Typewriter Exhibition Mementos

Far and away the highlight for me in this memorable typewriting year was the two-month Typewriter Exhibition held at the Canberra Museum and Gallery from July to September. The exhibition was seen by 12,000 people.

As if the museum hadn't done enough in presenting 101 of my typewriters in such a wonderful display, I was astonished at the end of the exhibition to be presented with a beautiful little Moleskine cover book as a memento. Some of the pages from the book are shown here:

Naturally I had a number of "thank you" letters to write to museum staff, most especially the exhibition curator Rowan Henderson (below).

Happily, because of the many images of old typewriter company letterheads offered online by Georg Sommeregger and Richard Polt, I was able to typewrite these letters on a range of different pages.

One reply noted, "I had forgotten the delightful feel of the indentations on the reverse side of a typewritten document!" Now there's something we don't think about very often!

The museum's director called the exhibition "a great success for us and extremely popular with our visitors".

It was pleasing that in an article on the National Library of Australia's website, headed "A reflection on the National Library of Australia’s Treasures gallery", Michael Piggott wrote, "The Library’s premier gallery can also now demonstrate that an exhibition of content for its own sake actually can work, if cleverly thought through and appropriately disguised within legitimate micro themes. Good examples where the message is the medium abound, such as the recent exhibitions and matching publications from the State Library of New South Wales (ONE Hundred), the British Museum and the BBC (A History of the World in 100 Objects) and the Canberra Museum and Art Gallery (From A to Z: Robert Messenger’s Typewriters)."

In the commentary, a photo from the exhibition was captioned: "One man’s treasure: an eclectic collection of typewriters on display ..."

In the aftermath of the exhibition, Rowan Henderson passed on some other small mementos, such as letters written by Scott Kernaghan and others on public use typewriters (including an IBM Selectric with a Blick keyboard).

One day that my friend Eva, 82, visited the exhibition, she was there when a busload of Japanese tourists arrived. Many of them used the typewriters. Knowing most of us automatically type "The quick brown fox ...", Eva wandered over to the typewriters after the tourists had left, curious to see what they had typed. This is a typical example: