With Great Truth and Regard
The story of the typewriter in india
This book is a tribute to the typewriter, one of the few everyday mechanical technologies still used in India, and recently termed the ultimate hipster accessory by The Telegraph. In the West, typewriters were almost always indoor objects confined to offices and studies. But in India they have long been a part of life on the street and you can still encounter rows of typists in front of courthouses and government buildings.
The book was not designed with the intention of inciting retro mania or a typewriter renaissance – while it does cater to nostalgia for everyday mechanical technologies such as bicycles and sewing machines. The brief we gave ourselves was to make the book interactive and appealing to even non-readers.
With articles by historians, essays and interviews on individuals and institutions who have had long associations with the machine, the manuscript was fairly text heavy. However, we had at our disposal a veritable treasure trove of archival content as well as Chirodeep’s evocative photographs. We gave ourselves a brief to make the book as ‘interactive’ as possible. We dipped into the many aspects of material and visual culture associated with the machine: “Piiiiing” – the stretched out tinkle at the end of each line, drawing itself in preparation for the next; a quirky illustration of a pangram showing a brown fox jumping over a lazy dog; a smudgy fingerprint from carbon paper making readers do a double check of their own fingers; crossed out x’s and proofreader marks hidden in the text; all these and more are waiting to be discovered in this volume.
“A history of typewriters is more than a history of machines: it is equally a history of their users and of the world of social activity and cultural association they help bring into being.”
The typewriter post Independence symbolised changing times, of modernity tied in with larger narratives, whether of nationalistic pride or the entrance of woman into the workplace. Cartoons of workplace scenes, frames of a dance on a typewriter in a Hindi film, intersperse with archival adevrtisements from the 70s and visual culture memorablia closely linked to the social activity of the era.
Scope
Creating Theme based Chapters | Writing for the Section Separators | Design and layout
Team
Sarita Sundar, Shreyas R Krishnan, Joanna Mendes, Sybil D’Souza, Georgie Paul, Ruchika Chanana