Abstract/Summary

Drawing on a selection of non-keyboard ‘index’ typewriters, this exhibition explores how input mechanisms and alphabetic arrangements were devised and contested continually in the process of popularising typewrites as personal machines. The display particularly looks at how the letters of the alphabet have been variously comprehended, accessed, and handled, before being impressed on paper. Operative methods and layouts of late-19th/early-20th century typewriters were as fluid and irreverent as they were wide-ranging. The material on display demonstrates how this multiplicity was both occasioned by and flourished through a combination of mechanical ingenuity, conceptual reformulations, and commercial adventurism. As a set of imaginative responses to ‘mechanising’ the alphabet, index typewriters raise important questions in the key encounter between writing and technology.