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Marcin Wichary's photos of an Olivetti Praxis 48 electric typewriter. (credit: Marcin Wichary)
It's the 150th anniversary of the QWERTY keyboard, and Marcin Wichary has put together the kind of history and celebration this totemic object deserves.
Shift Happens
is a two-volume, 1,200-plus-page work with more than 1,300 photos, researched over seven years and cast lovingly into type and photo spreads that befit the subject.
You can
preorder it now
, and orders before October 4 (Wednesday) can still be shipped before Christmas, while orders on October 5 or later will have to wait until December or January. Preorders locked in before Wednesday also get a 160-page "volume of extras."
Wichary, a designer, engineer, and writer who has worked at Google, Medium, and Figma, has been working in public to get people excited about type, fonts, and text design for some time now. He told the Twitter world about
his visit to an obscure, magical Spanish typewriter museum
in 2016. He put a lot of work into
crafting the link underlines at Medium
and
explaining font fallbacks at Figma
.
Shift Happens
reads and looks like Wichary's chance to
tell the bigger story
around all the little things that fascinate him and to lock into history all the strange little stories he loves.