Since the book will soon be delivered to about half the people who ordered it, with many to follow in the next weeks, I thought I’ll start sharing a few of the “making of” posts I had been thinking of.

These will go deeper than before. Please, please let me know if this is interesting since they take a while to prepare.

If you are looking for cool keyboards instead, I shared photos and a video of a fascinating “typewriter” in this November Kickstarter update and strange Australian navy keyboards just seconds ago.

A few sentences of dialogue from a 1968 sci-fi book changed the way I look at writing.

The book is called Tales of Pirx the Pilot and written by someone who’d become my favourite author – Stanisław Lem.

Lem was a masterful literary world builder, and Pirx stories were no exception. The opening paragraphs weren’t wasted on clunky exposition or establishing shots. No, you were thrown straight into Pirx’s universe, without an onramp and without a warning. The explanations would come in due time, in between the lines, or never at all.

As the book is nearing its delivery, please check out the cute mini game I made out of the book’s slipcase.

Also, the book got a nice write-up in Ars Technica and I was on a short and sweet public-radio podcast.

⌘

The book will start shipping soon! If you have lost track of Kickstarter updates, please supply or verify your address by following these instructions.

If you are not a Kickstarter backer or later pre-orderer, I opened up a bunch of recent updates to everyone, and they might be interesting to read if you want to see more of the process of bringing a book to life: July update, photos from the printer visit and the sequel, August update, and September update.

⌘

Many years ago, I received design validation in what was perhaps the most surprising, most genuine, and most delightful way it’s possible to get it.

The dream state of writing a book is the flow state. It’s romantic, this idea that the skies part and perfect words and metaphors and connections flow straight into your fingertips at the pace ideal for measured writing and satisfied reflection.

The good news is that this actually happens. There were moments in the last few years where my brain stumbled upon a phrase I felt so happy about, I had to sit down to a keyboard to write, right then and there.

But this state can also delude. In 2016, I thought of the perfect opening paragraph of my book. I remember where I was exactly: at a dam near Seattle, after visiting the great museums there, among beautiful trees and mountains. It felt like such a writerly, perfect moment, for the first words of the book to arrive this way.

Hello, friends!

I’m finding Kickstarter kind of funny, because it separates milestones in strange ways. A successful Kickstarter is better than a failed one, of course, but a Kickstarter being finished doesn’t mean the books are in people’s hands quite yet. Stretch goals and initial funding muddle things even further. Are you supposed to quarter-celebrate each time around? Just wait until everything is shipped?

I don’t actually know. But in the meantime, here we are, close to yet another milestone: The Kickstarter campaign for Shift Happens has only about 60 hours more to go! Yes, it’s over 400% funded, which is honestly incredible, and it’s the second book in the history of Kickstarter non-fiction publishing. We all know the book will get printed by October.

But we’re not quite done yet.

The Kickstarter for Shift Happens still has 10 days to go.

Please help us get to $700,000 and unlock a free nice colorful third-volume for everyone by backing and spreading the word!

And now for something completely different…

⌘

If you backed the book, you have seen some – but not nearly all – of this in my first (!) backer update.

The campaign update

The Kickstarter campaign was funded within the first two hours, and at this time it’s very close to being 300% funded, which is incredible. This means the book will definitely get printed – as a matter of fact, the printer is excited, too – and if more people back, the book could automatically become nicer for everybody owing to economies of scale!

Kickstarter

I just pressed the Enter key at the right place, and the Kickstarter for my book went live.

I hope you find it valuable and entertaining, and enticing enough to click on one of the tiers and then, too, press Enter at the right place. (Or use your mouse or finger, I guess, if you’re like that.)

The Kickstarter for the book will launch on Tuesday, February 7, at 9am Pacific! I will send another email before so you won’t miss it, but you can also bookmark the Kickstarter page (although at this moment it is not particularly exciting).

There will also be a livestream at 11am Pacific (2pm east coast time, 7pm London time) the same day. I will be joined by Robin Rendle – a designer, typographer, and one of my favourite design thinkers – to talk about the book, the stories within, the keyboards I met along the way, and what the whole project means to me!

For those interested, we might also later go into the process of putting the book together and more details – I want to screen share some stuff and even perhaps try to assemble part of the book using my strange scripts.

Happy New Year!

The website for the book is ready at shifthappens.site. I’m really excited about it:

• you can see what the book is going to look like exactly

• you can learn so much more about what’s inside

I’ve printed many versions of the book before using print on demand, but what arrived last week feels so much more important. It’s the first test from the actual printer in Maine I’m going to employ.

In the chronology of my Spanish trip going haywire, the hard drive dying came on May 5, after me getting COVID and after the cat sitter locked herself out of my apartment, but before an airline kicked me out of the airport despite following all the recovery rules, and before the second airline lost my luggage.

The drive was a relatively new four-terabyte SSD, and 75% of its contents were the 100,000+ files that encompass the book: the writing, the high-resolution photos, the typesetting, the database of keyboard stuff, all the newsletters and various mini projects. It was all there until one moment, without any warning, it wasn’t.

I won’t keep you in unnecessary suspense: there was no real danger. I backed everything up just before I left, and even the hard-to-replace photos I took earlier on the trip were immediately duplicated into sets put in different wallets and suitcases.

Still. I’ve done a million small things during the trip’s quieter evenings – photo processing, minute adjustments, tiny rewrites, and so on – and the notion of having to redo all of them felt daunting. Besides, I wasn’t sure I kept track of them all, and it’s a really unpleasant feeling to face something not being done while remembering having done it. (Or, don’t ever let Schrödinger and Zeigarnik have a baby!)

I finally have some good news to share. We† found the right paper and the printer that knows what to do with it, and have all the verbal agreements we need. Things can go haywire still, but this is the current plan:

• crowdsourcing (likely Kickstarter) in February 2023
• printing over the summer
• book publication in the late summer/fall 2023

I’ll tell you the complex story of the paper search later, but what’s exciting about this moment is also that I finally can start sharing some aspects of the book, because I no longer worry about them changing.

So let’s start with revealing the chapter list!

There are some exciting new developments on the printer/paper front. If things go well, I’ll have something to announce next time! Please keep your fingers crossed.

Have you ever seen a pinball machine being scared?

Pinballs, already fascinating during their mechanical era, accelerated in complexity with the advent of microprocessors. Like many other things in the 1980s, pinballs too became computers, and this allowed them to reach new heights: music and digitized sound effects, small and then big animated screens, different play modes, remembering the state between players, and multiball.

The famous saying goes “the best camera is the one you have on you,” but I keep changing my mind about what it means.

In the early days of my interest in photography, this felt simple. “The best camera is the one you have on you” meant “don’t forget to bring your camera.”

Then, as smartphones made it hard not to carry a camera, the saying morphed into: “any camera is better than none.” You might have left your point-and-shoot at home, but you can still capture something with your iPhone.

Throughout the history of keyboards, a battle has been fought by two opposing camps.

On one side, there were keyboards with the modifier keys – the Shifts, the Controls, the Commands. They appeared in QWERTY’s suburbia the moment typewriters needed uppercase and lowercase characters, and never went away. 

Early typewriters experimented with two, or even three separate shifts, and while eventually we standardized on just one Shift key (cloned onto both sides of the spacebar for convenience), other modifier keys followed in due time – Margin Release in typewriters, Ctrl in teletypes, Code in word processors, Alt in terminals. Each one added at least one new possible function to other keys, and likely more after you started combining the modifier keys (like in the infamous Ctrl+Alt+Del).

What’s going on with the book

There’s no easy way to put this.

The book is ready to go. The writing, proofreading, typesetting are completely done, and photography’s incredibly close. The campaign video is 100% ready. The cool little site I made for the occasion needs just a few extra days of polish.

But the book also needs to be delayed. All of this – regrettably, sadly, frustratingly – is owing to the supply chain problems. The printers are either unavailable or overloaded, the right paper is hard to come by, and the situation seems to be changing by a month. My friend, who’s been in this business for over a decade, told me “I’ve never seen it being so bad. If you don’t have to rush, I’d advise waiting.”

I learned a thing long time ago, and it was: Once you print something, you can’t get it back.

On the surface, this statement doesn’t make any sense. Scanners are cheap, and in 2021 some digital cameras are as good as scanners, too. Optical character recognition is so fast that it can happen in real time, leaving enough processor power for simultaneous translation to a different language. And I myself bragged about scanning almost 400 printed items and putting them up on the Internet Archive the other day.

But something happens to photos in particular when they get printed. Pixels only make sense on displays. To survive in real life, pixels have to get translated into halftones – complex patterns of translucent cyan, magenta, yellow, and black dots that overlap, vary in size, and are rotated at strange, yet deliberate angles.

I’m writing this newsletter under duress. The last issue, one I sent just a week ago, arrived in spam folders for most people owing to a glitch in Revue – and I really wanted you to know about the livestream that’s happening this Saturday.

But this also presents a fun opportunity. The many recent issues of the newsletter were complex mini essays, and it might be fun to do something much simpler. So let’s just talk about three bad keyboards I’ve gotten recently!

Keyboard №1

I watched the TV show Chernobyl with a pit in my stomach, but also – please, do not judge me – a strange sense of nostalgia.

Quick updates first: 

• I am aiming to release the book in 2022. There are still many unknowns, but people who know the printing process better than I am tell me this is doable. (I still have to go to to a museum in Spain, but hoping this becomes possible.)
• Let’s meet! I will be hosting a very informal livestream if you want to come: see some of my keyboards, and let’s just chat! This will be happening on Saturday, July 17, at 10am San Francisco time (5pm GMT). More livestream details and sign-up info here

⌘

A few weeks ago, my coworker tweeted this:

I open the door, exit the bar, and walk outside onto the sidewalk in a surprisingly straight line. It’s a nice, warm night. I hear muffled music coming from the inside, and the buzzing of the blinking neon that’s trying very hard to spell “Lefty’s.” I take a deep whiff and immediately regret it, being reminded of a large trash bin nearby.

And then, it hits me: I’m a loser. I’m balding, fat, and on the more cruel side of forty. I came to this town searching for love, but I haven’t yet found anything but toilet paper stuck to my shoe. I exchanged all my possessions for the ill-fitting white polyester suit, and I am wasting my days away drinking cheap whiskey at a run-down bar.

I sigh. I hail a taxi cab to get to the casino. Then, I forget how to say “thank you.”

⌘

Every Saturday at 8am, a certain ritual takes place. All my snoozed book-related emails resurface that time, my inbox lighting up with dozens of reminders. I respond to a few that need responding, poke a few people I haven’t heard from in months, archive emails that feel complete, and snooze the rest once more so that they reappear in a week.

I learned to love this part of the process, that flywheel of sorts that gives the book some momentum. Some of the emails are eBay purchases in transit, some requests for imagery, some reminders to myself (always, for some reason, in all caps), and some messages to experts and proofreaders. But the group that has always been the trickiest and that lingered the longest is emails to people I wanted to talk to.

There is the art of interviewing, and there is the art of knowing whom to interview. Although I have learned a lot since the first chat I had with Rick Dickinson in 2017, I am still too nervous, too inexperienced, too deferential. I admire other interviewers who can listen to an answer while thinking ahead to the next question, who can fluently steer a conversation, who can coax people to admit to new things or connect old things in new ways, and who can assemble a “B roll” of good quotes while taking care of the main threads. 

You’ve always been a bit suspicious of the trashcan on your computer’s imaginary desk top, and I’m here to tell you why. 

I know what you’re thinking – I figured it out already, in real life no one keeps a trashcan on top of their desk. Yes, this adds to the tension. But the real reason is, I think, far more interesting.

The trashcan is an example of a skeuomorph – an intentional borrowing from a prior time that exists as a bridge to the past in order to make people feel comfortable and familiar.

Sometime in 2019, I fell in love with a photo in a way I’ve never known before:

What grasped me here? Many things. The grittiness. The composition. The angular shapes of the key punch machine juxtaposed with the person typing. The stains on the wall. The sideburns and the glasses placing the action, I thought, some time in the 1970s. And that sign, that sign! “EXPRESS KEYPUNCH: 3 minutes or 6 cards (or until asked to leave!)” Six cards means a mere 480 bytes; you don’t expect a keyboard to be in such high demand.

I’ve loved photos before. But with this one, there was a new factor: I loved it so much that I wanted it in my book.

It’s hard for me to explain how I feel about Twitter. On one hand, there is the abuse, the Nazis, and Jack Dorsey’s almost legendary indolence. When it doesn’t chip away at your attention, Twitter creates – and then supercharges – your outrage.

But also: Twitter has been helpful and, as cheesy as it sounds, made me a better person. Yes, I sometimes become snarky and (very occasionally) even cruel, but I also try hard to follow activists, pay attention to thoughtful people, and listen to many who simply… don’t look like me.

As for the book, I quoted Twitter many times in this newsletter, and there’s a reason: it is on Twitter that I found a great community of people that engage me, share things with me, cheer me on when I share my process, and up when I struggle. This has been a crucial part of writing, and I’m thankful for it.

So, this newsletter will be rather simple: just links to my best/most popular Twitter threads related to the book. You’ll have to brave Twitter’s oft-confusing user interface – but I swear it’ll be worth it.

It’s not just keyboards. Even some of the touch typing manuals can be great-looking:

A few fun stories

This is a forgotten story of Typit, the typewriter extension to solve a problem we all take for granted today:

Step aside Enigma, the most interesting crypto keyboard is… the Barbie Typewriter:

And, speaking of cryptography – a story of that one time I keylogged myself:

About a few keys

This is a thread about the unexpected origins of the ⌘ key:

Never meet your heroes, or an internet appliance with an unusual button:

And, an ongoing thread of weird keys in general:

Solving mysteries

I ask people to send me the most unusual keyboards they can think of without any context, as a challenge:

Other times, people help me out in identification. This Spectrum joystick should look familiar if you read the last newsletter:

A few months earlier, Twitter friends helped me figure out the make of a rather unusual and rare computer:

Not everything’s super great

Through this Twitter thread, you might learn to hate novelty calculators:

…or wristwatch keyboards:

Or Soviet clones of Spectrum computers (of course, it’s entirely possible you’ll learn to love them instead):

Smaller threads (on smaller things)

“This note in a used book I just bought broke my heart”:

Great miniature art by Tanaka Tatsuya. He’s been doing it for so long that just the keyboard-related entires make for a great thread:

“3–8 minute shorts about old men repairing typewriters.”

Pop culture

Once I asked about movies that feature typing, and people floored me with their answers (fun game: count how often my response is “Ooooh.”):

A grab bag of fun links about auto-suggest/auto-complete/spell check/predictive text:

Around the world

This thread of people sending in translations of the term “touch typing” in different languages was extraordinary:

I went to Japan and I started documenting every keyboard I saw… and then gave up. There were too many:

At a museum in Laws, California, I also found a surprising number of keyboards – and then convinced the staff to let me into secret areas just so I could take some photos for the book: 

A by-appointment-only office tech museum in Delaware had some great artifacts inside:

Another museum in Catalonia revealed so, so many old-school computers with fantastic keyboards (and this thread’s Esc jokes feel timely again!):

And speaking of Catalonia – this here, in late 2016, is my most popular Twitter thread, and a truly miraculous discovery that gave me so much joy and energy (in hindsight so necessary to continue working on this book for so long):

2020

What does the next year bring? I don’t know much, but I have two ideas:

The first is to actually return to that very museum in Figueres, Spain – get to know the owners/collectors, take among the last photos I need for the book, and reunite with that magical place.

The second one? 

The book should come out in late 2020. I think. I hope. I so far avoided promising dates since there have always been so many unknowns on the horizon. But while I am still uncertain of many upcoming tasks, my understanding of the rest of the process is that this – a late 2020 publishing date – should be eminently doable. 

So please keep your fingers crossed, send your best wishes, and… I guess, follow me on Twitter. It’s usually fun, and I’d love your comments and feedback, although sometimes my tweets misfire – as is the case with this recent depressing Christmas thread.

But I won’t leave on that note. Following the last year’s tradition, I have a message for you, written on a one-of-a-kind keyboard. I very much encourage you to view the movie in higher quality, with sound on, but either way:

That 16-segment-display exclamation point is just the best

Marcin

This was newsletter №19 for Shift happens, an upcoming book about keyboards. Read previous issues · Check out all the secret documents