As a certified typewriter person, of course I’d be interested in Marcin Winchary’s magnificent book Shift Happens: A Book About Keyboards. But I didn’t think I’d actually be able to read it since it was a popular Kickstarter project that went for a cool $150 for the two-volume set before selling out.
That is until I thought to check if I could borrow it through interlibrary loan, and sure enough I could. (Libraries to the rescue, baby. As always.) The only catch was I had to read it at the library instead of bringing it home, presumably to prevent a pricy book from disappearing. Which was fine: I just brought my six year old along and he perused his favorite graphic novels while I dove into this wonderful work of art, history, and typewriter glory.
It’s hard to overstate just how beautiful the book is, both as an object and how the content is laid out. Everything is thoughtfully designed, all the way down to the footnote symbols:
The book’s two volumes focus on the two major epochs in keyboard history: the origins and development of typewriters, and the keyboard’s advancement into computers and smartphones. (There’s also a bonus making-of booklet wherein Winchary goes into greater detail about the project’s conception and implementation.) Along the way there’s some really great writing on the burgeoning business of typewriters in the late 19th century, the QWERTY vs. Dvorak drama, and other delightful details die-hard typists will dig.
I appreciated this bit of context-setting on Christopher Latham Sholes, one of the inventors of the typewriter:
Sholes worked in a relative vacuum of technology. There were no tall buildings, and the few business offices that existed were coarse. Weller described them as having “rough, bare floors, box wood stoves, sawdust cuspidors and Windsor chairs and smoke-blackened walls.” The most complex object in most people’s homes was a manual sewing machine. The main source of entertainment at home was typically a piano; home radios were still half a century away, with television to follow twenty-five years after them. The telegraph allowed the flow of Morse code across continents, having crossed the Atlantic a few years earlier. But the first successful test of a telephone was nine years away, the Edison lightbulb another twelve, and electrification of cities and factories decades ahead.
There’s also this passage from the chapter on touch typing about the equivalent terms for “hunt and peck” in different countries, which, as a hunt-and-peck typist myself, I found delightful and even inspiring:
The Dutch call it “poking.” In Portuguese, it’s “key-per-key typing.” Germans have the most complicated word, of course: Adlersuchsystem, which translates as “an eagle search system,” imagining an eagle circling above the keys, striking from up high once in a while. In Hebrew it’s not uncommon to refer to casual typing as “doctor’s typing,” and in Slovak as “the police method,” singling out the professions apparently unable to learn touch typing. In Colombia, touch typing comes with a beautiful term, mecanografia, which for simple typing mutates into the colloquial chuzografia: “poke-o-graphy.” Some languages recognize even non-touch-typing technique as something to admire. Brazil’s catar milho can be translated as “collecting corn.” The Swedish call it pekfingervalsen – or, the index finger waltz. And then there’s the Japanese 雨だれタイピング、which means “raindrop typing.”
(See the rest of my notes and quotes.)
I doff my cap to Winchary’s dedication and care for every aspect of this endeavor, and am simply grateful for its existence. Consult WorldCat and your local library to see if it’s nearby or could be delivered to you. It’s definitely worth the postage.
