Customer Reviews

Quirky Qwerty: A Biography of the Typewriter and Its Many Characters

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And you thought that the alphabet is only 26 simple letters. Torbjorn Lundmark, a true hybrid Swede living in Australia with a background in lingustics, and is also an illustrator and cartoonist has taken a well trodden road and made it accessible. Over 170 pages, he deconstructs the development of the typewriter (which may sound dull, but is quite interesting) and reviews not only the 26 letters, but all the supporting punctuation. The history of each letter and where it was born, stolen and reintegrated (usually after some modifications) are little mini odyssey's. The @ symbol was almost extinct until Ray Tomlinson used it to link names to server addresses. There is a very extensive reference section for more exploration. I would highly recommend this book for experienced designers and novices alike.

This book manages to include, in one little package, material about the history of the letters of the alphabet, the history of the typewriter and its odd keyboard arrangement (as well as other proposed keyboards), the computer codings for various characters, and more. How the author managed such a great information density without becoming unreadable amazes me.

If you have _any_ curiosity about our alphabet, typewriters, or anything related to these, you should read this book.

This small, easy-to-read, peppered-with-wit book manages to cover just about everything you could possibly want to know about the history of our QWERTY keyboard, who really invented the typewriter, the evolution of our alphabet and the history of such symbols as the dollar sign (and why it's called a "dollar"), the Euro, the pound sign and any other dot and tittle on your keyboard.

Citing historic documents and practices from the Greeks, Semitic tribes, the Irish scribes, Hindu mathematicians, etc., the author gives the reader the "big picture" of the how and why of the symbols we use for math, reading and punctuation.

The book also includes some handy charts of HTML, ASCII and ISO codes for special characters, including key combinations for both PC & Mac.

The chapters are short and to the point. The author uses text creatively, wrapping it around into a design to help bring home a point about a particular symbol's development, etc.

Not exhaustive, but unless you're writing your Master's thesis on this topic, it doesn't need to be - it gives a well-rounded, brief education of the symbols we use every day.

The gentleman below wrote an excellent review of this book, which I heartily second--it's well-written but an easy read, fun, and it's taught me *loads* of stuff about characters and symbols on the keyboard I never even thought of! I can't wait to employ some of the new stuff in this book in my e-mails. This book's a read must-read.

What this book is good for: short, concise historical backgrounds on the letters of the alphabet and punctuation.

What this book is bad for: reading. Well-intentioned, but a terminally corny tone makes this book pretty unbearable.

I'm sure many people will find this quirkful and querulous, but the bulk of this book has very little to do with keyboards!
The part that does is quite interesting.

Starting on page 20, the author switches from a discussion of keyboards to a history of the alphabet and various symbols.

Quackish titling if you ask me!

As I glanced over "Quirky Qwerty" by Torbjoern Lundmark, I thought this would be an in-depth history of the typewriter. It ened up being a brief history on the characters and symbols on the typewriter.

The layout of the book is highly visual, and the typesetting plays a big part in the contents, which makes it a somewhat interesting read. I must admit, however, with the exception of a few points at the beginning of the book, Lundmark added nothing new to what is already known (at least to me; if you find otherwise, modesty forbids).

Another of my pet peeve with this book, is its varous unintentional typogracphical errors. At one instance, he even forgot to finish off a sentence. This book is catchy, but it offers little in turn.