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Sunday 26 February 2012

Making Paper Typewriters

It's a year now since I presented at the Sticky Institute's I Am Typewriter Festival in Melbourne.
The zine makers down there showed me lots of things you can do that are typewriter-related. And going through my bits and pieces today, I found one of them: Making typewriters out of paper -
The Olympia above is a series of images of the typewriter, printed in black and white, cut out in sections and pasted to an inner cardboard frame. It is just over four inches square and an inch high. The Blue Bird below is a little simpler to try, if you can print out on an A4 sheet. It has no frame, but perhaps it should be printed on stiffer paper:
I bow, however, to the real expert in this area, a man called Bryan, at Paper Foldables:

http://www.paperfoldables.com/
Bryan made this paper typewriter for Canal Publishing, promoting a novel by Christopher Herz, "The Last Block in Harlem". Bryan says, "Herz writes the first draft of his books on this cool old typewriter of his, which also makes an appearance on the cover of the book. He plans to promote the book grassroots style and make a bunch of these little typewriters and leave them all over NYC! If you are in town, keep your eyes peeled and maybe you'll be lucky enough to find one!"
The layout above is a PDF at
http://www.canalpublishing.com/images/foldables/LBIH_Foldable.pdf
And this one is way out of my league: Jennifer Collier, a British artist, recycles paper into 3-D objects by sewing sheets of it like fabric.






3 comments:

Bill M said...

Such a great idea! The first series was a bit deceiving until the last one -- reflections from the keys gave it away as not a real typewriter. I may now need to try my hand at paper typewriters.

notagain said...

pretty spiffy

Richard P said...

Clever! A neat topic I hadn't considered before.