It is easy to feel history when you are walking down a 500 year old cobblestone road in Italy. Our story – the story of billions of people have flowed down such roads every day. A story that is worn into the stones and written on the walls. You can see it and you can…
I’ve been eager to write Kowloon Walled City for a while. It was one of the main reasons I wanted to re-visit Hong Kong, The book can be acquired directly from the…
It has become a sad era for television. I can flick on box on any given night and see an array of cop shows, distorted ‘reality’ and teen-pandering supernaturalism. Outside of that there seems to be only ‘Game of Thrones’, which has been banned at our house (not by me). I’ve watched some incredibly well…
With thanks to Thomas Fürtig. While browsing ebay, it is easy to dismiss many of the machines there as ‘just a re-badged machine’. That phrase itself implies that it has no collectable or desirable characteristics, and is thus regarded as just another ‘also-ran’. It is also a very puritanical view that can leave out significant parts of our…
The cover – as proposed on Richard’s blog. Is it a book about typewriters? Or just writing. Yeah, I admit it. I’m a typewriter collector. I intended to stop at 3, but then I found myself rescuing a glass key Royal portable from key choppers and it all went up-hill from there. The more blogs…
A have a few more typecasts to post about my trip to Melbourne that I’m to get out of the way… oh, by the end of the year? Hope you’re still enjoying these. A view up one of Ballarat’s original gold-rush era streets, Lydiard street. *Correction: 1852, not 1952. Inside the Ansonia hotel on…
I’m quite a fan of the scientific inquiry, and all the more if you can add artistry to it. Earlier today I was sifting through my usual pile of emails. Ms Jane, who is a voracious reader had sent me a handful of typewriter related articles that she had stumbled across while surfing the world’s…
Howard Steer – Saved By The Flying Doctor. I’m going to steal Rob Messenger’s thunder a bit here. While in Charleville I found an interesting Hermes Featherlight, that had formerly been in service to a rather significant Australian. Significant enough that he features on the back of the Australian Twenty Dollar note. I speak…
Walking into the Charleville museum I was confronted by what I thought was an odd collection of typewriters. There was almost no information on each item, and they seemed to be just thrown into place as though they were set up for some ad-hoc type-in for really, really thin people that didn’t need elbow…
I now officially have a folly, as I collected the ‘Jewellery’ destined Royal this afternoon in circumstances that are fitting of it’s own blog entry. But all I can say at the moment about it is….. Oh good grief. It hasn’t been the best day. A work function at a restaurant in Hamilton last night…
The Filthy Platen 