional images. Roger Van Braekel’s portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1943, see left) was copied from an article in a youth magazine, and Julius Nelson’s typewriter art competitions, begun in 1939 when he published his book Artyping, drew a great many entries over the years.

02 THE GOLDEN AGE * Structure = Content Although the typewriter has been used as an artistic medium by artists, illustrators, writers and poets for around 130 years, the ‘golden age’ of the typewriter as a creative tool will always be intrinsically linked with the concrete poetry movement, which was active between the 1950s and 1970s.

Bob Cobbing Whisper Piece (1969). *

Bob Cobbing Beethoven Today (1970). * Originally a painter, Cobbing was famous for his sound, visual, concrete and performance poetry, as well as his role as a publisher for his Writers Forum press. In 1968 he founded the Westminster Group of experimental poets (WOUP). He created a link between the silent poetry of

text on the page and the audioscapes of sound poetry. Cobbing’s work became more and more experimental as his career developed; almost any mark that could be made and any sound that could be heard were viable ingredients for his prolific creative output.

This international movement began simultaneously in two separate locations – with the Noigandres group of poets in Brazil, which included Décio Pignatari and Augusto and Haraldo de Campos, alongside a movement in Europe, led by poets such as Öyvind Fahlström in Sweden and Eugen Gomringer in Switzerland. Gomringer claimed that the movement was not merely international in range, but ‘supranational’, and the ubiquitous typewriter truly was a supranational device, available to almost every language and culture. Concrete poetry is perhaps most easily defined as poetry that appeals to the eye and not the ear. The Noigandres manifesto, The Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry, states that ‘concrete poetry begins by being aware of the graphic space as a structural agent’, while author and poet John J. Sharkey has suggested that the reading of the pieces is ‘inferred through a simple language pattern’ without necessarily reading the pages as texts. Concrete poetry is not an exercise in typographic style. As writer and former editor of the Chicago Review Eugene Wildman says, a character is not, by itself, a concrete poem; ‘it requires the presence of an artist who will do something with the material.’ The definition is a difficult one, however, as works do not need to include letters, words or complete texts to qualify as concrete poetry. Augusto de Campos’s Olho por Olho (‘Eye for Eye’) of 1964, for example, is a series of images of lips and eyes cut from magazines – more pop art than poetry. In the introduction to her book Concrete Poetry: A World View (1968), Mary Ellen Solt quotes Mike Weaver (organizer of the First International Exhibition of Concrete and Kinetic Poetry in Cambridge, UK, 1964) as describing three types of concrete poetry: visual (or optic), phonetic (or sound) and kinetic (moving in a visual succession). These in turn relate to ‘either the constructivist or expressionist tradition in art’. Whatever path they follow, the reading of these works requires a distinct and radical shift in the assumed flow of text, which for readers of English begins at the top left of the page and runs line after line to the bottom right. Concrete poems may require reading to take place vertically or backwards, and the reader may even have to navigate their way through several overlaid texts at once. Words become an image to be taken in at a

single glance and then understood on a deeper level as the reader/viewer investigates the page. As the German poet Hugo Ball said in 1917, ‘the word and the image are one.’ The printed letter is the raw material for the concrete poet; letters overprinted one on top of another do not reduce meaning but intensify the visual density of the imagery being created – they enrich visual meaning, rather than reduce written meaning.

Miroljub Todorović Textum 1 (1973). *

Miroljub Todorović Textum 2 (1973). * Politically active as a law student in Serbia, Todorović participated in the student uprisings of May 1968; he founded the avant-garde artistic and literary movement Signalism a year later. During his career he worked as a journalist, teacher and magazine editor, and also worked for the Ministry of Culture. He retired in the early 1980s to devote himself to his literary and artistic work, including collages, drawings, visual poetry, mail art and conceptual art. His work has featured in a number of national and international exhibitions.

Zoran Popović Portrait of Jasna Tijardović (November 7, 1969). * A radical concrete poet, performance artist, film-maker and fine artist, Popović was a contributor to concrete poetry/ word art journals and magazines during the 1960s and 1970s. His work continues to be informed by a desire to ‘carry art into society’. Part of the Signalism movement of the late 1960s, his typewriter drawings were exhibited in the UK and Italy.

Jiří Valoch Three pieces from 8 Sonnets (1969). * An art theorist, curator, conceptual artist, critic and poet, Valoch’s graduation thesis was on the development and typology of visual and phonetic poetry. He first started making his own visual poetry in the early 1960s, moving from scores to artists’ books and text installations. He corresponded and worked with a number of Fluxus artists, whose work inspired him greatly. He has curated a number of significant exhibitions, including what was probably the first digital art show in Eastern Europe. Valoch has continued to explore differing routes and outcomes for his work throughout his career.

Amelia Etlinger Fishes (n.d.). * An American concrete poet and textile artist, Etlinger most commonly worked with a unique fusion of text/textile, an extraordinary array of fabrics and threads pulled and teased into a variety of constructed forms combined with found materials – dried flowers and leaves, beads, feathers – enshrining a few poignant words. Her work is held in a number of international collections, and the Amelia Etlinger Collection is being developed at the University at Buffalo, New York, USA.

The use of the typewriter to produce these artworks was a pragmatic decision for the poets of the time. It allowed the author to own the page, to dictate the visual structure without relying on the interpretation of a graphic designer, printer, compositor or editor. Up until the mid-1980s, the typewriter was the only easily accessible printing machine, allowing for the relatively cheap production and dissemination of printed matter. Overprinting was simply a case of backspacing or reinserting the sheet of paper being worked on; in traditional printing this would involve the typesetter resetting and overprinting the page, which would in turn require the making up of separate formes, if they were using letterpress, or the production of several sets of films and printing plates if using lithography. With a typewriter, colour could be added at no extra cost if a black-andred ribbon was used in the machine, and yet more colours were only a

change of ribbon or addition of carbon paper away. (A Life magazine article in 1953 featured Montserrat Escardivol, a typist with the Barcelona Police Department, who reproduced paintings and photographs on an old Underwood with the aid of 17 different coloured ribbons.) Some of these original typewritten pieces have been reworked by designers and formally typeset, sometimes at their cost. If the grid of the original is intrinsic to its meaning, then a proportionally spaced typographic interpretation can only reduce the purity of the original visual/literal message. However, in the hands of a sympathetic typographic designer a piece can also become something far more compelling – something that reduces the original to the status of simply a rough or working drawing rather than a finished poem. Hansjörg Mayer’s translation of John J. Sharkey’s 1963 poem Schoenberg is one such achievement. Perhaps the most famous example of the genre is Gomringer’s Silence (1953). Famous, because the poem does not actually exist. The piece is given its meaning by its very absence. The graphic space of the page is a vital part of the poem’s meaning – both the white space of the paper that surrounds the text and the ‘missing’ element at its heart are fundamental to understanding the piece. At the time Gomringer was writing singleword poems, and found it ‘wonderful’ that he could ‘say so much with a single word’. In Silence, that wonder is taken to an absolute conclusion. Gomringer believed that the writing of concrete poetry was a test of character. It demanded a deeper foundation and was therefore, in his opinion, closely bound up with the challenge of individual existence, with the individual’s ‘Life with Language’, ‘Life with Words’. A great many concrete poets also began to exploit what English poet John Furnival called ‘two of the great liberators of the period’ – dry transfer lettering and phototypesetting – and their work moved away from the exploitation/exploration of the limitations and opportunities afforded by the mono-spaced grid of the typewriter. Dieter Roth, Ferdinand Kriwet, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Wolfgang Schmidt and many others produced typographic works that were linked to, but not ‘of ’, the typewriter and are therefore beyond the remit of this book.

herman de vries From Gesammelte Matritzendrucke 1964–1972 (Verlag Artists Press, Bern, 1974). * An artist, scientist and natural philosopher, de vries was originally a biological researcher who began to create abstract art in the 1950s. In the 1960s his white, random and abstract works established his association with the Zero art group. The exploitation of the grid in his typewriter pieces has a resonance with the ‘Earth’ paintings of the early 1990s.

Geof Huth perfection/reflection (1979). *

An archivist, writer and poet, both of traditional and visual forms of verse, Huth’s work ranges from hand-drawn texts to performance pieces and both analogue and digitally generated visual poetry. His mail art piece 365 Letters took the form of one written poem a day, over the course of a year. Each one was written as a letter to a friend and posted out to them. The poems were archived on his blog, 365 ltrs. His book ntst: the collected pwoermds of geof huth is a collection of 775 one-word poems.

J. P. Ward section through a tree trunk (1971). *

J. P. Ward shakespeare sonnet XVI (1973). *

J. P. Ward the words we use are lovely (1973). *

J. P. Ward coming together (1973). * Both a traditional and concrete poet, Ward firmly believed that the old-fashioned typewriter poem (c. 1960–80) should exploit that machine’s nature, rather than what is handwritten or printed. His work thus evinced a fascination with geometry, abstraction and the search for a deeper truth that goes beyond surface detail, looking instead for ‘more elaborate patterns, including semantic ones, requiring only the poets with the patience to find them’. In the 1990s came the digital word-processor, taking him to different approaches.

Alan Riddell ‘o’ from The Seasons Suite, a serial visual poem (1975–76). *

Alan Riddell The Honey Pot (1969). * Although born in Australia, Riddell was bought up in Scotland and went on to live in Greece, Spain, France and Australia. Originally a traditional poet, he was introduced to concrete poetry by Ian Hamilton Finlay in 1963. A major figure in the promotion of typewriter art, Riddell organized two major shows of work in Edinburgh and London, as well as editing the book Typewriter Art (London Magazine Editions, 1975). For almost fifty years it was the only major publication on the subject. His opus, The Seasons Suite, remained uncompleted at the time of his death.

Alan Riddell, a traditional poet until 1963, when he was introduced to the medium of concrete poetry by Ian Hamilton Finlay, curated the only

major retrospective show of the medium to date. Held in London and Edinburgh in 1973 and 1974, it led to the publication of his anthology Typewriter Art in 1975. Riddell’s own final pieces – a set of related compositions called The Seasons Suite (1977), which were still a work in progress when he died – are quite deceptive. On the surface they seem to be a series of repeated patterns and geometric shapes made up from the words ‘Spring’, ‘Summer’, ‘Autumn’ and ‘Winter’. However, author June Road was able to use Riddell’s diaries to uncover references to things as diverse as ‘Greek myths, Rimbaud, time, Oxo cubes, the atom bomb, the Christian calendar, “white” holes, drinking and telephoning’. Riddell felt that an artist’s engagement with technology was the only way to humanize the modern world and overcome the ‘deadening’ effect of mechanization. Surveying the range of work produced by so many different artists with essentially the same starting point provides a vindication of his beliefs. These creators range from those who, as contemporary British artist Barbara Clayton says, use ‘tiny marks on the page, innocuous in themselves, but accumulating to create an unanticipated entity that may be satisfying or perplexing’, to the artists and poets that, as poet keitharmstrong (see p. 54) observes, must ‘see the piece of work in their heads, in its entirety, before striking even a single key… (a mathematical mind helps)’, and even to those such as American artist Stephanie Strange (see p. 160), who creates ‘a body of work born out of typing freestyle poetry; one day the words fall away, but the poetry continues’. Throughout all these works there is a contradiction between the need for complete control over the machine – a desire for the exact, decisive placement of its texts – and the serendipity of happy accidents and the occasional beauty of unexpected errors. Works such as Stuart Mills’s Poems for my Shorthand Typist (see p. 89), originally published as part of a catalogue in 1972 and then collected in a book in 2002, represent concrete poetry at its most minimal and ‘singular’. This piece of wonderfully sustained wit relies on nothing more than the keystrokes of the typewriter itself. The poems take their starting point from Ian Hamilton Finlay’s one-word poems, where the title of a poem can be of any length, but the poem itself consists of just one word. Mills takes that idea to extremes, each of his poems being but a single character. Other works from this period are constructed as visual patterns, sometimes with the text matter remaining a readable part of the page,

sometimes not. Their origins lie in the Greek pattern poems of the third and second centuries BC as much as in the liberated pages of Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard (‘A throw of the dice will never abolish chance’; published in 1914, after the poet’s death). Christian Scholz described these works as ‘sound texts without a sound. In other words visual texts are a sort of orchestral “score” for a sound text.’ The most immediate difference between these and more traditional ‘sound poetry’ is the use of the graphic space of the page as a structural agent, moving from a two-dimensional picture plane to a three-dimensional visual space. A more representational use of the page can be seen in works like Alan Riddell’s The Honey Pot (1969), or Jeremy Adler’s vibrant and beautiful Blue Typing (1974) or Typewriter Poems (1969, see p. 50). These exemplify art writer Jasia Reichardt’s observation that ‘the shape of the poem becomes a counterpoint of its meaning’. More experimental works, on the other hand, may hint at a depth beyond the single plane of the page, as in Bob Cobbing’s Whisper Piece (1969, see p. 34), or, as with the works of Dom Sylvester Houédard (often referred to as dsh, see p. 52), deal very clearly with a fully realized and self-contained universe – in publisher Dick Higgins’s words, ‘a constellation from an epicentre of the whole concrete earthquake’.

Cavan McCarthy zeeeyooosshhhhhhhh (c. 1965–66). *

Cavan McCarthy Plurble Poem (c. 1965–66). * A prolific word artist, who edited the experimental magazine Tlaloc from 1964 to 1970, McCarthy left England to wander the world and get involved with various other types of printed materials, including Nigerian market literature and Brazilian popular poetry. He still divides his time between the USA and Brazil. His collection of concrete poetry is in the Special Collections, Brotherton Library, Leeds University, UK.

The fiercely intelligent Houédard was a Benedictine monk, and a theorist and practitioner of both visual poetry and theology. He created some of the most fascinating works of the period – ‘typestracts’ as the Scottish poet Edwin Morgan (see p. 65) called them – on his Olivetti Lettera 22, creating an almost limitless palette from the machine’s limited set of characters. Although considered part of the avant-garde, Houédard saw his work as having roots in the very origins of all graphics – the ancient cave paintings that existed well before Greek pattern poems. Mary Ellen Solt has likened Houédard’s work to a vehicle for spiritual meditation. His intuitive understanding of the exact positioning of the typebars, the visual effect of layering and retyping on the same page over

and over again, and the subtle use of half spacing (a design feature created to make corrections less noticeable) all combine to create rich worlds from the flat surface of the paper that are perhaps indeed evidence of his spiritual concentration.

Jeremy Adler Typewriter Poem (1969). *

Jeremy Adler Typewriter Poem (1969). * Adler’s explorations into typographic forms and wordplay began as calligraphic texts and then developed into stencil and typewriter works. The beauty and economy of his line is superb. His archive can be seen at the Foyle Special Collections Library, King’s College, London.

Karl Kempton K, P and S, from Rune 2: 26 Voices/ January Interlude, published in Typewriter magazine (1980) and Rune: A Survey, ed. Karl Young (Light and Dust Books and Atticus Books, 1992). * A visual artist, poet and publisher who composed over 600 visual poems on the typewriter before moving over to computer-based works in 1992, Kempton constructs beautifully articulate poems in pattern series, each exploring different themes: alphabets, Celtic knots, mandalas, optic art, sine waves or the left hemisphere of the brain. His major work Rune, begun in 1975, is still ongoing. Its first nine volumes, of over 300 pages, were composed on the typewriter. Since 1992 another 600 pages for volumes 10–21 have been composed digitally. Volumes 22–24 are currently in progress.

Dom Sylvester Houédard Jargon B46F51 – untitled (1963). * The single most important figure in the history of typewriter art, Dom Sylvester Houédard (dsh), was a Benedictine monk, theologian, translator, artist and, along with Ian Hamilton Finlay, one of the pioneers and advocates of concrete and visual poetry in the UK. According to his friend Charles Cameron, dsh had begun to explore the graphic possibilities of the typewriter while working in British Army Intelligence during World War II. Required to write 16-page reports but never able to find enough to say, he filled the remaining pages with graphic patterns and experiments. After the war, he was often to be found working away at night in his monastery cell creating his ‘typestracts’, much to the annoyance of the other monks. His understanding of the way the flat picture plane of the page could be explored as a three-dimensional space and his use of overlays and coloured ribbons or carbon papers to create delicate and seemingly impossibly complex imagery shows his mastery of the medium. His output was quite phenomenal, as was his letter writing. His (pre-internet) address book was said to run to over 3,000 names. Along with Jonathan Williams, John Furnival and Kenelm Cox, he was part of the GLOUcestershire grouP (GLOUP) of concrete-kinetic poets living in the west of England. A long-overdue anthology of dsh’s work, Notes from the Cosmic Typewriter, was published by Occasional Papers in 2012.

Dom Sylvester Houédard Jargon B46F29 – typikon (1963). *

Dom Sylvester Houédard Jargon B46F30 – typikon (1963).

Certainly, few typewriter artists of the time other than Houédard were able to create such consistently immersive experiences – work that goes

well beyond the intensity and rigour usually associated with the medium. Working from a cell at night, Houédard’s typewriter would often keep the other monks awake, so it was the search for a noiseless method of production, along with the onset of arthritis, that eventually led him away from the typewriter.

INTERVIEW

= keitharmstrong Writer, poet, typewriter artist, film-maker, activist and musician keitharmstrong’s involvement with concrete poetry began with the publication of his international literary magazine The Informer (1966– 71). He was in regular contact with a number of typewriter artists at the time, notably Amelia Etlinger, Dom Sylvester Houédard and Bob Cobbing, and his artworks, both text-based and photographic, have been exhibited nationally and internationally.

keitharmstrong corners outside of a square (c. 1971–72). =

keitharmstrong flowergAme (December 16, 1970). =

keitharmstrong @ @ @ @ (January 11, 1986).

You’ve had quite a wide range of jobs, from publisher, to poet, to artist, to musician. How would you describe yourself? =

I vary between these. I have also worked as a local government policy planner in both transport and housing in London. I sometimes describe myself as a concept designer. I’m currently finishing off a text about the word ‘Claudius’ which is mainly history/etymology. I have also been directly involved in a number of community groups. I understand that your involvement in the avant-garde, concrete poetry and typewriter art began with The Informer, a magazine that got you expelled from school. How did that come about? = I did not get expelled from school, although I once helped organize a pupil strike and boycott, which was successful in its outcome. What happened with the magazine was the first issue had the school address, and basically the school wanted to take control of the magazine. So I simply changed it to my home address and continued with it. I suppose the best coup was to publish a previously unpublished essay by Boris Pasternak. The magazine was where you first began to publish concrete poetry and typewriter art, but you had already been working creatively with a typewriter before then, hadn’t you? Where did your own influences come from? = The first example I still retain is the cover of the first issue of The Informer: International Poetry Magazine, which I directly curated on a Roneo stencil duplicator, or mimeograph, in 1966. This was a long time before I met dsh (see p. 52) or the rest of the Gloucestershire visual poets. Peter George, an antiques specialist and regular on the forerunner of the Antiques Roadshow, noticed the similarity between my typewriter work and dsh’s and so invited me to a private view at Arlington Mill. My first published design was created out of necessity and my limited resources; there were no desktop publishers in 1966.

You’ve said that with the kind of work you or dsh produced on typewriters, a ‘mathematical mind’ helps. Does this inform the way you write and produce music too? = Yes and no. You have to create structures in anything you do; however, you need to be flexible. One thing really annoyed me early on in my Claudius book: someone asked me what I wanted to say. As I’d only just started researching, I responded, ‘I don’t know’, which was true. However, as research moved on, I became able to answer that. Every new creative item has to start with a blank. The creation of music has to start with silence. How many different typewriters did you use, and what range of coloured ribbons? = I have two electric Smith Corona typewriters. I cannot use manual track typewriters, although I can see that they would be more sensitive for anyone who has the physical strength to use them. My first typewriter uses standard reel, and I have ribbons for it in red, white, black and silver. My second typewriter uses a cartridge system and I have brown, black, green, red and blue colours. From the work I’ve seen, you were incredibly prolific as a typewriter artist, but you said that you simply became too busy in the 1980s and essentially stopped. What was it that took over? = I was in hospital for a year with a back operation. I did a number of poetry readings, including Rochdale and Huddersfield, and I performed at a number of music events. I led a campaign for buses in the UK to be accessible to wheelchair users, and researched US passenger transport for the Greater London Council. I edited a comic for one issue. I squatted for three and a half years. I then secured myself a council flat and then spent a lot of time on local government committees, including not-for-profit voluntary groups and a community law centre.

keitharmstrong aaaaaa (October 4, 1968). =

keitharmstrong o game unfinished (November 15, 1971). =

keitharmstrong Tower (November 15, 1968).

Did you ever feel part of a coherent group of typewriter artists, or were you simply a disparate group of people who happened to be using the same medium to work with? = As mentioned, Peter George noticed I was using the typewriter to create art. The invitation to a private view at Arlington Mill (deep in William Morris country) that he secured for me was where I met John Furnival, dsh and Ken Cox (who lectured at Chelsea College of Art) for the first time. Initially I was working to create a sculpture with Ken Cox, who unfortunately was killed in a traffic accident. I got to know dsh very well and stayed with him twice at Prinknash Abbey. As you know, dsh was in cyphers in the Second World War and was the last person to leave Guernsey before the German occupation and the first person to come back when the Germans surrendered. The Alan Riddell show and exhibition seems to have been the last major event/record of typewriter art, yet there has been a great deal of work produced on the machines ever since the late 1800s. Why do you think it has such a low profile within the arts? = dsh told me his initial inspiration was from the decorative lettering on the first page of a chapter in early Christian manuscripts, and in the late nineteenth century shapes were popular in the work of Edward Lear. It’s been very influential in the creation of ASCII art. I see at present it is out of fashion, as concrete poetry was very big in the early avant-garde. And then it faded until the late 1960s. One can cite the work of ee cummings. It has gone in and out of fashion at least three times and is likely to come back into fashion sometime in the future. Although I don’t know what will trigger it.

William Jay Smith Typewriter portrait of Ernest Hemingway (Papa Piper) (1957). *

William Jay Smith Typewriter portrait of Tallulah Bankhead (Tallulah) (1957). * A lyric poet and, from 1968 to 1970, Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, Smith is the author of many books of poetry for both adults and children. In 2012 his book My Friend Tom: The Poet-Playwright Tennessee Williams was published by the University Press of Mississippi.

Eduard Ovčáček Optická Struktura (‘Optical Structure’) (1964). *

Eduard Ovčáček Hlava (‘Head’) (1966). * A true multimedia artist, Ovčáček’s work ranges from graphic design to paintings, collages, sculptures, photographs, screenprints, installations, digital technology and visual/ concrete poetry. He was politically active and strongly opposed the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968, publishing works, both in Czechoslovakia and abroad, that directly criticized the Warsaw Pact’s actions, namely the series of monotypes Lessons of the Big A, which was created

immediately after the invasion of Warsaw Pact armies into Czech territory on August 21, 1968. His typewriter pieces draw together elements of his collages, pictoral works, and visual and sound poems. Among the pieces shown here and overleaf are two concrete poems from Ovčáček’s famous series Kruhy (‘Circles’) (1964–66) . Eduard Ovčáček Emanace (‘Emanation’) (1962). *

Eduard Ovčáček Prázdny Kruh – Zájmena (‘Empty Circle – Pronouns’) (1964–66).

Steve McCaffery Carnival (section), second panel (1970–75), unpublished full-colour version. * McCaffery’s experiments with the disintegration/reintegration of language began in the mid1960s. In the 1970s he formed the sound-poetry group the Four Horsemen with Rafael Barreto-

Rivera, Paul Dutton and bpNichol (see pp. 100, 79). The two panels of Carnival, produced between 1967 and 1975, are among the most significant pieces of typewriter art/concrete poetry/sound poetry ever produced. McCaffery saw it as ‘essentially a cartographic project; a repudiation of linearity in writing and the search for an alternative syntax in “mapping”.’ The work developed and grew throughout the two panels to gain typographic complexity, moving from the simplicity of the red and black masks of a typewriter ribbon to include coloured rubberstamped letterforms, carbon-paper frottage, wet-feed electrostatic disintegrations and holograph. A third digital panel was conceived in 2012, comprising a superimposition of the earlier two panels and has been published (in reduced size) as a poster.

Peter Finch The Area of Probability (July 1969). *

Peter Finch Music for Cloud Song (1978). *

Peter Finch The Sonic Skyline of Britain (November 1971). * Editor of one of the two seminal books on typewriter art and poetry published during the 1970s and of the ground-breaking magazine Second Aeon, Finch is a full-time poet, critic, author and literary entrepreneur. His work has been exhibited internationally, and he toured with the sound poet Bob Cobbing. In the 1980s, his work moved away from typewriter pieces into performance poetry.

Edwin Morgan Unscrambling the Waves at Goonhilly (1968). *

Edwin Morgan The Chaffinch Map of Scotland (1968). * Morgan was the most inventive, wide-ranging and popular poet writing in Scotland in the second half of the twentieth century. He was Poet Laureate for Glasgow from 1999 to 2005, and Scotland’s National Poet from 2004 until his death in 2010. His experiments with concrete poetry began in the 1960s, although he was never restricted to one form. His publication archive, including his typewriter, is held at the Scottish Poetry Library, Edinburgh.

Peter Kubelka Typewritten scores for the film Arnulf Rainer (1960). * In the late 1950s, the Austrian experimental film-maker Kubelka invented a method to write the scores and sketches for his film Arnulf Rainer on a typewriter. In his words: ‘I left Austria and went to Sweden following the scandal caused by my film Schwechater. There, supporting myself by shovelling snow, cleaning restaurant kitchens and other similar jobs and having no access to film or any technical tools needed for film-making, I started to use a typewriter to realize my cinematographic phantasies. The typewriter prints a regular chain of symbols on paper, just like

the film projector projects images in regular succession on the cinema screen. The scope of my new work was to build an ecstatic architecture out of the essential elements of analogue cinema in their purest form: light and darkness, sound and silence. In order to create one completely black field, I had to type five different letters on the same spot; a white space, of course, was easily achieved. I cut out single lines of typewritten “paperfilms”. They can be experienced with the naked eye and do not need a projector.’

Karel Adamus Poems Pictures (1975). *

Karel Adamus Poems Pictures (1975). *

Karel Adamus Poems Pictures (1974). *

Karel Adamus Poems Pictures (1974). *

Karel Adamus Poems Pictures (1974). *

Karel Adamus Poems Pictures (1976). * A poet and artist, Adamus creates cycles of visual poems. His use of, and ability to manipulate, the keyboard of the typewriter leads to a series of pages where the rigid mechanism of the machine is made to create images that have a totally different feel from one frame of the sequence to the next, belying the fact that they are made on a machine as inflexible as a typewriter.

Hart Broudy C Pomes: Sequences 1 and 2 (1969). *

Produced during the late 1960s and early 1970s, Broudy’s C Pomes were part of an exploration into the alphabet from a graphic point of view, the sinuous character of the letterforms at odds with the imposed rigidity and regulation of the typewriter. It was part of an attempt to allow the letter-shapes themselves to communicate meaning, divorced from their use as elements in creating words; this has proved to be a constant theme in Broudy’s work over the years. Several books and anthologies of his work have been published and his work has been exhibited internationally.

INTERVIEW

= Andrew Belsey Belsey was involved in the international concrete poetry movement of the late 1960s, and worked in a variety of mediums, including typewriters. Some of these appeared in ‘obscure journals and anthologies’, as well as more mainstream publications. He contributed to the exhibitions organized by Alan Riddell in 1973 and 1974, and to Riddell’s resulting anthology Typewriter Art (1975). Belsey continues to produce concrete poetry and word art.

Andrew Belsey Unusual Love Poem (1987).

=

Andrew Belsey Cosmos (1976).

When did you first become involved in typewriter art? How did it come about? = In 1968 I was a student at Warwick University and I met Paul Merchant, lecturer in English, and Michael Gibbs, student, who were already involved in concrete poetry. Concrete poetry was new to me but I took to it immediately, using typewriters and Letraset and other media. A small group emerged and Paul and Michael got together some examples which appeared in the Warwick student newspaper. And in spring 1969 they edited the first issue of Kontexts, which consisted of eight cards in an envelope (250 numbered copies). Some of the contributions were

typewritten, but mine was Letraset. Subsequent issues, edited by Michael alone, were in various little-magazine stapled formats. I also contributed to Typewriter, edited by Robert Caldwell in America, which in spite of its name was a general concrete poetry magazine. Did you consider yourself an artist or poet at the time? = I wrote (non-concrete) poetry in the 1960s, which I typed out on my 1901 Underwood. Unfortunately I no longer had this machine by the time I discovered typewriter art/poetry. I had no artistic abilities at that time, but once I discovered that art of some sort could be produced mechanically on a typewriter I never looked back. (I had no freehand drawing ability, but I also started producing drawings with ruler, compass, etc., and also collage.) I was very aware of the limitations and therefore the possibilities of the typewriter. I had always been interested in typography, and reckoned I could do a better layout of a typewritten document than professional secretaries. I was also familiar with Letraset, having done headlines for student newspapers in the 1960s. Where did your career take you? = I studied philosophy at Warwick University, and my career from 1973 became teaching philosophy at Cardiff University. I had a few concrete poems and some typewriter art published in various magazines and anthologies, but no time to pursue this vigorously. And these outlets soon disappeared as typewriters went out of use. However, I did send some examples to the London Magazine, and the editor, Alan Ross, published a couple, but also showed them to his friend and contributor Alan Riddell (see p. 47), which is how I got into Riddell’s exhibitions in Edinburgh in 1973 and London in 1974, and the book in 1975. I met Riddell for the only time at the opening of the London exhibition. Unfortunately he died at only 50 in 1977, otherwise I am sure he would have been prominent in producing and promoting typewriter art. He did in fact produce amazing stuff in his last few years. And I think he must be credited with separating and identifying typewriter art as a subcategory of concrete poetry. As a journalist he would have been very familiar with typewriters.

Your work seems to be influenced by the concrete poets and by the more abstract artists, yet your own research is focused on ‘typewriter drawings’. Was that always one of your interests? = I have always been very susceptible to influence (most philosophy consists in building on what has gone before)! I became familiar with a wide variety of concrete poetry because I was fortunate in being able to buy a lot of concrete poetry anthologies, magazines, etc., when they were readily available and pretty cheap in the 1970s and 1980s (now they are rare and often very expensive). Quite a bit of this was typewriter art. I particularly liked typewriter art because of my love (does this sound ridiculous?) of the typewriter and its potentialities, and this was further stimulated by an admiration for the typestracts of dsh (see p. 52) – although I could never produce anything with his level of skill and inventiveness. So I thought of myself as an (amateur) concrete poet with a special interest in typewriter art and typewriter poetry.

Andrew Belsey Rain/Storm (1986). =

Andrew Belsey Ozone Layers (1977). =

Andrew Belsey The Threat and the Promise (1972).

Did you move on from the typewriter to ASCII art, or did other things draw you away from text- based art and concrete poetry? = I was lucky that I got a Mac in 1987, while colleagues were struggling with Amstrads. I started to transfer typewriter work to the computer in as close to its original form as possible, but quickly realized that there were other inviting possibilities: changing the typeface, size, line spacing, colour, etc., and adding graphics. So in spite of my love of the typewriter, I pretty much used the computer from then on. Computers could be fun! Lots of ASCII art and other text-based art and concrete poetry, but also non-text-based art, right up to the present day. I prefer the small scale: most of my work is now on A5 (5⅞ x 8¼ in) rather than A4 (8¼ x 11¾ in). Masses of it, nearly all unpublished and unseen. A lot of the stuff I have done on the computer is in the spirit of typewriter art

in that it would never have been done if I had not been a typewriter artist first. Did you ever feel part of a community of typewriter artists? = I don’t think there ever was a community, though there might have been one if Alan Riddell had lived. Over the years I’ve been in touch (email) with a few people involved in text art, but it was not until I met Keira Rathbone (see p. 140) and then you that I got to know other typewriter artists.

Robert Zend Typescape #7 (April 13, 1978) and Typescape #22 (May 16, 1978), from Arbormundi (1978). *

A Hungarian-Canadian writer, poet, composer and multimedia artist, Zend’s experiments with concrete poetry, which he referred to as ‘ditto’ poems, and their off-shoot (or improvement), ‘drop’ poems, were brought together in the portfolio Arbormundi (‘Tree of Life’). His typescapes are all the more remarkable in that he appears to have had no knowledge of other artists or writers who were working within the same genre at the time. Of the seventeen prints in Arbormundi, a note states that ‘Zend creates them with a manual typewriter; no electronics, computers or glue involved.’

Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt Sammlung-Streuung(1974). *

Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt From the series Faces (n.d.). * An East German artist, Wolf-Rehfeldt began to create ‘typewritings’, a combination of writing, poetry, drawing and collage, in the 1970s. Produced on an Erika typewriter, the works have a precision and intuitive understanding of the form that puts her three-dimensional experiments on a par with that of Karl Kempton or keitharmstrong (see pp. 51, 54). Her works cross the boundaries of concrete/visual poetry and conceptual art. Despite the political seclusion of East

Germany during the Berlin Wall era, she remained extremely well connected to a wider artistic community through a series of mail-art networks. Wolf-Rehfeldt recently donated her archive to the Weserburg Research Centre for Artists’ Publications.

bpNichol Precarious Poem, from Konfessions of an Elizabethan Fan Dancer (Writers Forum Quartos no. 3, 1967). *

bpNichol Early Morning: June 23, from Konfessions of an Elizabethan Fan Dancer (Writers Forum Quartos no. 3, 1967). * Although he worked in a variety of different media, from musical theatre to performance pieces, bpNichol was considered by Ellen Solt, in her book Concrete Poetry: A World View (1970), to be Canada’s leading concrete poet. He referred to his works as ‘borderblur’ – the writing between poetry, short fiction, novels, musical scores, performances, comic books, collages, assemblages and computer texts. A member of the Four Horsemen (along with Steve McCaffery, Paul Dutton [see pp. 61, 100] and Rafael Barreto-Rivera), he also collaborated with his wife Ellie, producing

three-dimensional visual poetry. The annual bpNichol Chapbook Award, for excellence in Canadian poetry, has run since 1986.

03 THE BOOK: Best lookers rather than best sellers Typewritten text and the narrative form have been intrinsically linked since Mark Twain delivered his first completely typed manuscript to his publisher in the late 1800s. From that point on, authors had their work typed up into manuscripts. Publishers would then pass these on to typesetters, who would cast off the manuscript in order to calculate the number of typeset pages needed for the book.

Renaud Perrin Machine (2011).

:

Renaud Perrin Red Wheelbarrow (2011). :

Renaud Perrin Club de Natacio Barcelona (2011). :

Renaud Perrin Garage (2011). :

Renaud Perrin Forum (2011). : Perrin’s use of the typewriter has many layers to it. Inspired by Henri Chopin’s exclamation, ‘The important thing is to have defeated the machine’ (from Chopin’s manifesto Machine Poem, 1964; see also p. 121), Perrin’s surly Hermes Baby ‘gradually softens’ as he uses it. He is also inspired by the typewriter’s relationship with traditional printmaking, such as linocutting or etching, where any mark made cannot be ‘unmade’. There is an element of ‘industrial music’, too – he is aware of the noise of the keys as another layer of meaning while he is working. Perrin also appreciates that old typewriters are full of a poetry that increases in value as their commercial functionality ebbs away.

There were even advertisements in the late 1890s for book typewriters – such as the machine produced by Elliott & Hatch in 1897. With this contraption, the book remained stationary whilst the typewriter moved on rails across the page as the operator typed. The advertising claimed that it wrote ‘anywhere a pen will, and on any size sheet of paper or page of book’ (see p. 9).

Almost 80 years later, the punk movement saw the typewriter as a very effective way of creating cheap typewritten texts that could be printed or photocopied without the expense of a typesetter or graphic designer. More mainstream magazines, from i-D to Emigre, have used the typewriter in a similar way, enlarging text for headlines and reducing it for body copy. Some books are what they are because of the method of writing. Jack Kerouac famously wrote On the Road on a 120-foot-long scroll. Archy and Mehitabel (originally a series of columns in the New York newspaper The Sun) by Don Marquis, is presented as written by Archy the cockroach; the book is written entirely in lowercase as Archy cannot type on two keys at once, until he at last accidentally discovers the Cap Lock key. Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America (1967) was printed directly from the typewritten manuscript he wrote while travelling around America with his family, adding to the reader’s experience of Brautigan’s journey and the composition that grew from it. American poet Christopher Knowles’s oversized book Typings (1972), a collection of new works alongside pieces previously published in a variety of magazines and journals, reflects his interest in generative systems and music, the pages being full of prose poems, snippets of repeated texts and geometric patterns. The typewriter pieces are, unusually, in red, black and green. Knowles’s most famous work led to a collaboration with Robert Wilson and Philip Glass on the libretto for their 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach. His typings from the 1980s rejected the format of the book and were made on large rice-paper banners. Knowles continues to inspire contemporary typewriter artists such as Renaud Perrin (see p. 82), who, after watching a documentary about Knowles’s work, was moved by its poetic nature.

Charlotte Gee Repetition (2010). :

Charlotte Gee

Tribute of Stitch (ongoing). : Inspired by ‘overheard conversations’, Gee uses the format of the book as a sculptural form, in which she manipulates and repeats a series of hand-stitched pages to build the structure of the book. Tribute of Stitch features the typewritten names of soldiers who have lost their lives in Afghanistan. ‘The piece will only be finished when all our soldiers return home with no more fatalities; the continuing thread and needle symbolize this’, she says.

There are other books that take the relationship between typewritten text and narrative form even further – those whose literary content is directly driven by the process of typewriting and therefore would lose their entire literary structure if the writing of them was separated from the typing of them. Willard S. Bain’s 1967 ‘teleprinter novel’ Informed Sources (Day East Received), although not strictly typewritten, uses the mono spacing of the teletext machine as part of its visual structure. The Faber edition of the book is traditionally bound along the left-hand edge, but the visual structure of it clearly shows that it was originally intended to be printed on a dot matrix printer and form a continual concertina fold. If you have ever seen a stack of old perforated printer paper with the series of registration holes running along either edge, you will immediately understand how the book was supposed to be read. At various points, the narrative, which begins as a series of ticker-tape news reports, fragments and disperses on the page, and in one sequence begins to create a recognizable image – with the legend ‘Suffer your local police’. I was once told that the novel was originally ‘published’ by telephone. You would call the writer and attach your phone to a modem. The text was then sent ‘down the line’ to your teleprinter and the book appeared ready for you to bind and read however you wished. I can find no evidence for this at all, but very much want the story to be true.

Earl Conrad Pages from Typoo (Paul S. Eriksson, New York, 1969). : Conrad was the author of more than twenty books, his subject matter often reflecting his concern for the African American experience and race relations. Typoo was unlike anything else he ever wrote – or for that matter, anything anyone else has ever written. The Special Collections and University Archives, University of Oregon Libraries, hold manuscript materials, research notes, draft copies and galley proofs for several of his novels, including Typoo.

In 1969 American author Earl Conrad’s Typoo – A Typographical Novel (see left) was published. A truly experimental book written and designed on a 1915 Underwood, Typoo is literally a character, or sequence of characters – a precursor of the emoticon – and his story takes place in a world of ‘white paper infinity’. The book seeks to reflect our own experiences, as seen ‘between the typewriter keys’. The story unfolds over a series of abstracted pages, with both written texts and visual ones. Sometimes the word pictures are to be read simply as images; sometimes the textural content is used to add meaning. The page layouts themselves

are very loose, with a fair amount of white space. There is some rigour to the text blocks, but for the most part the roller has been disengaged and the type allowed to roam freely across the page. A digital adventure called Compoo, the planned ‘electrified sequel’ to Typoo, never materialized. A more recent poetry collection – Was mir die Adler erzählt (‘What the eagle told me’) by the Austrian writer Christian Futscher (1995, see p. 88) – has a similar typographic sensibility and often the same ‘earthy’ references, although the poems are a series of single statements rather than a continuing narrative.

Christian Futscher komposition für gerald futscher, from Was mir die Adler erzählt (Das fröhliche Wohnzimmeredition, Vienna, 1995). :

Christian Futscher fc ? : fc ! kurz vor dem anpfiff, from Was mir die Adler erzählt (Das fröhliche Wohnzimmeredition, Vienna, 1995). : Futscher, a writer of poetry, prose and radio scripts, won the Dresden Poetry Prize in 2008. His Was mir die Adler erzählt (‘What the eagle told me’) is a witty and playful collection of almost entirely typewritten visual poems.

Perhaps, as Andrew Belsey (see p. 72) says, it is a case of typewriter artists or poets having to reinvent the medium time and again. There are threads in Futscher’s work that go back to the considered explorations of the page investigated by artists from the Bauhaus and beyond, as well as to the playful, flippant visual games of Madge Roemer’s 1956 Fun With Your Typewriter or William Jay Smith’s (see p. 58) 1960 Typewriter Town, which continue right through to the contemporary work of Michael Crowe and Lenka Clayton (see p. 144), with their month-long ‘drawing a day project’, in which they reproduced each day through the medium of their typewriters something they had seen first hand that day. The visual structure of French-American writer Raymond Federman’s Double or Nothing (1971, see p. 90), is as defined by the typewriter’s mechanical and graphic language as Bain’s Informed Sources. The novel is part of a genre Federman called ‘surfiction’.

Stuart Mills The Tadpole’s Poem, The Canal’s Poem, The Sea Horse’s Poem and The Sailor’s Poem, from Poems for My Shorthand Typist (Coracle Press, Ireland, 2002). :

From the early 1960s Mills, a poet who originally studied fine art, ran the imprints Tarasque Press and Aggie Weston’s. In 1967 he met Ian Hamilton Finlay and began a close friendship and working relationship with him. Mills embraced Finlay’s concept of the ‘small poem’, and Poems for My Shorthand Typist is the most perfect expression of this form. The only fiction that still means something today is that kind of fiction that tries to explore the possibilities of fiction; the kind of fiction that challenges the tradition that governs it: the kind of fiction that constantly renews our faith in man’s imagination and not in man’s distorted vision of reality – that reveals man’s irrationality rather than man’s rationality.

The pages of the book are arranged in a variety of ‘concrete’ passages; these use the structure of the mono-spaced typewriter keyboard to create hard-edged columns and blocks of type that alter and affect the reader’s engagement with the page itself. Dense pages of type are interspersed with open pages that surprise with visual puns and wordplay. Artists’ books and small presses have often used the typewriter to great effect. In 1948, Stefan and Francizska Themerson (see p. 92) founded the Gaberbocchus Press in London, with the aim of bringing international works to a new audience and publishing ‘best lookers’ rather than ‘best sellers’ – publishing what was, at the time, the (commercially) unpublishable in a form that would allow design, form, typography and layout to respond to the narrative and meaning of the text. In 1962 they published Semantic Divertissements, a book that combines Francizska’s witty line drawings with Stefan’s typewritten prose. As Nick Wadley noted in an Eye magazine essay, The black, red and white house style that evolved in the later Gaberbocchus books, although it has precedents in the history of modern typography, owed its origins in their case to the standard black and red ribbon of the typewriter.

Raymond Federman Pages from Double or Nothing (Swallow Press, Chicago, 1971). : Federman was a novelist, academic, poet, essayist, translator and critic. Double or Nothing was his first published novel. It has been described as a ‘concrete book’, with each page of the narrative given layer upon layer of meanings: typographical, grammatical and visual. The artist, author and critic Richard Kostelanetz declared that ‘invention of this quality ranks the book among the fictional masterpieces of our age’.

The Themersons’ experimentation with text, form and image has set the standard for artists’ books and magazines ever since. For example, a 2012 show at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, ‘In Numbers: Serial Publications by Artists Since 1955’, contained examples from Daniel Spoerri’s Material (1957–59) and Edgardo Vigo’s Diagonal Zero (1962– 68), both of which use the typewriter to explore the visual and concrete poetry of the page in different ways. Direct links can also be seen between the Themersons’ image-and-text collaborations and the work of Philippa Wood (see p. 96). Her

collaboration with fellow British illustrator Tamar MacLellan – Personal Spaces 2 – The Desk (2006) – ‘demonstrates the importance of the domestic and familiar object in our working lives, creating a “home from home” in which a sense of self permeates professional space.’ Each book in the edition of 30 was hand-typed by Wood and then passed on to MacLellan to illustrate. The entire edition is unique, partly by design and partly by accident. Similar themes can be seen in The Last (2008), where the typewritten texts are an understated counterpoint to the drama of the wood type. Wood then built on this method in a collaboration with Angie Butler from Pet Galerie Press – Open House (2012) – which again combines the irregularity and accidental beauty of hand-typed texts with beautifully crafted fine letterpress prints.

Stefan and Franciszka Themerson Pages from Semantic Divertissements (Gabberbochus Press, London, 1962). : Avant-garde film-makers, publishers, poets, artists, illustrators, theatre designers, writers and book designers, the Themersons ran the Gaberbocchus Press, a publishing house that Stefan Themerson famously said published ‘best lookers, not best sellers’. Their work was considerably

ahead of its time and therefore not always given the credit it deserved. Their publications vary widely in format, but they always experiment with the relationship between text and image.

Joanna Gibbs Pages from Leaf Watermarks (2008). : A maker of mixed-media artists’ books, Gibbs uses various methods to produce her work, including embroidery, linocut, etching, digital photography and typewriter texts. The themes for her work are often drawn from the mythology of British fairytale lore.

The typewriter can also be used effectively to create a strong sense of place. René Fauconnet’s satirical story RF 22.301 (1961) creates a typographic Parisian landscape in a way that is then echoed in Lucy May Schofield’s more recent A Fair Place to Live (2010–11, see opposite),

which has its geographic roots, and its heart, in the Yorkshire town of Hebden Bridge.

Lucy May Schofield A Fair Place to Live (2010–11). : ‘Trained originally as a printmaker, but born a collector of moments’, Schofield documents the unspoken, the overlooked, our sense of place and the physical and emotional worlds we inhabit. In studying formal bookmaking, she discovered the satisfaction of the handmade and handcrafted, and she often uses typewriters, letterpress, watercolour, silk-screen printing, photocopiers, foil blocking and found objects in her work. Schofield runs creative typewriting workshops and is the curator of BABL (the Bibliotherapy Artists’ Book Library), a touring, mobile library with more than 200 artists’ books in its collection.

Philippa Wood & Tamar MacLellan Personal Spaces 2 – The Desk (2006). : Often inspired by the minutiae of everyday life, such as conversations between friends, hopes and dreams, our relationship with our sense of place or the role of women in the home, Wood makes beautifully crafted artists’ books, often using very immediate processes – typewriting, letterpress, sewing and rubber stamping. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, and her books are held within various permanent collections, including that of the Klingspor-Museum Offenbach, Germany. She is co-founder of the Caseroom Press. A maker of artists’ and altered books, as well as an illustrator, lecturer, textile and surface pattern designer, MacLellan often collaborates with Wood. Sometimes MacLellan illustrates responses to Wood’s texts; in other collaborations, the drawings lead the design and typography.

Artists are now finding yet more ways of using the format of the book. Nadine Faye James’s Typewritten Portraits (2007, see opposite), produced as part of the Bristol Artists Book Event, explores the nature of portraiture

with a series of delightful images – more so for the fact that their individuality is realized through such a limited method and format. British designer Jo Mansfield’s Nothing (2008, see p. 98) was inspired by her own childhood response to her mother’s question, ‘What are you doing?’ Although her answer was always ‘nothing!’, it always meant she was doing something. The book is a witty collection of ‘nothings’, including a list of those at school whose love affairs came to nothing, and the many shopping trips that have produced a wardrobe full of clothes, yet nothing to wear. A great many artists and poets have also used the typewriter to create kinetic texts, wherein ‘kinetic’ refers to a sequence of linked pages, rather than the animated typography that ‘kinetic type’ now brings up in a Google search. While researching and writing this book, many single pieces that I have known from various books on typewriter art and concrete poetry have, after further investigation, turned out to be pages drawn from a larger text. Some, such as Paul Dutton’s The Plastic Typewriter (1977, see p. 100), really need to be seen in their entirety to be fully appreciated, and the selections here can obviously only hint at the physical experience of having the object in front of you. The making of a book – its nature, the paper stock, the size and shape of it – are all as important as the initial decision to make a mark on paper with a typewriter. Canadian poet and novelist Dutton has been ‘drawing with the alphabet’ since the 1970s, using the typewriter as an ‘anti-writing writing machine’.

Nadine Faye James Selection from Typewritten Portraits (2007). : A British illustrator, James produces work in a variety of mediums, including pen and ink, photocopies, Omnicrom, letterpress, Letraset, typewriters and the occasional screenprint. Her witty and economical type portraits connect her with the earliest typewriter artists and the work they produced over a hundred years ago.

Jo Mansfield Pages from Nothing (2008). : Mansfield’s interest in word and text art came from the love of Letraset dry transfer lettering, a process she discovered as a teenager. After finding a typewriter in a charity shop for £10, she became fascinated with the machine, finding a soulmate in something that was as temperamental as she was. Nothing was Mansfield’s final project while a graphic design student – it was shortlisted for Best Student Book at the 2008 British Book Design and Production Awards.

Andrew Belsey and keitharmstrong (see pp. 72, 54), who were both involved in the typewriter art movements of the 1960s and 1970s, have noted that a great many works tended to appear in small-press editions that were never part of the mainstream canon and therefore only exist today in private collections.

Stephanie Black Page from Little Lady Sadie, the Fixer of Broken Things (2008), extract from the short story of the same name by Bonita Monsiegneur. : An illustrator who studied at the Glasgow School of Art, Black collaborated with Edinburghbased writer Bonita Monsiegneur on this project. The book was ‘drawn with light’, by obscuring and revealing the glass plate on a photocopier to copy the void above the plate and create dense images that reflect the narrative’s use of shadow as a metaphor. The book was created with low-

tech methods and materials: drawing, scissors, glue and a typewriter; the final artwork was compiled on a photocopier.

By their own admission, their own work was published in ‘obscure journals and magazines’ – poetry and visual art magazines or fanzines that were produced cheaply and disseminated to small groups of interested artists. For example, The Informer – the magazine edited by Armstrong and David Gill and published between 1966 and 1971 – is in the collection of the British Library, but this and other such publications have yet to gain wider exposure. However, with the efforts of enthusiasts such as the Canadian poet Derek Beaulieu (see p. 158), who is currently archiving a great many examples of typewriter/visual poetry on UbuWeb, this situation will hopefully change.

Paul Dutton The Plastic Typewriter, 2; The Plastic Typewriter, 4; The Plastic Typewriter, 7; The Plastic Typewriter, 8 (1977). : A poet, fiction writer, essayist and musician, Dutton practises a multisensory, interarts approach to language. He was a member of the legendary sound-poetry group the Four Horsemen (along with Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Steve McCaffery and bpNichol [see pp. 61, 79]) and since the late 1980s has been part of the free-improvisation trio CCMC. He is one of the leading exponents of oral sound art, using voice and non-vocal oralization as the most astonishingly versatile of instruments. His typewriter pieces – visual poems – are a convergence of the act of typing and of creating images and marks with the machine and its carbon accessories.

Paul Dutton The Plastic Typewriter, 13; The Plastic Typewriter, 17 (1977). :

Paul Dutton Mondriaan Boogie Woogie, 1 through 6 (c. 1976).

Willem Boshoff Vlaggies and Getikte Kwashale, part of a series from KykAfrikaans (1980). : Boshoff, perhaps inspired by his father’s training as a carpenter, decided to become a sculptor at the age of 15, although he did not exhibit his work in a public gallery until he was 30. He is an internationally recognized fine artist and teacher, whose concrete poetry series KykAfrikaans is

an extraordinary piece of work that uses the typewriter as a writing tool, a drawing tool and a brush.

04 CONTEMPORARY WORKS Between poetry and painting The typewriter is a printing press. But working with the platen of a typewriter does not feature in any book on printmaking methods, even though such books offer an overview of everything from the immediacy of mono printing and rubber stamping, to the traditional fine-art processes of etching or engraving, to the reinvention of once commercial processes such as letterpress and screenprinting.

Nico Vassilakis i poem (2005). — Usually a maker of complex multilayered and colourful visual poetry, which brings concrete poetry unmistakably and dramatically into the twenty-first century, Vassilakis’s typewriter pieces, although retaining a sense of movement and exploration of space, are very understated in comparison to these other works – and perhaps are more directly related to the historical canon of visual/word art. He recently edited The Last Vispo Anthology: Visual Poetry 1998–2008 (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2012).

Nigel Shaw Ancient Dreams I (2012). — Shaw is a painter who also works as a ‘word artist’. His written pieces are based on personal memory, dream diaries and the recollection of events. The emerging texts are typed, printed and often shredded, being presented in frames, jars or plastic bags. The ‘dream diary’ texts are typed one word at a time, the paper reinserted after each typing. The randomness of the word placement reflects the randomness of dreaming, while the remaining white space of the page represents the vast amount of unrecollected dream activity.

Christian Bök The Experimental Prototype for the Word (1995). — Bök is the author of Eunoia (2001), a best-selling work of experimental literature that won the Griffin Poetry Prize. He teaches English at the University of Calgary in Canada. The Experimental Prototype for the Word is an early piece of visual poetry, composed entirely on an electric typewriter. The image evokes the appearance of a microchip at the moment in history when computers began to replace the typewriter as the primary machine for writing.

Why is this? It may be that the notion of the typewriter as a tool for writing means that its potential to produce visual artworks in their own right is rarely considered, or perhaps it is to do with the typewriter’s place in our emotional life. Someone may wax lyrical about their new mobile phone or their new car, but somehow the typewriter has been denied this level of emotional justification or connection, despite its previous ubiquity and value. As a printing press, the typewriter is limited in the stock it can carry, too, both in size and weight of papers. It produces a single print, not an edition, unless carbon papers are used. There is also nothing of the fineart method of manufacture – the choice of inks, Arches papers, the paraphernalia of the press … Or perhaps it has to do with the machine’s comparatively recent invention and sudden obsolescence. Contemporary artists who opt to use a typewriter are making a very different decision to their predecessors. Historically, the typewriter was a sensible and obvious choice – it provided a method of producing cheap artworks that did not rely on the poet or artist distilling their vision through a third party, be that a printer or a designer. Colour printing was expensive and used quite sparingly right through until the 1980s (especially in the UK; America was a different story), so black-and-white reproductions of artworks were quite common. Now, however, the Macintosh, the Adobe Creative Suite and an inkjet printer offer far more opportunities for experimentation and creativity (plus that essential ‘undo’ function) than a typewriter ever could. So why are so many artists still drawn to this most regimented of mediums?

Vickie Simpson The Pattern Series (2012). — Simpson investigates the aesthetics of the handmade. For her, inspiration cannot be found on a screen but only in the physical exploration and making of tactile forms. The Pattern Series asks the viewer to consider the physicality of manual mark-making in our increasingly digitized world.

One aspect is the feel of the keys and the qualities produced – there is an almost infinite variation in the way a key hits the paper. Each typewriter is different, each ribbon changes the impression and each touch of the finger on the keys will alter the weight of that strike and produce a mark all its own. Even the repeated use of the same key on a manual typewriter will produce a variation in tone and weight, an effect that is difficult to replicate with later, ‘improved’, machines. In fact some of the older machines have features we would consider innovative even now – type wheels that contain different fonts, type carriages that can be swiftly removed and replaced to give a wide variety of type choices. Early machines from the 1900s have selections that include small, medium and large roman, italic, law italic (a ‘backwards’ sloping italic), script continuous, Gothic (a lovely sans) and Attic (a very Victorian decorative capital). Later advancements, such as the ‘golf ball’, a round interchangeable typehead, and the ‘daisy wheel’, a flat disc with the characters set around the rim, also allowed for different fonts, with varying point sizes, the use of bold characters, ‘invisible’ corrections and, most importantly of all, proportional (rather than mono-spaced) fonts. However, in the drive to improve upon the technology and move from the manual to the power- driven, many of these early innovations were forgotten and something of the personality of the machines was discarded. The original electric typewriters were basically manual models with a motor in them, the carriage-return arm being replaced by the now familiar Return key. Their action was faster and, more importantly, the strike was even, which compensated for the varying abilities of different typists. Eventually, of course, the desktop-publishing revolution of the 1980s changed all the rules and the development and sales of, and reliance on, the typewriter came to a sudden end.

Rachel Barron Typographic Studies (2011). — A Glasgow-born fine artist, whose work explores an incredibly precise sense of placement for images and text, Barron is inspired by the mechanical rigour of the typewriter – so much so that she has invented her own printmaking device. Using an inbuilt grid system to plot geometrical patterns, it allows for the exact positioning of every printed mark.

Jonathan Brannen From Nothing Doing Never Again, ed. Craig Hill (Score Press, 1995). Again section first appeared as a single artist’s issue of The Metal Farm, no. 8, ed. Daniel F. Bradley. — Nothing Doing Never Again is a series of pattern poems, which create half-hidden images within repeated words and texts – a form that seems to visually reference the way the ear might create imaginary words from repeated sounds. In an insightful review of Brannen’s work, Bob Grumman described the artist as ‘the master of not doing nothing’ (Tap Root, no. 6, Burning Press, 1995).

Another significant difference between artists who worked with typewriters prior to the 1980s and those who choose to use a typewriter

today is the relationship that exists between owner and machine. Earlier artists probably worked on a single machine that they had access to at work (a fairly limited resource, and one that depended upon their employer and not their needs as an artist) or one that they had bought, which, as there was no culture of upgrading, might well last a lifetime. Obsolescence was not built in. I have used a series of Macs that have run out of processing power, run out of upgrades, blown their power supplies, or just refused to turn on anymore. My 1934 Underwood, however, always starts first time. Modern typewriter artists, on the other hand, will more than likely have a collection of different models, perhaps sourced from junkshops or attics. This in turn creates a different relationship with the process of ‘art-typing’ – a unique connection that is perhaps what has given artists such as Dom Sylvester Houédard (see p. 52) such mastery over their medium. His use of a particular machine was well documented: my own typestracts (so named by edwin morgan) are all produced on a portable olivetti lettera 22 (olivetti himself/themselves show sofar a total non interest in this fact) . there are 86 typeunits available on my machine for use w/2-colour or no ribbon - or with carbons of various colours - the maximum size surface w/out folding is abt 10" diagonal the ribbons may be of various ages - several ribbons may be used on a single typestract inked-ribbon & manifold(carbon) can be combined on the same typestract - pressures may be varied - overprints & semioverprints (½ back or ½ forward) are available - stencils may be cut & masks used - precise placing of the typestract units is possible thru spacebar & ratchet-roller - or roller may be disengaged &/or spacecontrol disengaged…

Jorn Ebner Printer Drawing 01 (1996). —

Jorn Ebner Printer Drawing 02 (1996). — Ebner studied English literature in Hamburg before taking the Critical Fine Art Practice course at Central Saint Martins in London. He has contributed to a number of Alec Finley’s artists’ book projects and began his typewriter drawings as experiments in overlaid texts and patterns. These later developed into his Printer Drawings, which used digital technologies. Ebner has a love- hate relationship with technology; in January 2013, he began a year-long project – a one-minute drawing a day – entitled I’ve had enough of the digital world.

Having more than one machine allows a variety of techniques and typefaces to be employed; there is a noticeable difference between the xheight of the Olivetti to that of the Remington Rand. Different machines can also have different coloured ribbons already installed and ready to go, and each machine will have its own personality and imprint upon the page. However, although second-hand typewriters may still be found, they are rapidly moving up into the vintage category – a machine that once cost £2.50 will now cost £45 or more – so a contemporary artist’s collection may be limited for financial reasons. Of course, there is also the desire to rescue these machines from neglect, which may be more significant than the desire to use them as

artistic tools. And there is always that nagging hope that this next machine will be the perfect one – the one that will allow you to make the work you always knew you were capable of… Modern artworks are divided into those that use the typewriter as a physical record of the printmaking process – an end in itself, with no edits, alterations, additions – and those that use it as a complement to other processes, which may involve scanning, editing and adding another layer of ‘digital reality’ to the work. This is not a new development. The concrete poetry book Carnival (1967–75; see p. 61), by the Canadian poet Steve McCaffery, used a photocopier, rubber-stamped letterforms and collage techniques such as masking areas of the print to create shaped areas. (By the time the typewriter had started to become obsolete, dry transfer lettering was a part of the daily visual toolbox of designers and artists, and the readily available photocopier had opened up a huge range of graphic possibilities.)

Kasper Pincis

Footnote 1 (2012). —

Kasper Pincis Wave Experiment 1 (2012). — Pincis’s interest in the typewriter as a creative medium was partly inspired by a comment made by Truman Capote about the Beat writers, in particular Jack Kerouac: ‘It isn’t writing at all – it’s typing’. Pincis became intrigued by typing ‘as a separate medium in and of itself’. His first experiments were figurative, with later pieces turning to abstraction and playing with the resulting ‘happy accidents’ of interference patterns, when solid blocks of text overlap each other.

Paula Claire From Poem Project 620, Echo Chamber, ‘seequence of 6’ (1992; artist’s book, 2002), Catalogue 3: GOING FOR GOLD Part Two, Poems 2001–2011, PCA SVP 44 (Oxford, 2012). —

Paula Claire WEAVE/WOVEN from Poem 477, Balancing Act, ‘seequence of 8’ (1995– 96), Catalogue 2: DIVERS-ITY, Extending the Forms of Poetry, Poems 1991–2001, ISVPA 37 (Oxford, 2001). —

Paula Claire From Poem 438, Animated, ‘seequence of 20’ (1993), limited edition print. — A British sound and visual poet, Claire’s ‘typewriter text-ile seequences’ are shaped or pattern pieces exploring densities of text overlay. They are stereoscopic when viewed from a critical distance, simultaneously poems and scores for group improvisation by Claire with ‘all present’ – recorded with music and electronics. She has exhibited, performed and collaborated internationally throughout her 52-year career, notably with Bob Cobbing (see p. 34), and treasures two readings with Dom Sylvester Houédard (see p. 52). She is currently cataloguing the Paula Claire Archive of Sound and Visual Poetry, a major resource of around 5,000 items, an exchange of work with innovative fellow poets worldwide.

For Barbara Clayton, like many of her contemporaries, the interest is in ‘the process and impact of mark making’. When she works, Clayton often

allows ‘the process to occur at a subconscious level with no design at the outset. Repetition of the mark-making leads to emergent forms which influence and guide later stages of the work but the outcome is largely a reflection of an inner state.’ For her, mark-making is not limited to one medium but achieved with various tools, including pen and ink, typewriters and word- processing programs. British designer and educator Christopher Skinner uses the typewriter as a tool in web-design workshops, as a way of getting screen-based designers to look beyond Google. He feels that the resonance of these machines is clearly still as strong as ever. As typewriters have passed into the annals of obsolete office equipment and acquired collectable and curio status it would be acceptable to think that the old technology is no longer relevant. It has become a normal part of the transition process that the newer technologies will strive to emulate those unique details that are more often than not lacking in their more efficient and multi-functional successors; the myriad of digital ‘typewriter’ fonts that continue to become available is testimony to this, as is the enduring ‘photocopy’ filter in Photoshop, which creates the effect of the process as it was about twenty years ago that cannot be achieved on … modern [machines]. Although the technology has moved on considerably, the mechanical typewriter’s legacy exerts itself in every computer keyboard that has replaced it.

Lee Etheredge IV continuous prime shifting live die (2010). — This drawing comes from a series based on synonyms and antonyms. The work references Etheredge’s interest in music, science and mathematics, as well as minimalism and process art, and his fascination with wordplay and language.

Hartmut Andryczuk Three Works for ‘Monologe nach dem Neolithikum’ (1994). — A German artist, author and publisher, Andryczuk began his literary career performing with the group Solypse – Charmante Schamanen. In the early 1990s he founded the publishing house Hybriden-Verlag, an international forum for artists’ books. He continues to collaborate with authors, musicians, film-makers and other artists. The pieces shown here have handwritten as well as typewritten elements.

Henri Chopin Si? (Typewritten Poems) (September 1983). —

Henri Chopin Sculpture abstraite (Typewritten Poems) (September 1987).

This sense of the immediacy of the process does have a resonance amongst all the artists in this book. As British graphic designer and educator Simon Gomes says, ‘I love the serendipitous hit and miss of the letters on paper … I like the idea of kissing the paper lightly, or metaphorically hitting it with a hammer – an unpredictability not afforded by digital devices.’

Whereas most of the contributors to this book are poets, or artists working with typewriters alongside other technologies and mediums, the British artist Keira Rathbone (see p. 140) is unique in describing herself as a ‘typewriter artist’. Her dedication to this one method of working is to her credit, and her most recent pieces – live drawings of musicians performing at gigs and festivals – are taking her work into very exciting, very abstract places, which connect directly with the original, experimental and pioneering works of Flora Stacey and H. N. Werkman all those years ago (see pp. 23, 27). As mentioned in Chapter 1, typewriter art can face a challenge when it comes to longevity. Ingo Gerken, in an essay on the work of German typewriter artist Dirk Krecker (see p. 126), noted that there is a ‘dissonance between the power of the images and the fragility of the document itself ’. The more dramatic the work produced, the more physical the interaction with the page has to be, and the more an image is worked into, the more fragile it becomes as the keystrokes wear away the paper. The work of New Yorker Allyson Strafella (see p. 150), for example, is all the more beautiful for its fragility, the feeling that it could disappear under the pressure of one’s gaze.

Henri Chopin La Crevette Amoureuse (1967–75). — Chopin was a truly unique sound poet who pioneered the use of the throat microphone and recorded the smallest of sounds, including the vibrations of his nasal hair. His work was driven by his experiences of a Nazi death march during World War II, surrounded by the noises and voices of the people he marched with. He was an especially active figure in the arts, working as a writer, editor, artist, designer, typographer, film-maker, broadcaster and publisher; he founded the reviews Cinquième Saison and OU. His typewriter pieces – ‘dactylopoèmes’ – are incredibly sophisticated examples of the genre and often rely on the repetition of marks and patterns. They include collaged elements, handwriting and an exceptionally beautiful colour palette.

jw curry Aillusion #5 (c. 1982–83, revised 1985). —

jw curry HASHASH (c. 1986–87, revised 1991). —

A writer, photographer, performer, publisher, printer, bookseller (Room 3o2 Books) and general cultural factotum, curry was introduced to the work of bpNichol (see p. 79), and in particular his magazine grOnk, at the age of thirteen. Curry was deeply inspired by both the wildly varied content and forms of the magazine, leading him to begin his own imprint, Curvd H&z (among others that would follow), reprinting some of the early Ganglia Press publications along the way. Curry’s own work has embraced many forms, among which collage, drawing, typewriter and serigraphy figure prominently. Over the last several years, he has been obsessed with what he calls ‘urban printing’ and is currently editing and printing an anthology of Canadian concrete poetry, primarily on concrete walls in and around Ottawa.

Travis J Wyche Study for Semiotic Vase (2010). — A deconstructive visual artist, radical poet, experimental musician and revolutionary cultural pseudo-theorist, Wyche is ‘obsessed with the preposterousness of nothing, the terminal

abstraction of everything, and the uninhabitable desert of the neutral’. His work is driven by the desire to relinquish the need for art to communicate something, and instead ‘explores the possibility of not communicating, meaning, or understanding anything.’

As concrete poetry reached its height, Scotland found itself, rather to its surprise, to be a major part of this international movement. Similarly today, Canada has become a hive of activity regarding word art and concrete poetry – some of the most vibrant work in the world is currently being produced there. Typewriter art has also been selected for the UK’s Jerwood Drawing Prize exhibition: London-based Kasper Pincis’s (see p. 115)

Linda Zacks traffic (2007). — Linda Zacks bloat (2008).

— A visual storyteller, Zacks finds inspiration in the city around her, using a wide range of media that are nearly always connected with words and texts. Her 1945 Remington DeLuxe typewriter plays an important role in her work and life, her husband having proposed to her with it.

…As if you could kill time without injuring eternity, included in the 2012 exhibition, is a typewriter ‘drawing’ composed of 135,000 full stops on a folded sheet of newsprint. Yet, for all this progress, there is something wonderful about the fact that as you type away, your world reduced to you and that single sheet of paper, you really are still part of a very small and select club. The work in this book shows such a range of invention, application and (in the best sense) obsession that it is hard not to agree with British design critic Rick Poynor’s comment about the artists’ book A Poem to Philip Glass: ‘In the fine tradition of these things, it’s also a little bit mad’. Perhaps there is a wonderful insanity in the desire of so many people to make such a great range of art from such a stubbornly uncompromising machine. If so, long may the typewriter keep inspiring us to make such madness.

INTERVIEW

= Dirk Krecker (Translated from German by Claudia Liefeld) Krecker is a Frankfurt-based German sculptor and fine artist whose work revolves around extremely involved text/ typewritten pieces that create visually dense structures, which in turn reveal glimpses of imagery within the layering and weaving of type. The information-rich imagery is a product for our times and the machines that are used to create it, an anachronism.

Dirk Krecker Bbbbörsen, Bbbbanken, Einkaufszzzzzentren (‘Exxxxxchnge, Bbbbbnks, ShpppingMmmlls’) (2008). =

Dirk Krecker I’m Not a Pirate – I’m a Fisherman (2011).

You’ve been described as a ‘romantic futurist’, a ‘retro-pioneer’ and a ‘techno-dandy’. How would you describe yourself, as your work covers such a range of media and outputs? = Analogue-digital. 01000001. Our declarations of love rush via email in real time around the globe. We experience the tremendous acceleration of our society with all the shiftings that are caused by this process. The

existential proportions of space, movement and time change so drastically, like never before. And this process is not over yet. This is the world in which I’m moving, which is moving around me. This is the perspective from which I tell. Names should always have resonance, but they are given by others. How did your career develop? How did you become fascinated with typewriters? Were you drawn to them the first time you used one, or was it a gradual process? A happy accident? = I discovered the typewriter during my studies at art school. Early in the 1990s I took a class in conceptual drawing with Prof. Manfred Stumpf. All around us, analogue rooms had been filled with computers: Photoshop instead of the photo lab, Avid instead of Steenbeck. We tried our hands at the machines in order to see how they could be used for our projects. The most thrilling were the expensive Silicone Graphics computers running Softimage. But the program was so complex that I couldn’t integrate it into the development of my artistic project. So I continued to look for adequate ways to relate drawing to what was happening around me. Before creating my first typewriter drawings, I made a series of expressive hand drawings in reaction to the German government’s resolution to buy 180 Eurofighter jets. The theme was OK, but the drawings didn’t work as I’d hoped: they seemed to say, ‘Caution! Important! Art!’ They were snotty, but in a way this fusty academic air stuck to them. They contained too little of anything that corresponded with our lives – being angry, restlessly roaming the city, techno and drum ’n’ bass at illegal parties. I worked mostly in my small attic room, and among all kinds of finds from the flea market, waiting to be used, there was an old typewriter. I knew only a little about typewriter art. That was good. I tried to punch out a Eurofighter on paper using the full-stop key. And it worked; it came out really well. The result was not so far from a computer printout. The marks of the outdated machine played well with the modern image. And I could concentrate on creating pictures; I didn’t need to learn a program, didn’t need to write a script. That was it.

Dirk Krecker Bubble (2008). =

Dirk Krecker Luftlandeübung auf den türmen der Deutschenbank (‘Airborne Exercise on the Towers of the Deutsche Bank’) (2008). =

Dirk Krecker No title (Face) (2005).

Were you part of a group of artists who used typewriters, or were you essentially working alone? = During our studies we all had chosen different ways to draw, install, film, paint and build. We were interested in each other in terms of the position from which our work was created. How you locate yourself in society, how you manifest, reproduce – it is these positions that link people over time, space, material and procedure. It becomes interesting when you can communicate beyond the group that surrounds you, explore similiarity and dissent, learning from each other. No one except me was working with a typewriter. But I was never alone. Complicity

needs movement, concealment, concentrated instantaneity, an awareness of the past while creating the future. Your work is richly layered. Do you use a number of typewriters with a number of different ribbons to achieve the effects you need? = Today I have a studio with about ten machines. Some of them can handle bigger formats. Others are equipped with different colour ink ribbons. As for bigger productions, I work on several machines in parallel. The catalogue works look to be excerpts from larger pieces. Do you tile pieces together or do you work on a large-format machine? = The works in the Echo Oldschool book are all printed in their original format. The larger works came afterwards and are indeed typewritten on different sheets then put together later on. The cutting points between the sheets are incredibly important to the development process. Even if the image is to be continued on the next sheet, the disruption of the continuity of the drawing offers the possibility for change, for something new. Continuity and change, like in a good piece of music.

Is there a typewriter model of your dreams that you hope to find in a second-hand shop? = I am neither an analogue nostalgic nor a design addict. I am interested in the possibilities of a machine, not in ownership or possession itself. I get myself a new machine when there is a reason for it. For example, at a flea market some time ago I bought an old typewriter that had huge ‘Rheinmetall’ [a large European defence contractor] lettering on it. In the past, typewriters were often developed and produced by arms manufacturers. Digitalization and militarism play a major recurring role in my work, so acquiring that particular typewriter seemed appropriate. But I admit that I have not yet found a meaningful use for it.

When you are working on sculptural pieces, do you think differently than you do when working with a typewriter? = I come from drawing, but I have departed from the world of traditional drawing. This self-concept, along with my interest in exploring space, is very important to me. All the rest develops along with each particular question and the material. If I work on paper, I don’t need to worry about gravity. This is an enormous relief. Your typewriter pieces isolate elements of written language to produce ‘coded’ visual imagery. Do you ever use complete ‘written’ texts in your work? = In the fabric of a picture I braid fragments of articles, music tracks, documentaries, podcasts, etc. They circle around a range of topics that are connected with the theme of the picture. But the text must not in any way explain the picture; nor should the picture be an illustration of the text. It is about the creation of simultaneity. Out of the interaction, a new source code will be created.

Kasha Dunne From Eye Spy (2003). — Dunne’s work was produced in response to a student competition brief while she was studying graphic design at the Lincoln School of Art and Design. The project brief, set by the International Society of Typographic Designers, was ‘Surveillance’, and Dunne’s response used the typewriter as a reference to George Orwell’s 1984. It is a hugely ambitious work, and a one-off – she has not made another piece of typewriter art. The work was produced as a series of long panels, made on a machine with an oversized platen.

Eduardo Kac Self-portrait (1981). —

Eduardo Kac Untitled II (1982). — A pioneer of telepresence (the technologies that allow someone to feel or appear as if they were present at a different location than they really are) as well as bio and transgenic art (utilizing genetic technology), Kac began to experiment with digital futures in the early 1980s. In 1982 he

created his first digital work, and in 1985 he began to explore the possibilities of the online environment. His transgenic work began with the creation of an ‘artist’s gene’ (Genesis, 1999) and continued with his fluorescent rabbit Alba (GFP Bunny, 2000). Kac’s work has been exhibited internationally and has appeared in numerous magazines. His typewriter pieces are all the more exceptional for being so at odds with the majority of his artistic practice.

Leslie Nichols Looking Forward (2010). —

Leslie Nichols Typeface (2004).

— Trained as a traditional painter, Nichols now combines texts with images to create mixed-media landscapes and portraits. Her typewriter text portraits are driven by a desire to understand different facets of women’s rights and identity as well as her place, and sense of womanhood, in her own community. Nichols creates large-scale text pieces with hand-stamped oil-based inks and stencilled graphite; smaller, more intimate pieces are produced entirely with a manual typewriter.

Marianne Holm Hansen Typing (not writing) (2012). — Hansen works across many different media, including traditional processes such as drawing, photography, moving image and writing, as well as new and emerging technologies. This range of skills requires a singular mind, and her typewriter pieces seem to embody this clarity of thought.

Anatol Knotek Inverse (2013). —

Anatol Knotek Censored (2013). —

Anatol Knotek Kissing (2013). — Knotek, an Austrian artist, visual and concrete poet, made a conscious decision to purchase and use a typewriter (originally a Seidel & Naumann 5Tab, now an Adler Triumph Gabriele 10) rather than a computer to produce word and text art, in order to experience the methods explored by the concrete poets of the 1950s and 1960s. The ‘aura’ of the works produced with this very physical and constrained process is integral to the transformation of his ideas into art.

Bill Bissett the futur uv salmon is us, from scars on th seehors (Talonbooks, 1999). —

Bill Bissett th kaptin sd he was mercurial, from scars on th seehors (Talonbooks, 1999). —

Bill Bissett hopra return to merlinonda amethyst voices, from scars on th seehors (Talonbooks, 1999). — Paula Claire (see p. 116) referred to the work of Toronto artist Bissett, one of the most prolific of all the sound and visual performance poets, as ‘a cosmic statement’. Bissett’s writing is freeflowing, reflecting his shamanistic nature and desire to be free of behavioural and role repressions. In 1964 he started the blewointmentpress. His two novels, novel and hungree throat,

were both recently published by Talonbooks, and he is now working on Earth Project, a book of concrete, visual and text/letter poems.

INTERVIEW

= Keira Rathbone A London-based fine artist, Rathbone uses the typewriter as the starting point for her practice, ‘typing from life in order to capture the essence of a scene’. Over the last ten years, her work has developed from quite formal studies to a much more immediate response to situations and environments, which show a control of the medium as immersive as that of the more ‘mathematical’ spacial artworks of practitioners such as Dom Sylvester Houédard or keitharmstrong. You have the most wonderful job description: ‘typewriter artist’. How did you go from being an art student to a typewriter artist? = Becoming an artist wasn’t really a transition that happened to me after university, but instead it was during. As I started to get out and exhibit, attract attention and, most importantly, make loads of business cards in my third year, I was promoting myself as a typewriter artist. I never abandoned my other techniques of drawing and painting, but typewriter art became my main focus from about 2003. Do you still work with other mediums or is your practice solely driven by the typewriter? = Definitely driven by the typewriter! It has got me further in terms of a practice that I could concentrate on enough to develop into my specialism. But I still regularly sketch on paper with my Rotring pencil, and make patterns with pen and ink from some of the drawings. And occasionally I am drawn back to painting, which I love. Were you aware of other typewriter artists when you started? If you were, has their work informed or influenced you at all, or have you

become more aware of other artists as your work has developed? = I wasn’t aware of typewriter art except when I started to develop it quietly in my room, blindly thinking ‘everyone must do this’. When, at university, I was asked to contextualize my practice and find others doing something similar, I was stuck and realized it was quite a niche area of practice. I found one book, Typewriter Art by Alan Riddell (see p. 47), but that was published in the 1970s, and similar examples on the internet after extensive searches, but still there was nothing exactly in my style, and nothing contemporary. I was aware of concrete poetry but never properly associated it with typewriters; plus, words have never been my concern in my typewriter art as they are in concrete poetry.

Keira Rathbone Cover artwork for Malcolm Middleton’s album Waxing Gibbous (2009).

Keira Rathbone Barcelona Love Letters (2012).

Keira Rathbone Old Brighton Pier (view from recycling bin) (2012).

What draws you to such a ‘restricted’ medium? Is that the right word, or should it be ‘specialist’, ‘liberating’, ‘mechanical’? = ‘Restricted’ is the perfect word. I love having restrictions as they breed creativity – overcoming being told you can’t, but quietly doing it anyway. Scaling up my works means using multiple sheets. Representing the tone or shape I want from a limited set of marks means getting creative and disassociating myself completely from their meanings. What scale do you normally work to? Does it depend on the subject matter? How big is your biggest piece? = I generally work on paper that is A4-width (29.7 cm / 8¼ in), but approximately 57 cm (22½ in) high. I could go longer, infinitely longer, but the paper I love to type on best can be cut down into three pieces of this format. I like to scale up two or three of these when I type a landscape. My biggest piece – a 180-degree panoramic study of my old back garden in Bristol – is six A4 (8¼ x 11¾ in) pages side by side. Your earlier pieces are often quite direct representational ‘drawings’, while the more recent pieces have an expressionistic feel. Is this a conscious decision or one that has developed as your relationship with typewriters has grown? = Yes, absolutely. As I progressed and typing became increasingly natural to me, so I delved further into my own areas of interest, as opposed to just experimenting with what subjects I could type. I am much more focused now. I love to type architecture, especially bridges and piers, and eyes representationally, and moving subjects, such as bands playing live, are my more abstract pieces of late. I am interested in being more expressive so that there is more left to the viewer’s imagination. I like to type something representationally but leave some of the typing unfinished so that the eye is drawn to individual marks – to encourage viewing from different perspectives.

Is the performance element to your work (drawing on stage, etc.) something you’ve always been interested in? = I never set out to be a performance artist, but I realized that the simple act of typing, when done in public, becomes a performance whether you like it or not. When I started typing in public was when I realized how unique my chosen practice really was, and the reactions I got caused my performance to evolve over the years. Since moving to London I have had even more ideas for where I want to take it – I and an old friend of mine who does VJing have just put in a proposal for a live audio/visual amplified and distorted typing performance including cameras and projections, for example. Do you modify your typewriters at all? = No Do you have a favourite machine? = I have one favourite for in studio/special performances and another favourite for bog-standard mobile typing. Is there anything I should have asked but forgot to? = Yes, you were going to ask me if there was anything you could do to help me get to certain far-off places to acquire new typewriters containing alphabets unknown to me, with which to type my experiences of people and places.

Keira Rathbone Typing Barnes Bridge from the foot of the stairs (Chiswick side, of course (April 2013). =

Keira Rathbone My Old Back Yard (4 Clift House Road, Bristol) (2005).

Michael Crowe Typewriter Drawings (November 2012).

Lenka Clayton Typewriter Drawings (November 2012). — Michael Crowe (based in the UK) and Lenka Clayton (based in the USA) are conceptual artists, friends and occasional artistic collaborators, who are currently in the middle of a project to write a personal letter to every household in the world. Their month-long ‘daily drawing’ piece required them to draw with their typewriters something they had seen first-hand that day. The project is to be repeated every November.

Simon Cutts Ode for the Recovery of an Olympia Splendid Portable Typewriter (1995–2011). — A poet, artist, editor and publisher, Cutts founded Coracle Press in 1975 after working with other small presses throughout the 1960s, especially Tarasque Press in Nottingham, UK. His concrete poetry had led to an investigation into the structure of the book as a ‘physical metaphor for the poem itself’. Cutts’s use of the typewriter in his work is informed by its functionality as a device, as a process of reducing and editing from the notebook to final printing. It is one of many devices that he has used to produce work over the years.

W. Mark Sutherland Antiqwerty (1996–2009). — A Canadian intermedia artist, Sutherland’s work blurs the boundaries between performance art, music, poetry and visual art. The typewriter features in his work as both a counterpart to spoken pieces (where texts are typed and read aloud at the same time) and also as ‘noise instruments’, where microphones are attached to specific working parts of the machines. He says: ‘I’ve been creating/performing Antiqwerty since 1996; the image is always changing based on the performance … however, this image was created in a recording studio for the Sonotexts CD in 2009.’

Michelle Noel Untitled (photograms) (2007). — A response to a student project called I’ve got a brand new typewriter, Noel took her machine apart and re-assembled the pieces under enlargers in the darkrooms of the Lincoln School of Art, creating an entire alphabet from photograms.

Linda Hutchins Untitled (sorrow) with scroll boxes (2003). —

Linda Hutchins Reiteration (pay attention) with scroll box (2003). — Hutchins began her career as a computer engineer, writing software for Intel. As a fine artist, she has taken her engineering mindset, love of textiles and ‘memories of sailing out of sight of land’

to produce work that has been exhibited internationally and purchased by numerous private and public collections. For Hutchins, the use of the typewriter gives a specific voice, one that is different from her handwriting voice, her keyboarding voice or her drawing voice.

INTERVIEW

= Allyson Strafella A native of New York, Strafella began using the typewriter as a college student to process her thoughts without the pressure of having to follow any formal structures. The major shift in her work came about as a result of writer’s block. Unable to write, she hit a random key – the dash – repeatedly tapping until she had filled a page. This creation of a rhythm as part of a pattern of repeated keystokes informs much of Strafella’s work.

Allyson Strafella Detail of Crest (2011). =

Allyson Strafella Detail of Profile (2009). =

Allyson Strafella Outgrowth (2010).

Do you see yourself as a typewriter artist, or an artist who happens to use typewriters? = Definitely an artist who uses typewriters. My typewriter drawings are my foundation, but I make other things, objects which stem from the drawings. Do you still work with other mediums? I notice that on your website even your drawings are ‘typed’. = I do work with other mediums. Making objects has always come in and out of my work. Sometimes I cast things with plaster or Hydrocal. Most recently I have made papier mâché sculptures, which I do refer to as ‘drawings’– they just happen to be three-dimensional. I like how the papier mâché keeps in line with one of my primary materials – paper – and I love the inexpensive quality of the materials. I turn to these materials when I’m not able to successfully accomplish what I need to on the page with the typewriter. To me, most of my drawings with a typewriter are as close to sculpture as any two-dimensional thing could be, sometimes because of the form made, sometimes because of the way the paper gets pulverized and breaks down. Were you ever in contact with other typewriter artists, or part of a ‘typewriter group’? = I’ve never been part of a collective. I appreciate seeing what other artists are doing with the machine, but I have a tendency to move away from things that are too similar. For some, there is comfort in being amongst like-minded folks. For me, this is true to a point. I recently had work in a lovely group exhibition of works from a collector of drawings [‘Notations: Contemporary Drawing as Idea and Process’, 2012, Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri, USA]. The curator grouped the works in two different sections. My work was in a room with likeminded works. The other room had wonderful presentation drawings and proposals for sculptures and projects, both executed and not, by

artists such as Richard Serra, Carl Andre, Robert Smithson and the like. My room had people like Agnes Martin and Eva Hesse, who are excellent company, but I do see my work as a potential blueprint for something much larger. Or at times I see my drawings as objects in and of themselves. It’s obvious to put me with Agnes Martin not Robert Smithson – but not nearly as interesting, if you ask me!

Allyson Strafella Underbelly (2008).

Your early work is very different from the work you produce now. The earlier pieces seem to be responses to the restrictive grid of the machines, rather than the abstractions of your current work. = When I began using a typewriter I was interested in patterns, ideas that in my mind were more constructively minimalist and I loved the restrictions of the machine and the grid. I still do, as a matter of fact, but over time my interest in and knowledge of my tool developed deeply, and my understanding of what I can do with the tool led me away from the restricted grid. I still thrive on the limitations of the machine. I guess it’s like any relationship over time: you learn things and if it’s good you learn new things and build on the old. I think that’s

what I’m doing. My love for the typewriter is still there and I don’t feel I’ve done everything I can with it. Your typewriter is ‘altered’, both in the size of the carriage and the strike keys. How did the decision to make those changes come about? = Well, there was a time in my studio when I was thinking about expanding the drawing plane. My thought was to replicate the mechanical gesture of the typewriter and to embed marks directly into the wall using a screwdriver and hammer. I began thinking of other tools for making marks, and that led to inventing my own marks. The first step was using a magnifying glass to zoom in on an area of a drawing I had made to isolate marks. I like to think of this as excavating marks from my drawings to acquire new marks. So, I isolated 29 marks and had those made into metal stamps. I took my 29 marks to an incredible machinist and we worked on creating a custom typewriter. He cannibalized one of my Smith Coronas to build a machine with a carriage that is 36 inches (91.4 cm) long. I had my marks cast into bits, each mark in both outline and solid form – I was thinking about upper case and lower case. The bits replaced the typeface in the Smith Corona. Since I was keeping the scale of the mark the same, I was able to have two marks on each key – the solid form and outline form. The typewriter moves left to right and right to left. It’s quite a machine, for sure! I’m still learning how to use it, as it is very, very different from my regular Smith Coronas, which I still use.

Allyson Strafella Green Escarpment A (2007).

Allyson Strafella Green Escarpment (2007).

Rita Sobral Campos

A Shoemaker in a Small Little Village, from The Last Faust Myth in the History of Mankind (2009). — Originally from Portugal, Sobral Campos now lives and works in New York. A Shoemaker in a Small Little Village is part of the series The Last Faust Myth in the History of Mankind, a script narrating the odyssey of a series of characters with dubious relationships with reality, and the failed mischief of Mephistopheles. Despite the time lapses and geographic distances of the characters, they are able to interact via the classic science-fiction travel method – the teleporter. The piece comprises twenty-three prints of the script, along with a teleporter machine and its three platforms for receiving matter.

Gemma Balfour Benkle (Type 2) (2013).

—

Gemma Balfour Ruckely (Type 1) (2013). —

Gemma Balfour Vanloop (Type 4) (2012). — Balfour, a native of Shetland, studied fine art at Gray’s School of Art. Her typewriter work is a response to the different forms of weather the islands experience.

Gustave Morin reptile house (2010). —

Gustave Morin factoria (2002). —

Gustave Morin friday night at cedar and locust (2010). — His early ambitions to be a spy, cartoonist or horror writer eventually led Morin to become a writer, artist, performer, publisher and film-maker. His involvement with typewriter art began in 1990 and, by his own admission, he feels that it is only after 20 years of working with the machines that he has begun to really truly understand and manipulate the medium. His portfolio

of typewriter poems Nien Typos, published in 2008, is the ‘formal beginning’ of this process. He is currently completing a large body of typewriter poems that will be published under the name Clean Sails.

Erica Baum Untitled (Encyclopedias) (1997). — Baum’s work uses photography to explore and expose hidden meanings in found texts and images. Her subject matter ranges from second-hand paperbacks, to library card catalogues, to old parlour games. In these works she finds the traces of their past – marks, smudges, typos, handwritten notes – elements that give weight to the objects’ history, use and, perhaps, obsolescence.

Derek Beaulieu golfball (2006). — A radical poet, publisher and anthologist, Beaulieu is also the curator of visual poetry for UbuWeb (the ‘Robin Hood of the avant-garde’). Golfball subverts one of the major technological advances in typewriter history. The IBM Selectric typewriter promised a machine that could change font and personality in seconds, print proportional rather than mono-spaced texts, and produce a clear and exact character every time a key was struck. Here the golf ball is made to produce a text the exact opposite of that promise.

BELOW Ruth d’Andilly-Clune 4 Minutes 33 Seconds, White Noise (2011). — 4 Minutes 33 Seconds, White Noise was a student project based around John Cage’s famous ‘silent’ music piece. The texts were drawn from Don Delillo’s novel White Noise and were originally typed, then photographed, distorted and finally scanned. D’Andilly-Clune’s use of a typewriter was a development from an earlier artists’ book she made based on Kurt Schwitters’s story ‘Fish and Man’.

INTERVIEW

= Stephanie Strange Born in Dallas, Texas, Strange now lives and works in the Netherlands. Throughout her career, community and environment have played an important role in her work. She works across a variety of mediums: writing poetry, sculpting and creating typewriter pieces, as well as

following more traditional routes such as drawing. Her work evokes ‘the energy of the process of creation’. Your website shows a range of work, from drawings to sculptures to poetry. How do you describe yourself? = My work does span a range of mediums. There was a time when I found it difficult to describe myself for this reason. It was unsettling to me that I didn’t have a strong iconic focus in my art, but I have since then learned a little more about my work and why my interests seem only distantly related. The truth is that they are closely bonded. It is not medium that connects my art but subject. And that subject is so vast it’s almost faceless. But like the universe, what is big is small. So the big picture of the body of my work can be recognized in the individual works as they move through different mediums. I would say my art follows the energy lines of communication. It observes how things communicate and how that energy grows. I find it a challenge and important to address my art on this subject in a manner that mimics the characteristics of its subject. In creating art about that thing that compels something to grow, I try to approach it by creating an environment or a voice that it can expand, whether it be a sculpture of concrete, drawing on paper, or using a really great machine like a typewriter. There seems to me to be a clear link between your drawings and your typewriter pieces. Do they consciously inform each other? = That’s a good question. Both my graphite drawings and my typewriter drawings are speaking about the same subject but in different languages. So is it conscious that they are linked? Yes, in that they are coherent with my interest, but they were not created with the intention to mirror each other for that purpose. Have you ever been in regular contact with other typewriter artists, or considered yourself as part of a ‘typewriter group’? =

When I became interested in the typewriter in the 1990s, I didn’t know many people who shared my active appreciation. When I started showing my typewriter art in the early 2000s, I was greeted with a lot of nostalgic responses or curiosity for the machine, depending on the generation. I’ve watched a resurgence in the popularity of the typewriter since then. It was never my intention to begin a movement or be a part of a collaborative typewriter group. But I’m glad that, in the circle of my influence, my work has exposed the beauty of the machine and inspired many people to seek out one or a small collection of their own.

Stephanie Strange Cross 11 (2006).

Stephanie Strange Study (2007).

Are you informed by, or inspired by, other typewriter artists? = With my art in general, I am careful when looking at other artists’ works. With so many creatives producing such great work, it is easy for me to reach oversaturation quickly. I prefer that my inspirations come from things not related to art or other artists. Often I find inspiration comes from observations in fields of science. If left to its own devices, the typewriter dictates a very structured grid when it types. Your work is the complete opposite of that; you’ve described it as ‘typing with released registration’. Was discovering that way of working a ‘eureka moment’? = I actually like this juxtaposition. You’ll see this idea of contrast in my work over and over. There is something about energy that swings to polar opposites that interests me, and using the typewriter in freeform falls within that theme. If the structured grid is point A and released registration is point B, there were many years in between those two points, with a long trail of many experiments in pushing the limits of what a typewriter was known to be capable of performing. In a sense it was the next step in my explorations, but it was also a moment like night suddenly becoming day. When it happened, it caused quite a commotion in my mind. That incredibly significant flash is what launched the inclusion of the typewriter in my art.

Stephanie Strange The Approach (2006).

Stephanie Strange The Meeting (2009).

Stephanie Strange Turning from Turning (2006).

What scale do you usually work to? Do you have a series of typewriters with different- sized carriages? = I didn’t intend to collect typewriters, but factors like various carriage lengths helped get me started. Especially in the beginning, if I found an unusually long carriage I would get excited about creating a larger-scale work. That, combined with the orientation of the typed image, determines the limits of scale. However, I have been known to stretch the limits. For example, I once created a very rounded image, which required a constant rotating of the paper. The page was 12 inches (30.5

cm) square in a 13-inch (33-cm) carriage. There was very little movement allowance, and I remember re-feeding the paper hundreds of times. It took a lot of patience and creative manoeuvres, rotating and bending the paper. Many times, I rely on a simple rule of keeping at least one dimension of the paper no wider than the platen. Do you modify your machines, or do you use each according to its particular quirks? = I really enjoy discovering the idiosyncrasies of each typewriter and emphasizing those characteristics in my work. It’s part of my tool base to know and reference each machine for its qualities. I consider my collection of typewriters a media palette of options.

Emma King Underscore Apostrophe, from Typewriter Patterns (2012).

—

Emma King Asterisk Underscore, from Typewriter Patterns (2012). —

Emma King Parentheses Slash, from Typewriter Patterns (2012). — King, who studied graphic design and typography at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK, originally saw these typewriter patterns as part of a larger project, in which the visual textures would be mapped on to a series of huge letterforms. During her research, however, she began to look at typewriters in a different way, realizing that what was once an essential tool for formal communication had now been reappropriated as a decorative object, not a functional one. The individual characters from the typewriter are explored as purely decorative forms, ones that do not convey any meaning but create repeated patterns instead, a continuation and updating of the themes the Bauhaus began to explore in the 1920s.

Mira Schendel

Untitled, from Datiloscritos (‘Typed writings’) (c. 1970s). — The painter, sculptor and poet Mira Schendel, a Jewish refugee forced to flee from fascist Italy in the late 1930s, is considered one of the greatest figures in Brazilian twentieth-century art. Her work spans a huge range of mediums and processes, often featuring symbols, letters and numbers. Laura Cumming in The Observer (29 September 2013) referred to Schendel’s work as ‘beautiful, pensive, quirky and so delicate it might fly away in a breath’. A recent exhibition at the Tate Modern (September 2013– January 2014) showcased 250 pieces, many of which had not previously been exhibited.

Barrie Tullett Purgatory: Canto V – The Unshriven (2010), from A Typographic Dante. —

Barrie Tullett Purgatory: Canto X – The Proud (2006), from A Typographic Dante. —

Barrie Tullett Purgatory: Canto XIX – The Covetous (2010), from A Typographic Dante. — Tullett is a British lecturer, graphic designer and co-founder of the Caseroom Press. His work has appeared in a number of magazines, garnered several awards and been exhibited nationally and internationally. His ongoing project A Typographic Dante was begun when he was a final-year student in 1987 and takes the form of typographic illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy, each created with ‘obsolete technologies’.

Barrie Tullett Purgatory: Canto IV – The Ascent to the Second Terrace (2010), from A Typographic Dante. —

Barrie Tullett Purgatory: Canto XXVII – The Lustful – The Pass of Fire (2010), from A Typographic Dante. —

Barrie Tullett Purgatory: Canto VII – The Rule of the Mountain (2008), from A Typographic Dante.

Notes

INTRODUCTION 13 A newspaper recently illustrated an article: ‘Is the Age of the Critic Over?’ The Observer, 30 January 2011. The computer user does their thinking on the screen: Will Self, quoted in Neil Hallows, ‘Why Typewriters Beat Computers’, BBC News Magazine, 30 May 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7427237.stm.it it does ‘allow a place for accidents’, and there is something about the ‘honesty’ of the medium: Renaud Perrin, e-mail to author, 19 August 2012. They are beautiful things, a connection to a bygone era: Simon Butler, quoted in ‘Typewriter: Print on Demand’, Bath School of Art and Design: News, 21 January 2013, http://artdesign.bathspa.ac.uk/news/typewriter-print-on-dmand/. 15 Using a manual typewriter has unlocked a hidden part of me: Angie Butler, quoted in ‘Typewriter: Print on Demand’, Bath School of Art and Design: News, 21 January 2013, http://artdesign.bathspa.ac.uk/news/typewriter-print-on-dmand/. 16 there is something unique about the typewriter: Joanna Gibbs, e-mail to author, 3 January 2013.

THE PIONEERS 23 work like this ‘denied rather than affirmed’ the instrument it was made with: Alan Riddell, ‘The Image in the Machine’, in Typewriter Art (London: London Magazine Editions, 1975), 11.

THE GOLDEN AGE 34 the movement was not merely international in range, but ‘supranational’: Eugen Gomringer, introduction to Concrete Poetry: An International Anthology, ed. Stephen Bann, London Magazine Editions 13 (London: London Magazine Editions, 1967), 7. the reading of the pieces is ‘inferred through a simple language pattern’: John J. Sharkey, ed., Mindplay: An Anthology of British Concrete Poetry (London: Lorrimer Publishing, 1971), 9. A character is not, by itself, a concrete poem; ‘it requires the presence of an artist who will do something with the material’: Eugene Wildman, ed., Chicago Review Anthology of Concretism (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1967). the word and the image are one: Hugo Ball, ‘Dada Fragments’ (1916–17), in Die Flucht aus der Zeit (Munich: Duncker and Humboldt, 1927). Ball’s ‘Dada Fragments’ were first

translated from German by Eugene Jolas and published in Transition 25 (Fall 1936). See also the English translation of Die Flucht aus der Zeit: Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary, ed. John Elderfield, trans. Ann Raimes (New York: Viking Press, 1974). 39 a desire to ‘carry art into society’: Exhibition statement, Galerija Umetnika, Belgrade, quoted in Bojana Pejic, ‘Zoran Popovic: From the Trauma of Collectivism to the Happy Self’, Moment 15 (July–September 1989), http://www.seecult. org/v/galerija_umetnika/ZoranPopovic/tekstovi/album100/texts_001.jpg.html. 40 A Life magazine article in 1953: ‘Speaking of Pictures: Typewritten Paintings Are the Remarkable Work of a Lady Police Clerk – Montserrat Escardivol’, Life, 20 July 1953, 10– 12. 41 ‘Life with Language’, ‘Life with Words’: Eugen Gomringer, ‘The First Years of Concrete Poetry’, trans. Stephen Bann, Form 4 (April 1967): 18. Brighton Festival of Concrete Poetry issue. two of the great liberators of the period: John Furnival, ‘Openings’, Baseline 18 (1994): 35. 45 more elaborate patterns: J. P. Ward, artist’s statement, in Typewriter Poems, ed. Peter Finch (Millerton, N.Y.: Something Else Press/Cardiff: Second Aeon Publications, 1972), 52. 47 Greek myths, Rimbaud, time, Oxo cubes: Chasing Clues Through a Typewriter Serial, A4 information sheet for an illustrated talk by June Road, Edinburgh, 29 August 2004. the ‘deadening’ effect of mechanization: Alan Riddell, quoted in ‘Background to The Seasons Suite’, in A Guide to an Illustrated Talk (brochure), first presented by June Road, Edinburgh, 29 August 2004, 3. tiny marks on the page: Barbara Clayton, e-mail to author, 30 May 2012. see the piece of work in their heads: keitharmstrong, interview with author, London, November 2012. a body of work born out of typing freestyle poetry: Stephanie Strange, e-mail to author, 7 April 2008. 48 ‘sound texts without a sound … a sort of orchestral “score” for a sound text’: Christian Scholz, ‘Relations between Sound Poetry and Visual Poetry: The Path from the Optophonetic Poem to the Multimedia Text’, Visible Language 35, no. 1 (2001). the shape of the poem becomes a counterpoint of its meaning: Jasia Reichardt, ‘Type in Art’, in Between Poetry and Painting, by Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, exhibition catalogue (London: Printed by W. Kempner, 1965), 15. A fully illustrated version of this text originally appeared in the Penrose Annual 58 (1965). 49 a constellation from an epicentre: Dick Higgins, preface to US edition of Typewriter Poems, ed. Peter Finch (Millerton, N.Y.: Something Else Press/Cardiff: Second Aeon Publications, 1972).

61 essentially a cartographic project: Steve McCaffery, quoted in Marjorie Perloff, Poetry On and Off the Page: Essays for Emergent Occasions (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 267. 66 I left Austria and went to Sweden: Peter Kubelka, e-mail to author, 10 August 2013. 78 ‘ditto’ poems: Robert Zend, Beyond Labels (Toronto: Hounslow Press, 1982), 116. Zend creates them with a manual typewriter: Robert Zend, Arbormundi: 16 Selected Typescapes (Vancouver: Blewointmentpress, 1982), back cover blurb. 79 borderblur: ‘About bp: A Short Biography and Select Bibliography’, accessed August 2013, http://www.bpnichol.ca/ about.

THE BOOK 82 gradually softens: ‘s’adoucit petit à petit’ (author’s translation); Renaud Perrin, ‘La Machine’, text from the catalogue of the exhibition ‘Moyens de pression’, Galerie les Arches, Metz, June 2011, http://perrin.renaud.free.fr/ index.php/typings/serie-2/. 84 moved by the poetic nature of the pieces: Renaud Perrin, e-mail to author, 19 August 2012. 88 a case of typewriter poets having to reinvent the medium: Andrew Belsey, e-mail to author, 14 August 2012. 89 The only fiction that still means something today: Raymond Federman, ‘Surfiction – Four propositions in Form of an Introduction’, in Surfiction: Fiction Now … and Tomorrow (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1975), 5–18. ‘best lookers’ rather than ‘best sellers’: Exhibition wall graphic, ‘The Themersons: 1 Day Before Yesterday – 1 Day After Tomorrow’, Institute of Contemporary Art, London, 18 February 2012. 90 a ‘concrete book’ / invention of this quality: Raymond Federman, Double or Nothing, 3rd ed. (Boulder: Fiction Collective Two, 1998), jacket blurb. 91 The black, red and white house style that evolved in the later Gaberbocchus books: Nick Wadley, ‘Experiments in Publishing’ Eye 12, no. 3 (1994): 51. 94 demonstrates the importance of the domestic and familiar object in our working lives: Philippa Wood, description of Personal Spaces 2, accessed August 2013, http://www.thecase.co.uk/Personal_Spaces2.html. 95 Trained originally as a printmaker, but born a collector of moments: Lucy May Schofield, artist’s statement, accessed August 2013, http://www.lucymayschofield.co.uk/about.html. 98 drawing with the alphabet: Paul Dutton, quoted in Bob Cobbing and Lawrence Upton, eds., Word Score Utterance, Choreography, in Verbal and Visual Poetry (London: Writers Forum, 1998). See also Liisa LaDouceur, ‘New Exhibit Blurs the Line Between the Written Word and

Visual Art’, Eye Weekly, 7 July 2005, eye/issue/issue_07.07.05/arts/ metalogossoiree.php.

http://contests.eyeweekly.com/

anti-writing writing machine: R. M. Vaughan, ‘The Big Picture 39’, RMVaughanink (blog), 10 July 2005, http://rmvaughanink. blogspot.co.uk/2005_07_01_ archive.html. 99 obscure journals and magazines: Andrew Belsey, e-mail to author, 14 August 2012.

CONTEMPORARY WORKS 113 my own typestracts: Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Between Poetry and Painting, exhibition catalogue (London: Printed by W. Kempner, 1965), 53. 115 typing ‘as a separate medium in and of itself’: ‘Kasper Pincis Q&A with Giovanna Paternò,’ in Kasper Pincis: Pekee-Nuee-Nuee, published to accompany the exhibition of the same name at dall Rosa Gallery, London, 8 September–20 October 2012, 13, http://issuu.com/dalla_rosa_gallery/docs/ kasper_pincis_pekee-nuee_nuee. 116 the process and impact of mark making: Barbara Clayton, e-mail to author, 30 May 2012. 117 As typewriters have passed into the annals of obsolete office equipment: Christopher Skinner, e-mail to author, 28 August 2012. 120 I love the serendipitous hit and miss of the letters on paper: Simon Gomes, e-mail to author, 14 August 2012. 123 urban printing: jw curry, e-mail to author, 14 August 2013. 124 obsessed with the preposterousness of nothing: Travis J Wyche, e-mail to author, 31 August 2013. 124 dissonance between the power of the images and the fragility of the document itself: ‘Despite their brute power of impact, they stay fragile documents in the fight against a general disappearance’; Dirk Krecker and Ingo Gerken, Echo Oldschool (Frankfurt: Gutleut Verlag, 2006). 125 In the fine tradition of these things, it’s also a little bit mad: Rick Poynor, e-mail to author, 23 August 2012.

Index

Underlined figures refer to illustrations. A

Adamus, Karel 68 Poems Pictures 68 Adler, Jeremy 48, 50 Blue Typing 48 Typewriter Poems 48, 50 Adler Triumph Gabriele 10 typewriter 138 Aggie Weston’s (imprint) 89 Andilly-Clune, Ruth d’ 159 4 Minutes 33 Seconds, White Noise 159 Andre, Carl 151 Andryczuk, Hartmut 119 Three Works for ‘Monologe nach dem Neolithikum’ 119 Ant, Adam 31 Armstrong, Keith see keitharmstrong ‘art-typing’ 20, 23, 112 ASCII art 57, 75 B BABL see Bibliotherapy Artists’ Book Library Bain, Willard S.: Informed Sources (Day East Received) 84–85, 88 Balfour, Gemma 155 Benkle (Type 2) 155 Ruckely (Type 1) 155 Vanloop (Type 4) 155 Ball, Hugo 34 Barreto-Rivera, Rafael 61, 79, 100 Barron, Rachel 110 Typographic Studies 110–11 Bath School of Art and Design: ‘Typewriter: Print on Demand’ (2013 exhibition) 13 Bauhaus, the 24, 25, 88, 164 ‘Bauhaus: Art as Life’ (2012 exhibition) 27 Baum, Erica: Untitled (Encyclopedias) 158 Beaulieu, Derek 99, 158 golfball 158 Belsey, Andrew 19, 72–75, 88, 98–99 Cosmos 73 Ozone Layers 74 Rain/Storm 74 The Threat and the Promise 75 Unusual Love Poem 72

Bibliotherapy Artists’ Book Library (BABL) 95 Bismarck, Otto von, portrait of (anon.) 30 Bissett, Bill 138 Earth Project 138 hungree throat 138 novel 138 scars on th seehors 138, 139 Black, Stephanie 99 Little Lady Sadie, the Fixer of Broken Things 99 Blickensderfer head office, Cheapside, London 9 Bök, Christian 107 Eunoia 107 The Experimental Prototype for the Word 107 book typewriters 9, 82 Boshoff, Willem 102 KykAfrikaans 102, 103 Boston Typewriter Orchestra 17 bpNichol 61, 79, 100, 123 Konfessions of an Elizabethan Fan Dancer 79 Braekel, Roger Van 31 Franklin D. Roosevelt 31,31 Brannen, Jonathan 112 Nothing Doing Never Again 112, 113 Brautigan, Richard: Trout Fishing in America 83 Bristol Artists Book Event (2007) 96 Broadbent, Ruth 16, 17 String Wrapped (Typewriter) 14–15, 17 Broudy, Hart 70 C Pomes: Sequences 1 and 2 70, 71 Butler, Angie 13, 15 (with Wood) Open House 94 Butler, Simon 13

C

Cage, John: 4’ 33” 159 Caldwell, Robert 73 Cameron, Charles 52 Campos, Augusto de 34 Olho por Olho (‘Eye for Eye’) 34 Campos, Haraldo de 34 Capote, Truman 115 CCMC 100 Chopin, Henri 24, 82, 121 La Crevette Amoureuse 121 Machine Poem 82 Sculpture abstraite (Typewritten Poems) 120 Si? (Typewritten Poems) 120 Cinquième Saison (review) 121

Claire, Paula 116, 138 Poem 438, Animated, ‘seequence of 20’ 117 Poem Project 620, Echo Chamber, ‘seequence of 6’ 116 WEAVE/WOVEN (from Poem 477, Balancing Act, ‘seequence of 8’) 117 Clayton, Barbara 47, 116–17 Clayton, Lenka 88, 144 Typewriter Drawings 144, 145 Cobbing, Bob 34, 54, 64, 116 Beethoven Today 35 Whisper Piece 33, 48 colour(s) 15, 31, 40, 56, 61, 83, 91, 107, 113, 121, 128 concrete poetry/concrete poetry movement 17, 20, 33, 34, 39, 47, 55, 72, 73, 74, 138 Conrad, Earl 87 Typoo – A Typographical Novel 86, 87 Coracle Press 146 Cox, Kenelm 52, 57 Crossroads (TV serial): Benny (character) 31 Crowe, Michael 88, 144 Typewriter Drawings 144 curry, jw 123 Aillusion #5 122 HASHASH 123 Cutts, Simon 146 Ode for the Recovery of an Olympia Splendid Portable Typewriter 146

D

Dault, Gary Michael 98 Delillo, Don: White Noise 159 De Stijl (magazine) 27, 31 De Stijl movement 31 Doesburg, Nelly van 27 Doesburg, Theo van 27, 31 dry transfer lettering 16, 41, 116 dsh see Houédard, Dom Sylvester Dunne, Kasha 130 Eye Spy 130, 131 Dutton, Paul 61, 79, 98, 100 Mondriaan Boogie Woogie, 1 through 6 101 The Plastic Typewriter 96, 98, 100, 101

E

‘Earth’ paintings 43 Ebner, Jorn 114 I’ve had enough of the digital world 114 Printer Drawings 114 Elliott & Hatch: book typewriter 9, 82

Emigre (magazine) 82 Erika typewriter 78 Escardivol, Montserrat 40 Etheredge, Lee, IV 118 continuous prime shifting live die 118 Etlinger, Amelia 40, 54 Fishes 41 Exposition of Objective Poetry (Belgium, 1962) 24 Eye (magazine) 91

F

Fahlström, Öyvind 34 Fauconnet, René: RF 22.301 94 Federman, Raymond 88, 90 Double or Nothing 88–89, 90, 91 Finch, Peter 49, 64 The Area of Probability 64 Music for Cloud Song 64 The Sonic Skyline of Britain 64 Typewriter Poems 20 Finlay, Ian Hamilton 41, 47, 52, 89 Finley, Alec 114 First International Exhibition of Concrete and Kinetic Poetry (Cambridge, 1964) 34 Fluxus 39 Four Horsemen (group) 61, 79, 100 Furnival, John 41, 52, 57 Futscher, Christian 88 Was mir die Adler erzählt (‘What the eagle told me’) 87, 88, 88

G

Gaberbocchus Press 89, 91, 92 Ganglia Press 123 Garland, Ken 12 Gee, Charlotte 84 Repetition 84 Tribute of Stitch 85 George, Peter 55, 57 Gerken, Ingo 120, 124 Gibbs, Joanna 16, 94 Leaf Watermarks 94 Gibbs, Michael 73 (ed.) Kontexts (magazine) 73 Gill, David 99 Glass, Philip: Einstein on the Beach 84 Glidden, Carlos see Sholes, Christopher Latham GLOUcestershire grouP (GLOUP) 52, 55 Gomes, Simon 120

Gomringer, Eugen 34 Silence 40–41 Graves, Robert 12 Green, Albert P.: All About Typewriters and Typewriting 9 grOnk (magazine) 123 Grumman, Bob 112

H

Hammond Typewriter 12,12 Hammond Typewriter Company: Art in Typewriting 12 Hansen, Marianne Holm: Typing (not writing) 135, 136, 137 Hansen Writing Ball typewriter 9 Hermes Baby typewriter 82 Hesse, Eva 151 Houédard, Dom Sylvester (dsh) 49, 52,53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 74, 113, 116, 140 gripfreak 2 Jargon B46F29 – typikon 53 Jargon B46F30 – typikon 53 Jargon B46F51 – untitled 52 Notes from the Cosmic Typewriter 52 Hutchins, Linda 148 Reiteration (pay attention) with scroll box 148 Untitled (sorrow) with scroll boxes 148, 149 Huth, Geof 43 ntst: the collected pwoermds of geof huth 43 perfection/reflection 43 365 Letters 43 Hybriden-Verlag (publishing house) 119

I

IBM Selectric typewriter 158 i-D (magazine) 82 Informer, The (magazine) 54, 55, 99 Institute of Contemporary Arts, London: ‘In Numbers: Serial Publications by Artists Since 1955’ (2012 exhibition) 91 International Society of Typographic Designers 130

J

James, Nadine Faye 97 Typewritten Portraits 96, 97 Jerwood Drawing Prize exhibitions (UK) 124–25 Jordan, Tim 17

K

Kac, Eduardo 132 Genesis 132

GFP Bunny 132 Self-portrait 132 Untitled II 133 keitharmstrong 47, 54–57, 98–99, 140 aaaaaa 56 @ @ @ @ 55 corners outside of a square 54 flowergAme 55 o game unfinished 56 Tower 57 Kempton, Karl 51, 78 Rune 2: 26 Voices/January Interlude 51 Kerouac, Jack: On the Road 83 Kiesler, Stefi see Saga, Pietro kinetic poets/texts 17, 34, 96 King, Emma 164 Typewriter Patterns 164 Knotek, Anatol 138 Censored 139 Inverse 138 Kissing 139 Knowles, Christopher 83–84 Typings 83 Kontexts (ed. Merchant and Gibbs) 73 Kostelanetz, Richard 90 Krecker, Dirk 124, 126–29 Bbbbörsen, Bbbbanken, Einkaufszzzzentren (‘Exxxxxchnge, Bbbbbnks, ShpppingMmmlls’) 126 Bubble 128 I’m Not a Pirate – I’m a Fisherman 127 Luftlandeübung auf den Türmen der Deutschenbank (‘Airborne Exercise on theTowers of the Deutsche Bank’) 129 No title (Face) 129 Kriwet, Ferdinand 41 Kubelka, Peter 66 Typewritten scores for the film Arnulf Rainer 66, 67 Schwechater 66

L

Last Vispo Anthology, The (ed. Vassilakis) 106 Lear, Edward 57 letterpress 16, 27, 40, 94, 95, 96, 97, 105 Letraset 16, 73, 97, 98 Life (magazine) 40 London Magazine 74

M

McCaffery, Steve 61, 79, 100 Carnival 61, 62, 63, 116 McCarthy, Cavan 49 Plurble Poem 49 zeeeyooosshhhhhhhh 48 Macintosh computers 16, 75, 107, 112 MacLellan, Tamar 96 (with Wood) Personal Spaces 2 – The Desk 91, 94, 96 Mallarmé, Stéphane: Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (‘A throw of the dice will never abolish chance’) 48 Mansfield, Jo 98 Nothing 96, 98 Mares, George: The History of the Typewriter 20, 23, 30 Marquis, Don: Archy and Mehitabel 83 Martin, Agnes 151, 152 Mayer, Hansjörg 34 (trans.) Schoenberg (Sharkey) 40 Mayer, Jeremy 17 Merchant, Paul 73 (ed.) Kontexts 73 Middleton, Malcolm: Waxing Gibbous 140 Mills, Stuart 89 Poems for My Shorthand Typist 47, 89 mono printing 105 mono-spaced characters 15, 31, 41 Monsiegneur, Bonita 99 Morgan, Edwin 49, 65, 113 The Chaffinch Map of Scotland 65 Unscrambling the Waves at Goonhilly 65 Morin, Gustave 156 Clean Sails 156 factoria 156 friday night at cedar and locust 157 Nien Typos 156 reptile house 156 Murphy, Christopher 117

N

Neill, Bob: Second Book of Typewriter Art 31 Nelson, Julius: Artyping 31 Next Call, The (magazine) 27 Nichol, Barrie Phillip see bpNichol Nichol, Ellie 79 Nichols, Leslie 135 Looking Forward 134 Typeface 135 Noel, Michelle 147

Untitled (photograms) 147 Noigandres group 34 The Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry (manifesto) 34

O

Olivetti typewriters 49, 113, 114 advertising campaigns 16 Ons Volkske (magazine) 31 OU (review) 121 Ovčáček, Eduard 59 Emanace (‘Emanation’) 60 Hlava (‘Head’) 59 Kruhy (‘Circles’) 59 Lessons of the Big A 59 Optická Struktura (‘Optical Structure’) 58 Prázdny Kruh – Zájmena (‘Empty Circle – Pronouns’) 60 overprinting 15, 34, 40

P

Pasternak, Boris 55 Patterson, G. M.: Flower Study 20, 23,23 Perrin, Renaud 13, 82,84 Club de Natacio Barcelona 82 Forum 83 Garage 83 Machine 81 Red Wheelbarrow 82 Pet Galerie Press 94 Photoshop 16, 117, 127 phototypesetting 41 Pignatari, Décio 34 Pincis, Kasper 115 ...As if you could kill time without injuring eternity 124–25 Footnote 1 115 Wave Experiment 1 115 Pitman’s Typewriter Manual 20, 21 platen 15, 27, 31 Popović, Zoran 39 Portrait of Jasna Tijardović 38 portraits 30, 31, 31, 38, 58, 96, 97, 132, 134, 135 Poynor, Rick 125 punk movement 82 Purvis, Alston: H. N. Werkman 31

R

Rathbone, Keira 75, 120, 140–43 Barcelona Love Letters 141

My Old Back Yard (4 Clift House Road, Bristol 142, 143 Old Brighton Pier (view from recycling bin) 142 Typing Barnes Bridge from the foot of the stairs (Chiswick side, of course) 143 Waxing Gibbous (Middleton) cover artwork 140 Reichardt, Jasia 48 Remington Standard Typewriter manual 7, 8 Remington typewriters 8, 9, 114, 125 Riddell, Alan 47, 57, 72, 74, 75 The Honey Pot 47, 48 he Seasons Suite 46, 47 Typewriter Art 19, 20, 23, 24, 47, 72, 141 Road, June 47 Roemer, Madge: Fun With Your Typewriter 88 Roosevelt, Franklin D.: portrait (Van Braekel) 31,31 Rose, Hajo 25 Entwurf für ein Stoffdruckmuster aus Schreibmaschinen-Typen (‘Design for a fabric pattern using typewriter letters’) 25 Ross, Alan 74 Roth, Dieter 41 rubber stamping 61, 96, 105, 116

S

Saga, Pietro (Stefi Kiesler) 27, 31 Typo-Plastic 26 Typo-Plastique VII Paris 27 Sargeant, Catherine 10 Original Manuscripts 10–11 Schendel, Mira 164 Untitled (from Datiloscritos [‘Typed writings’]) 165 Schmidt, Wolfgang 41 Schofield, Lucy May 95 A Fair Place to Live 94, 95 Scholz, Christian 48 Schwitters, Kurt: ‘Fish and Man’ 159 screenprinting 97, 105 Second Aeon (magazine) 64 Seidel & Naumann 5Tab typewriter 138 Self, Will 13 Serra, Richard 151 Sharkey, John J. 34 Schoenberg 40 Shaw, Nigel 106 Ancient Dreams I 106 Sholes, Christopher Latham, and Glidden, Carlos: Remington typewriter 9 Signalism movement 37, 39 Silicone Graphics computers 127

Simpson, Vickie 108 The Pattern Series 108, 109 Smith, Paul 23 Smith, William Jay 58 My Friend Tom: The Poet Playwright Tennessee Williams 58 Typewriter portrait of Ernest Hemingway (Papa Piper) 58 Typewriter portrait of Tallulah Bankhead (Tallulah) 58 Typewriter Town 88 Smith Corona typewriters 56 Smithson, Robert 151, 152 Sobral Campos, Rita 154 The Last Faust Myth in the History of Mankind 154 Solt, Mary Ellen: Concrete Poetry: A World View 34, 49, 79 Solypse – Charmante Schamanen (group) 119 Spoerri, Daniel: Material 91 Stacey, Flora F. F. 19, 20, 23, 120 Untitled (butterfly) 19, 20, 22, 23 stencils 16, 27 Stenographer’s Companion 20 Stenographer’s Journal 30 Strafella, Allyson 124, 150–53 Crest 150 Green Escarpment 153 Green Escarpment A 153 Outgrowth 151 Profile 151 Underbelly 152 Strange, Stephanie 47, 160–63 The Approach 162 Cross 11 160 The Meeting 162 Study 161 Turning from Turning 163 Stumpf, Manfred 127 Sutherland, W. Mark 146 Antiqwerty 146

T

Tarasque Press, Nottingham 89, 146 Themerson, Stefan and Francizska 89, 91, 92 Semantic Divertissements 91, 92 Tipp-Ex 16 Tlaloc (magazine) 49 Todorović, Miroljub 37 Textum 1 36 Textum 2 37 Tullett, Barrie 166

Poem to Philip Glass, A 125 Typographic Dante, A 166, 167 Tullett, Jantze 17 Lyons Refined Typewriter Oil 17 Twain, Mark 81 typefaces 12–13, 15, 75, 114, 153 Typewriter (magazine) 73 ‘typo-plastic’ images 26, 27, 27, 31

U

UbuWeb 99, 158 Underwood typewriters 73, 87, 112

V

Valoch, Jiří 39 8 Sonnets 39 Vassilakis, Nico 106 i poem 105 (ed.) The Last Vispo Anthology 106 Victoria, Queen, portrait of (anon.) 30 Vigo, Edgardo: Diagonal Zero 91 Vree, Paul de 24 Gun Poem 24 Het leven is een bacarrat (‘Life Is a Lottery’) 19 vries, herman de 43 Gesammelte Matritzendrucke 1964–1972 43

W

Wadley, Nick 91 Ward, J. P. 45 coming together 45 section through a tree trunk 44 shakespeare sonnet XVI 45 the words we use are lovely 45 Weaver, Mike 34 Werkman, H. N. 27, 31, 120 Tiksel 5 27, 29, 31 Tiksel 16 27, 28, 31 Westminster Group of experimental poets (WOUP) 34 William, Prince 31 Williams, Jonathan 52 Wilson, Robert: Einstein on the Beach 83–84 Wolf-Rehfeldt, Ruth 78 Faces 78 Sammlung-Streuung 78 Wood, Philippa 91, 96

The Last 94 Open House (with A. Butler) 94 Personal Spaces 2 – The Desk (with MacLellan) 91, 94, 96 Wyche, Travis J 124 Study for Semiotic Vase 124

Z

Zacks, Linda 125 bloat 125 traffic 125 Zend, Robert 78 Arbormundi (‘Tree of Life’) 76, 77 Zero art group 43

Picture credits

2: Courtesy William Allen ‘William Allen Word & Image’ / By kind permission of the Prinknash Trustees 7–9: Author’s collection 10–11: All work and photograph by Catherine Sargeant 12–13: Author’s collection 14–15: Ruth Broadbent 17: © Jantze Tullett 19: © Estate of Paul De Vree, Antwerp, © image: M HKA 21: From Pitman’s Typewriter Manual, 1893 22: From The Phonetic Journal, Pitman’s, 1898 23: From The History of the Typewriter by George Mares, Guilbert Pitman, UK, 1909 24: © Estate of Paul De Vree, Antwerp, © image: M HKA 25: Bauhaus-Archiv / © DACS 2013 26–27: © 2013 Austrian Frederick & Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna 28–29: Collection of Groninger Museum, photograph Marten de Leeuw / Estate of H.N. Werkman 30 top: From The History of the Typewriter by George Mares, Guilbert Pitman, UK, 1909 30 bottom: Author’s collection

31: Roger Van Braekel (1930–2010) 33, 35: Courtesy of the Bob Cobbing Estate 36–37: Courtesy of Miroljub Todorović 38: Image Courtesy of Zoran Popović 39: © Jiří Valoch 41: MART, Rovereto (Trento) Italy, © Archivio Fotografico Mart / Work created by Amelia Etlinger / Permission granted by Deborah Etlinger, Judith Klimoff & Laura Etlinger 42: © herman de vries 43: © Geof Huth 44–45: © J. P. Ward / Images Courtesy of the artist from Alphabet to Logos, J. P. Ward, Second Aeon Publications, 1973 46: © Alan Riddell / With kind permission of John D. Lid / from The Seasons Suite. A Guide to an illustrated Talk first presented by June Road, at the 21st International Edinburgh Book Festival, 2004 47: © Alan Riddell / With kind permission of John D. Lid /from Typewriter Art, published by London Magazine Editions, 1975 48: © Cavan McCarthy / Typewriter Poems / edited by Peter Finch. Cardiff, Second Aeon / Something Else Press, 1972 49: © Cavan McCarthy / An Anthology of Concrete Poetry / Williams, Emmett (editor). New York, Something Else Press, 1967 50: Courtesy Jeremy Adler 51: Courtesy Karl Kempton

52–53: The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York / By kind permission of the Prinknash Trustees 54–57: Images courtesy keitharmstrong 58: William Jay Smith, copyright © by William Jay Smith, 1957 59–60: © Eduard Ovčáček 61–63: © Steve McCaffery / Images courtesy of Coach House Books 64: Images courtesy of Peter Finch 65 top: © Edwin Morgan with kind permission of Eugen Gomringer 65 bottom: © Edwin Morgan / image supplied by De Montfort University / Reproduced in Edwin Morgan Collected Poems, published 1996 by Carcanet Press 66–67: Images courtesy of Peter Kubelka / photos Peter Kubelka, 2012 68–69: Images courtesy of Karel Adamus 70, 72: © Hart Broudy 72–75: © Andrew Belsey 76–77: © Robert Zend, 1982 78: Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt; Fund Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt / Research Centre for Artists’ Publications, Bremen 79: Estate of bpNichol / From the Paula Claire Archive of Sound and Visual Poetry, Oxford, www.paulaclaire.com 81–83: © Renaud Perrin

84–85: © Charlotte Gee / Christopherson Collection, De Montfort University 86–87: © Earl Conrad 88: © Christian Futscher / from: was mir die adler erzählt, das fröhliche wohnzimmer-edition, Vienna, 1995 89: © Stuart Mills from Poems for my Shorthand Typist, Coracle, 2002 90–91: © Raymond Federman / The Swallow Press, 1971 92–93: With kind permission of the Themerson Archive, London / Courtesy EYE magazine 94: © Joanna Gibbs 95: © Lucy May Schofield / Hand printed by Mandy Tolley 96: © Philippa Wood & Tamar MacLellan 97: © Nadine Faye James 98: © Jo Mansfield 99: © Stephanie Black / extract taken with kind permission from a book by Bonita Monsiegneur, Little Lady Sadie, The Fixer of Broken Things 100–101: © Paul Dutton / purchase inquiries: [email protected] 102–3: © Willem Boshoff 105: © Nico Vassilakis / from Text Loses Time by Nico Vassilakis, published by Many Penny Press, 2007 106: © Nigel Shaw 107: © Christian Bök

108–9: © Vickie Simpson 110–11: © Rachel Barron 112–13: © Jonathan Brannen 114: © Jorn Ebner 115: © Kasper Pincis / photo: Philip John Jones courtesy of dalla Rosa Gallery, London 116–17: © Paula Claire 118: Courtesy Lee Etheredge IV & Pierogi Gallery, Brooklyn, New York / photograph by Shady Republic 119: © Hartmut Andryczuk 120 left: With kind permission of Brigitte Morton / image courtesy of Sammlung Ellen und Michael Ringler, Zurich / photo: Nick Ash 1 120 right: With kind permission of Brigitte Morton / image courtesy of Fondazione Morra & Supportico Lopez / photo: Nick Ash 121: With kind permission of Brigitte Morton / image courtesy of Supportico Lopez, Berlin & Fondazione Morra, Naples 122–23: © jwcurry 124: © Travis J Wyche 125: Linda Zacks 126–29: images © Dirk Krecker with kind permission 130–31: Kasha Dunne 132: © Eduardo Kac / Private Collection, Rio de Janeiro 133: © Eduardo Kac / Collection Aníbal Jozami, Buenos Aires

134: © Leslie Nichols 135: © Leslie Nichols / Private Collection, St. Louis, Missouri, USA 136–37: © Marianne Holm Hansen 138 top; 139 top left, top right: © Anatol Knotek 138 bottom; 139 bottom left, bottom right: From scars on the seehors, by bill bissett, © 1999 bill bissett, Talon Books Ltd., Vancouver, B.C. Reprinted by permission of the publisher 140–43: Typewriter art © Keira Rathbone 2012 144: © Michael Crowe 145: © Lenka Clayton 146 top: Simon Cutts: Coracle / William Allen Word & Image 146 bottom: Text/image by W. Mark Sutherland 147: © Michelle Noel / www.michellenoel.co.uk 148 top: © 2003 Linda Hutchins / photo: Dan Kvitka 148 bottom, 149: © 2003 Linda Hutchins / photo: Bill Bachhuber 150, 151 top: © Allyson Strafella / photo: Ken Yanoviak 151 bottom: © Allyson Strafella / photo: von Lintel Gallery 152–53: © Allyson Strafella 154: © Rita Sobral Campos 155: © Gemma Balfour 156–57: © Gustave Morin

158 top: Courtesy of the artist Erica Baum and Bureau, New York 158 bottom: © Derek Beaulieu 159: © Ruth D’Andilly-Clune 160, 162 top, 163: Photo © Stephanie Strange / 2006 – all rights reserved 161: Photo © Stephanie Strange / 2007 – all rights reserved 162 bottom: Photo © Stephanie Strange / 2009 – all rights reserved 164: © Emma King 165: Scala, Florence / Digital Image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York / © The Mira Schendel Estate 166–67: © Barrie Tullett

Acknowledgements There are a great many people I’d like to thank with regards the production of this book. My wife, Jantze, for letting me use the peace and calm of her studio to write in. My children, Eilidh, Lewis and Alex, for giving up so much valuable Minecraft and Sims 3 time on the laptop. The team at Laurence King, for having faith in the book in the first place, especially Jo Lightfoot, Jodi Simpson, Angela Koo and Claire Gouldstone. John Dowling, for producing such an articulate and sensitive book design to showcase the work. Steve Calvert, Derek Beaulieu and Paula Claire for their suggestions and introductions. Neil Dishington, Jeremy Verrier, Allen Barker, Jonathan Newman and Dave Strickland for introducing me to concrete poetry, typography and typewriter art whilst I was a student, and, of course, Alan Riddell and Peter Finch, whose books have been a constant source of inspiration and the reason I wanted to write this one in the first place. BT