TypeTown #11: "There is no agony like it."
🕵️♀️ Agatha Christie, Austin Kleon, Ruby Keeler, and the Carolina Panthers...
Hello, hello.
Please, pull up a chair.
Can I get you a drink?
For the last fortnight, we’ve been stretching our little grey cells to find a way into this latest issue of TypeTown.
So, please, welcome to your Friday routine Agatha Christie — creator of Hercule Poirot, author of 72 novels, 14 short stories, and the brain behind The Mousetrap, the world’s longest-running play (it opened in the West End in 1952, only paused for Covid-19, and re-opened in May 2021).
She’s also the world’s all-time best-selling novelist. Four billion — yes, billion — and counting…
Not a bad little tally, is it?
And all knocked out on the humble typewriter.
Sound superhuman?
Reassuringly for the rest of us, it didn’t always feel that way.
“There is no agony like it. You sit in a room, biting pencils, looking at a typewriter, walking about, or casting yourself down on a sofa, feeling you want to cry your head off.”
READ» Agatha Christie’s Writing Habits - Tony Riches
READ» In the Study, with a Typewriter: 100 Years of Agatha Christie Novels - Publishers Weekly
READ» Agatha Christie: getting away with murder - The Guardian
Once you’re in, you’re in
If you’re at all interested in culture or creativity, Austin Kleon has been a must-follow for years.
This week, he’s been celebrating the 10th anniversary of the publication of Steal Like An Artist.
And it turns out he’s an another honorary member of the typosphere.
Three years ago, he got the bug.
It led to the inevitable consequences all TypeTowners will recognise…
And we all know there’s no way back.
Welcome to the gang, Austin.
READ» Austin’s newsletter has arrived in our inbox for the best part of a decade. More than 98,000 others get it, too.
Enjoying this?
Tapping out a masterpiece
For two glorious minutes at least, Ruby Keeler and Lee Dixon couldn’t put a foot wrong back in 1937.
Here they are in Ready, Willing, and Able dancing across an enormous typewriter.
What’s not to like?
Here’s the game-plan
We break from normal service to bring you this magnificent five-part Twitter drama from the 2015 Carolina Panthers’ press box.
Just because.
Typewriters, duh.
Quite.
Worth pausing the platen
📬 Inside Libération, the Legendary French Newspaper — Magnum Photos
📬 What I learned about languages just by looking at a Turkish typewriter — Medium
📬 Off the cuff: The way of the typewriters — Gulf News
📬 27 ways I use a typewriter — Paper Blogging
And finally… typewriters in the wild
In this striking 1926 image from German press photographer Georg Pahl…
In this downtown Toronto cafe…
And in this fun Smith-Corona produced by the same artist who knocked up the Mondrian typewriter…
TypeTown… brought to you by caffeine
Many thanks to all kindly supporters of the TypeTown tea fund.
As ever, and with all the usual caveats of absolutely no pressure, expectation or hard sales push… if TypeTown brightens your week, I’m open to coffee tea.
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Until next time
PS: New here?
TypeTown is a fortnightly celebration of the typewriter’s place in modern (and not so modern) culture.