Boxing Typewriters

Rob Bowker

Construction instruction To construct the typewriters in this book, you will need to print onto approx 160gsm white card. Cut around the outline with a sharp knife and score the creases with the back of the blade.

My blade of choice is a non-sterile Swann Morton 10A fitted to their nickel steel No.3 handles.

I reccomend cutting onto a self-healing mat by Uchida. These are available in many sizes and different colours. For Boxing Typewriters, I used a black mat 30mm x 45mm. A green would have served equally well.

Glue choice can be a very personal decision. I have had some success with PVA, though this can cause unwanted cockling. UHU general purposes can get stringy in use but holds fast in a short time.

If you print double sided, at least one of the typewriters will become invisible.

Cover image: Olivetti Graphika 87732.

I started out thinking about how I might be able to make a photorepresentation of a typewriter in cardboard. Like a cut-out and sticktogether kit.

I was interested in the physical way one looks at objects and how they are designed, often with a face that’s for public comlimption and a back that isn’t. I was also interested in the way one imagines objects when they are not present. How do we recall them?

How do we remember a face? What small features are tell-tales to identity? I decided a typewriter was just the right sort of object because they fall easily to hand. I mean, who can’t relate to a typewriter? I wasn’t really interested in making an accurate facsimile of a typewriter though, just a representation of ‘some thing’.

To conjure a beach hut vibe, this summer, the local shoe shop had cardboard boxes covered in photographs of brighlty coloured planks of painted wood. A ridiculous trompe l’oeil but no passing shopper was left in doubt that summer was here and summer = sandals = seaside = brightly coloured painted wood.

Though no reference was made in the shop window, shoe boxes are shoe boxes – resolutely cuboid.

Stuff comes in boxes. Packaged more or less obscurely, often with a transparency showing the contents at life-size. Equally often packed in a generic box with a small verbal description of the contents to differentiate it from other items by the same seller.

So, the box is sort of everything and nothing when it comes to belying its contents. Most objects aren’t cuboid but my 1930s Royal KHM comes as close as any typewriter to filling the space fully. It is the most cubic typewriter I own. The faces are sheer and vertical. Few domestic consumer durables have been marketed as agressively as the typewriter.

Historically, typewriter marketing could be a model for lots and lots of stuff we never knew we needed but found so indispendible once the cash had been handed over.

The typewriters in the cubes are motifs.

They could just as easily be cars or TVs or whatever. Stuff. The cube is the most reductive form I could think of. The 50mm x 50mm x 50mm cube best accomodates desktops. Standard machines for the office. I cut this in half for laptops (portables) which are the Olympia SM-2 and the Underwood Noiseless 77. These are squatter boxes

at 50mm x 50mm x 25mm. At this size, the flat-taken aspects of the typewriters were stretched and distorted as little as possible while still filling the six sides of the box.

It is very interesting, in going through the process, that the reduction to a cube or demi -cube renders any typewriter (or any ‘thing’) to the same base values. Anything you might envisage or imagine will have a photograph-able aspect which can be rotated 90 degrees and in two axes.

Anything can go in a box. Even the process of drawing relies on the implicit edges of a cube. For an inorganic form, I can see how it has become so adaptable at containing worldly goods.

Chattles.

Maersk recently completed the first of a fleet of new container ships (designated Triple-E) which are the largest-ever to set to sea. The greatest pains have been taken to ensure their efficiency and accuracy in transporting nothing more sophisticated than the humble box.

So, the dust is yet to settle on the box.

The ease by which the production of artwork for a new typewriter box is achieved means a degree of repetition but this is useful because each typewriter poses different challenges and demands different degrees of compromise in the process of being boxed.

1937 Royal KHM standard typewriter. S/N: KHM 2191365 From the collection at Typewriter Heaven

1950s Olivetti Graphika. S/N: 87732 From the collection at Typewriter Heaven

1961 Imperial 66. S/N: 6F29095 From the collection at Typewriter Heaven

1951 Olympia SM-2. S/N: 110739 From the collection at Typewriter Heaven

1947 Underwood Noiseless 77. S/N: 1513272 From the collection at Typewriter Heaven

This is absolutely amazing beyond words. Good job!

Dana Perez, Mid2Mod, Fort Worth

The added authenticity achieved by (god knows how) taking a photo of the underneath of these typewriter cubes is priceless.

Steve Snow, The Impatient Typewriter Mechanic, Brisbane

Here in Oz they put beer in boxes too.

Writelephant, Perth

www.typewriterheaven.blogspot.com Š Rob Bowker 2013