January 15, 2009

Typewriter ribbon tins are now collectibles. via lovelypackage
posted by Plegmund 15 years ago
  • Ooh, beautiful. Lots of want. No idea what I'd do with them, but want anyway. *bookmarks lovelypackage*
  • If you weren't willing to cultivate and outrageous drug habit, they'd make some spiffing containers for your Fisherman's Friends. I'll eschew the "lovely package" puns, as the site owners obviously got there first.
  • Holy crepes! Would you look at those prices! Great. I have a terrible habit of hoarding little tins from all sorts of things: Altoids, FF's, Bert's Bees, Bag Balm, anything and everything. My collecting bug just got more deeply entrenched thinking that someday MY little tinny pieces of crap will be worth something. My precioussssssss...
  • My kids wouldn't even know what a typewriter was if it weren't for their Looney Tunes and Tom & Jerry dvds. *sigh*
  • OooooOoooh. These are delightful. Doesn't it seem that graphic design was a lot better before the advent of "anyone can do it" desktop publishing? A quick browse through newspapers from the 20s and 30s will reveal gorgeous, often deco-inspired, ads with wonderful white space and type usage; today's adds seem to be all about horror vacuii. There are exceptions, of course, but now that type is generated via computer, I see far less inventive typographic design as well. That said, I sometimes miss manual typewriters and keep a 1928 Royal on hand for when my fingers get bored. It took real skill to type on a manual; finger strength and even keystroke pressure were a must in order to generate pleasing type. And oh, the sound of the bell, and that gratifying swipe to operate the carriage return! Sigh. So many tactile and aural pleasures, now gone forever... remember when news reports had a soundtrack of teletypes banging in the background, and when carriage return bells punctuated the atmosphere of a productive office? Okay, feeling really old now. And I sure do wish I'd saved all my type ribbon tins.
  • Why was there a bell on carriage returns, anyway? Surely working in a typing pool the sound would drive anyone nuts.
  • What the hell happened to graphic design for products? I'm looking at these tins and wondering when it was that logos started to generally suck.
  • Why was there a bell on carriage returns, anyway? It's been about 35 years since I last completely dismantled a typewriter, but if I recall the bell didn't ring when you returned the carriage, but rang as you approached the right side of the platen, to alert you that it was time to word wrap or hyphenate, and then use the carriage return. Yes, I got it reassembled in the end, unlike the Ferrograph tape recorder :-(
  • to alert you that it was time to word wrap or hyphenate Yes, if I remember rightly it indicated you had five characters left.
  • I want a bell on my keyboard. And an add-on to my monitor so I can simulate wacking the carriage return. Failed miserably in high school learning to type on a typewriter, but was absolutely brill from the start working on a 'puter. Except those number/symbol keys--still have to look at some of those.
  • Ah. How quaint. :) I never learned typing at school but my sister did. I remember her practising touch-typing with a dishtowel over her hands. We had an old typewriter that we used for play at home, with a two-colour ribbon (wow!). I bet it's long gone now.
  • MCT, regarding sucky design: I have a theory that dynamic design took a huge hit when things shifted from type-dedicated systems and typographic designers to a world where everything is being generated in computer programs by the minimally trained. At one time, logos and overall type appearance were strictly the responsibility of actual artists or typographic designers with very specific training and experience. I can recall people who could hand-draw nearly any style of lettering one might fancy, and could also create lettering and/or graphic elements freehand. Now, graphic design is the province of anyone at all with access to a computer, and many of those persons have no training whatever in typographic design. This is an area all too close to my heart, I'm afraid. As a former typographer, I watched things deteriorate dramatically once those first Macintoshes rolled in the door. I wish I were wrong, but alas, these days I see shockingly little design with a fraction of the visual impact of those ribbon tins. It doesn't help that law requires many, many more elements to appear on packaging now (barcodes alone take up a ton of space), limiting the available areas that might once have leavened otherwise constipated-looking labels and packages.
  • I remember visiting my Dad's office when I was small and being allowed to type things. Using the white correction ribbon to white out mistakes... getting multiple keys stuck... listening to the office resounding with tap-tappa-tappity-dingggg sounds... I also used to really annoy my parents by making typewriter noises while eating corn on the cob (row by row, left to right, dingggg.) Only a minority of people in the world would get that now. I grow old, I grow old.