I grew up surrounded by books and a certain appreciation – or even reverence – towards books. I’ve always wanted to write one, except I wasn’t sure what to write about.

The subject of keyboards found me over and over. I wrote some articles and gave talks that seemed to be interesting, I stumbled upon a magical museum, and the more I learned the more I wanted to learn.

It took me a while (having to learn a second language slowed me down), and I had to warm up to this idea (the initial short sabbatical turned into quitting and a year of not working to spend on the book), but I’m almost done now.

I’ve read somewhere that everyone making a book tries to make a book of a kind they would like to see more. This is a story of what kind of book Shift Happens is, and why.

The three important things

Thinking about and working on the book, I arrived at these three aspects that felt most important to me:

Forget about neither people nor technology

I didn’t want this book to be only for keyboard or typewriter nerds, but I did want to celebrate a certain nerdy obsessiveness and inquisitiveness – this book is 42 chapters, after all!

I was very inspired by The Soul of a New Machine and The Power Broker, and the amount of time and energy their authors spent on talking about people while not glossing over the technology. I love the way William Langewiesche injects humanity and ends his essays in an almost poetic fashion. I adore the warmth and casual seriousness of my favourite movie, Sneakers. There’s a way of writing that celebrates both the humane and the artificial, and I want to practice that.

Visual storytelling is important

Visual storytelling is important to me. I got to practice it in the last decade giving various talks. I wanted this book to have gorgeous visuals – but also meaningful visuals that participated in telling the story, rather than casual coffee-table soullessness.

You can read my book’s words and completely ignore the photos, and hopefully you’ll have a great time. You can also buy it just for the photos – for yourself or as a gift – and you will enjoy it also. But the best course of action is, of course, doing both.

I treated this aspect so seriously I came up with a rigid style guide, commissioned renders of objects lost to time or impossible to photograph, took hundreds of photos myself, and carefully thought about placement and juxtaposition.

I found few in-betweener books that do something similar to my book, books where about 50% of the pages are devoted to photography… but one close inspiration was The Bridge by Gay Talese.

Strange is better than boring

I love and am inspired by books that are just ever so slightly strange, personal, and weird. Of note here in particular are books published by Read-Only Memory – each one quirky, unique, unapologetically British, approaching nostalgia in a more nuanced way than most.

My book has a cold open, borrows equally from European and American typesetting, has (clever! but not pretentious!) easter eggs, and – as per above – picks the best parts from trade books and coffee table books.

I think people will like this strange object that I care for so deeply.

Why I’m proud of my book

And here are a few things I am really happy about when it comes to my book:

• There are books about typewriters only, although many feel cheap. There are no books about computer keyboards at all. My book connects the typewriters to computers, and tells the story of everything in between. (It also happens to be a great, accessible history of computing from the early days up until very recently. It covers the middle years of computers – punched cards, teletypes, terminals – in a friendly way I haven’t seen before.)
• It has gorgeous, meaningful visuals that actually contribute in telling the story. No image is there just because I happened to have it, and no image is low quality.
• It has the most comprehensive (but also entertaining) explanation of the design and the many myths of QWERTY and Dvorak keyboards.
• I went to Stanford archives and researched the Laser Eraser story that has never been told before.
• It has the most informative and historically accurate explanation of RSI I’ve ever seen.
• It tells the stories of popular keyboards such as Model M, Space-Cadet keyboard, and ZX Spectrum from interesting, new angles.
• There are a few photos of very rare prototypes never seen before in such great quality, and a few 3D recreations of artifacts that we lost along the way.
• It took me a long time to find the right paper and the right printer to do this project justice.
• It’s custom in many ways, and has tons of small touches that will resonate with people.

What’s in the name?

My book’s title has been something of an accident. I needed something quickly for the 5-minute Ignite talk I was planning that I linked to above. My brain rushed to either Shift Happens or Holy Shift because, obviously. I chose the former, assuming something else will eventually take its place.

I hated it then, deeming it vulgar and simplistic. But everyone else loved it, and in time it occurred to me it’s actually secretly a much better title than I gave it credit for. It hinted at a rigorous design process of keyboards not existing at all, things just happening haphazardly – and Shift being the first new key to appear, in the 1870s still, a harbinger of a confused future.

The book is the story of how Shift happened as that first new strange key, and then everything and every key that happened after that.