Shift Happens: The abridged history of having fun \/\/ith keyboards - with Marcin Wichary

11 May 2023

St Bride Foundation and Online via Zoom

In-person time (BST):
Doors/bar: 18:15
Talk: 19:00-20:30
In-person tickets: £8, £10, £12.

Online time (BST):
19:00-20:30
Online tickets: £4.50, £6.50

Please note: you will be emailed the Zoom link for the talk at 6pm GMT on the day of the talk.

Book tickets HERE

This year we’re celebrating the 150th anniversary of QWERTY and the typewriter – and 150 years of keyboards as instruments of creative expression. We’ll solve a typewriter mystery or two, learn the basics of artyping, chat with Eliza and her (its?) friends, figure out the difference between ANSI, ASCII, and PETSCII art, try to figure out the meaning of two rare keyboard keys, and see what we can learn about ourselves and our relationship with machines in the process.

Marcin Wichary is a design manager at Figma and the author of Shift Happens, the upcoming book about the history of keyboards. He previously worked as a designer at Medium, Google, and Code for America.

shifthappens.site
aresluna.org

Justin Howes died on 21 February 2005. A good friend to the St Bride Library and the wider typographic community in 1999 he founded the original Friends of St Bride Library with James Mosley. He was not only a distinguished scholar, whose wide-ranging research was making an important contribution to our understanding of the types and lettering of the past, but he also put that scholarship into practice, learning to cast type by hand and to demonstrate to others the techniques of a secretive and mysterious trade. This annual lecture series is given in his memory.

We would like to thank Google and The Wynkyn de Worde Society Charitable Trust for their generosity in sponsoring this lecture.