Noiseless Typewriter (actually, rather loud).

Fun looking at #saintjohn archives. "Canadian Winter Port"

Ruonoh & Ytiledif: Polymorphian Society crest.

A rare find: Colonial Book Store

Awhile back, I was going through my old books to see whether any spent their lives in Saint John and predate the Great Fire of 1877. Obviously, there is some conjecture since I have little way of knowing exactly where the book was one hundred and thirty four years + 8 days ago, but there are reasonable assumptions. 

This French Grammar was published in 1849 and came from 137 Sydney St., which was entirely destroyed in the fire. There are lots of interesting features about the book that make it an interesting artifact (although it would not be that great for learning French). The pages of advertising at the beginning are interesting, and the paper is thick and well-preserved. Absolutely perfect is the small logo of the bookseller, Colonial Book Store at King and Germain Streets, pasted into the inside cover. Finding something this well preserved that shows great design and human touch is rare indeed and a happy discovery. There are other books that might have survived the Fire, but they are religious tomes, and it makes sense that families would save them. With this book, I see a child who maybe had no idea how servere the situation would become who was still worried about getting her homework done. 

Sam Cooke lived in Saint John. For sentimental reasons?

Prescient statement

From "Marketing Myopia," published in 1960 in the Harvard Business Review: "Detroit never really researched customers' wants. It only researched their preferences between the kinds of things it had already decided to offer them." 

For any offence I may have caused, I am so very sorry.

Readers will likely realize that the first iteration of this site had big mistake in the banner. The red and black bar under the name had the red on the top and the black on the bottom. That was simply wrong; I'm sorry; and please accept my apologies. Of course, the intent is to mimic a typewriter ribbon and unless you love typing hard or you really like red, black is always on top. 

Picture, if you will, that each letter is attached to a typebar that swings up and smacks the ribbon and makes an imprint on the paper, then jumps back down because the platen is rubberized. As the typebar moves up, so does the ribbon (If the ribbon were stationary, it would be impossible to see what you are typing). This mechanism is called, provocatively, a ribbon vibrator. When you switch the setting on a typewriter to red ink, the vibrator does tonnes more work since it moves 1/4" higher so that the typebar hits the red part of the ribbon. 

A someone with more than one typewriter, I know that the black should be on top, yet still about once a year I put a new ribbon on upside-down. Sometimes, small details make a big difference. 

Typewriter ribbons are interesting. The tins that they came in are more highly sought than typewriters, presumably because they have 1/600 the weight. Ribbons are quite standard from one machine to the next and have been for over a century: 1/2" tall and six feet long. It's one of those seemingly unchangeable items like Schraeder tire valves that seem to have been invented so well that future modification was not required. 

 

New format, same site.

Welcome to the newest iteration of typed.ca. It's existed since 2004 and occasionally I will post something from my archives. The name comes from my typewriter collection and some oblique notion that everything is better typed. 

For the first year, it was a placeholder image with the recursive statement, "Until there's something better, there's typed.ca." 

Its longest run was as an 'anablog' (A portmanteau of analog and blog my friend Graham invented), where each entry was typed on an Olympia SM9 typewriter and scanned. The technique was time-consuming but faithful to a certain aesthetic. It also means that my archives is a pile of paper, which is a pleasant anomaly in a digital world. 

It looked something like this:

The complicated process of typing and scanning was partially to evade search engines that I felt had no business looking at my web site.  And I was always quite adamant that it was not a blog, since the word conjured myopia and vanity. But times have changed, and I'm comfortable with the anonymity I cede for SEO and the ability to tweet about food. 

Addendum: 'anablog' may have actually been invented by my friend Ivor.