It’s been a big couple of weeks here in Melbourne, and frankly I’m exhausted. A manager of my department launched myself and another co-worked into a 2 week revised workload trial that saw me working 8 of the 14 days till 11pm. All with less than 40 hours to prepare before it started. The bags…
Errrm, this should read ‘Ten-Forty, not Two-Forty’.
The Invicta. It has the most beautiful segment ever made, and a sharp and sophisticated design in its branding that is almost iconic. This is a machine that has an art-deco flair that has only been surpassed by the better known Olivetti Studio 42. But none of that seemed to stop this machine coming dangerously close to losing its life.…
I haven’t spent much time at the typeface of late as I’ve either been too unwell to feel motivated to write, or too preoccupied with work and a house full of visitors. As such I’ve been a bit delayed with my writing. I owe some correspondence to some of my local friends, as well…
Vital signs are still present: Beating heart with an appearance that I am awake and alert, and my fingers are still able to hit the keyboard. Yep, I believe I still qualify as living. That said, of late I feel my quality of living has been a little questionable. About three and a bit weeks…
What is the colour of this typewriter? This isn’t a trick question. The photo below was taken with my iPhone in my kitchen under 8 x 11-watt high efficiency (fluorescent) light bulbs. If you’ve seen a few of these Erika typewriters before, you probably will have just glanced at it and said ‘Black’. If you…
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…
Welcome back to ‘Filthy Labs’! I don’t really need a lot of words to introduce what this blog post is about, as the title is rather self explanatory. So welcome to the interesting, and microscopic world of the typewriter – under a somewhat dodgy and cheap 60X microscope. Type Stubs Crinkle…
I’m on dangerous ground here. For the last 6 months I have been largely concentrating my collecting activity on German machines – specifically Olympias, and I have been trawling ebay.de looking for specific typewriters for my collection. However, focusing on Olympias has introduced me to some interesting aspects of the history of their machines,…
When it comes to Science fiction story-telling, it is hard to remember a world that wasn’t created in a CGI environment. Colour, light and texture-mapping often fades out strong stories and good character development. The bigger the budget, the bigger the wow and the smaller the personal involvement in the story. So I was…
The Filthy Platen 