The Art of Typewriting
Collector’s Edition

The last remaining copies of the award-winning celebration of an underground graphic art are presented in unique, numbered and collectible slipcases.

  • 144 of 200
    copies remaining in edition
  • $94.00

About

Hailed by the Huffington Post as one of the best art books of the year – The Art of Typewriting presents 600 of the most exceptional works on paper ever produced. From early ornamental pages produced by secretaries in the late nineteenth century to more recent works that consider the typewritten document in the digital age, there is an astonishing range of creativity in every piece.

Published to great acclaim in 2015, only a few hundred copies remain. To commemorate this unique manual art form, Volume is releasing the final copies of the book with a specially designed slipcase limited to an edition of only 200 copies. A witty collaboration between the book’s designers, London-based studio Graphic Thought Facility, and Johannes Lang, who runs a ‘letter-making enterprise’ in Vienna, each numbered copy of the slipcase is unique, featuring a ‘coded ribbon’ that ‘wraps’ each slipcase in a different configuration.

With contributions by graphic-design historian Steven Heller and digital guru John Maeda, the result is a highly collectible volume that exalts the printed letterform to its highest form of expression and the creative obsessions that marry the mechanical act of typewriting with the poetic aesthetics of computer code.

Specifications
352 pages
315 x 250 mm
Hardcover edition contains individual combination of front and back image
Each specially designed slipcase is unique and numbered

The slipcase design resulted from some rather messy experiments, wrapping vintage typewriter ribbon around a box. Interesting compositions came about, but to avoid them looking mannered, we asked Johannes Lang to employ his coding know-how. He developed a script that generated 200 unique compositions that had the degree of variety that would not have come out of my human brain.

Paul Neale, Graphic Thought Facility

Today we place type onto pages (and onto screens) effortlessly. With no mess. No sound. No difficulty. I find it wonderfully ironic that the images in this collection are clearly not made on a computer. What is it about them? It’s their mechanical imperfection, carefully mixed with human sensibilities and grit. I suspect there will be more than a few young digital designers that will be shopping on eBay for a typewriter soon.

John Maeda

The authors

Authors Marvin and Ruth Sackner cofounded The Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, based in Miami, Florida, in 1979. The archive, acknowledged to be the largest of its kind in the world, includes a wide range of printed matter and spans a huge variety of art movements, styles and genres, such as Italian Futurism, Russian Avant-Garde, Dada, Surrealism, Bauhaus, De Stijl, and Ultra-Lettrisme. In 2014, Marvin Sackner was awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French minister of culture.