TypeTown #14: "I just sit at my typewriter and curse a bit."
🎩 PG Wodehouse, Madrid, Glenda Leon, Braille typewriters and more...
Howdy doody.
Ready for the weekend? Yep, me too.
Let’s get cracking. We start with PG Wodehouse, or the rather grand sounding Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse to commoners like you and me.
"I just sit at my typewriter and curse a bit."
A man born in the year of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, who lived through to the final year of the Vietnam War, Wodehouse was phenomenally prolific.
His catalogue includes 90 books, 40 plays, and 200 short stories. He even found time to write for Playboy.
He was so committed to his writing that one of his novels, Money in the Bank, was written while held captive in Toszek, Poland, during the Second World War (remarkably, he was given a typewriter to pass the time).
"I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don't know what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose."
READ» PG Wodehouse’s creative writing lessons - The Guardian
READ» Yours Ever, Plum: The Letters and Life of P.G. Wodehouse - Newsweek
WATCH» PG Wodehouse - Plum - Bookmark - BBC Documentary (1989)
Madrid magico
Despite the gift of a typewriter, we feel confident in assuming Wodehouse’s accommodation in Toszek didn’t match up to Gran Hotel Ingles, the oldest and one of the finest hotels in Madrid.
Found in the city’s Barrio de las Letras district, Gran Hotel Ingles has now recognised one of the world’s irrefutable laws: nothing screams ‘sophisticated lodgings’ more than a display typewriter.
The typewriter is there to pay tribute to the hotel’s literary past, having hosted Virigina Woolf, Ramón María del Valle-Inclán and Benito Pérez Galdós during its early years.
“In 1907 several Spanish literary female writers paid tribute to the English writer Rachel Challice among its walls, and this love of literature is still present in a reading room that recalls the old libraries of the manor houses of Madrid and has 600 volumes.”
We’ll see you there.
READ» The Grand Hotel Inglés: a walk through its history - Spain by Dia Libre
READ» Inside Madrid's Newest Luxury Hotel: The Gran Hotel Inglés - Forbes
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Get your teeth into this
Also found in Madrid, at least some of the time, is visual artist Glenda León.
Splitting her time between the Spanish capital and her home country of Cuba, León’s memorable work has been inspired by the typewriter in several different ways. Teeth, feathers, chewing gum, and matchsticks are all part of her toolkit.
Nos gusta!
“The pieces of human teeth establish an analogy between the act of speaking, chewing, consuming and writing. In the absence of something to swallow, or imagining only a blank sheet as possible food, writing becomes then a devourer of voids, blank sheets.”
READ» Conceptual Typewriter Sculptures by Glenda León Replace Keys With Dripping Candles and Acrylic Nails - Colossal
And now for something completely different
Only yesterday, BuzzFeed gave its Twitter followers an introduction to Braille typewriters, which seem both incredibly simple and inexplicably complex at the same time.
Take a look.
SEE» Perkins Brailler - Perkins
WATCH» Introduction to the Perkins Brailler - Statewide Vision Resource Centre (6m31s)
Worth pausing the platen
📬 Why I Bought a Typewriter - Medium
📬 Raging against the machine - News24
📬 Tale of a typewriter - Deccan Herald
📬 Poet inspired by four-day stay in Ledbury - Ledbury Reporter
📬 King of the keys: Typewriter repairman opens Goodlettsville store - The Connection
And finally… typewriters in the wild
In the film Titanic…
In this eye-catching tattoo…
And in this wonderful image from the Olivetti assembly line in the late 1950s…
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Until next time
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TypeTown is a fortnightly celebration of the typewriter’s place in modern (and not so modern) culture.