This profile has been written by a Northwestern student Annie Xia in 2023, and is published here with her permission.

In 2021 at the Oakland, California, restaurant Crepevine, Marcin Wichary set two hefty tomes with white covers and traffic cone-orange accents on a narrow wooden table. Titled Shift Happens, the text spanned the 150-year history of keyboards. For the past six years, Wichary had fine-tuned every one of the book’s 1,200 pages, from the research to prose to layout. Now, he handed the preliminary copy to his long-time internet friend Erica Fischer, who had spent years searching for the origin story of the device’s standard QWERTY configuration. “They’re all really junky,” Fischer said about the existing material. “They are very casual about their history.”

But that day over crepes and orange juice, Wichary’s book presented Fischer with a deeply researched account of the keyboard’s backstory. Split into two hardcovers, the work featured little-known narratives and over 1,000 photos, including ones of Comics Sans typewriters. Currently a design lead at Figma, Wichary raised over $750,000 in a recent 2023 Kickstarter campaign to print a few thousand copies with company Penmor Lithographers. On the website, his passion project stands as the second most funded nonfiction book of all time. “‘If 2,500 people buy the book, I'm happy.’ That was my internal metric,” Wichary said. “Something about that number felt real – it's not a goofy side project.”

Decades before he specialized as a keyboard expert, Wichary first became a genuine computer nerd. He fell in love with the digital world as a kid fiddling around with code. As an 8-year-old growing up in Poland, Wichary received his first computer, an outdated Atari 800XL. He would link the screenless beige wedge to the home’s Soviet-era console. “We only had one TV, so I had to fight for time with my family,” Wichary said. Whereas modern computers invisibly run code in the background, users could immediately start coding as soon as the Atari machine booted up to a blinking rectangular cursor. After school, Wichary logged hours coding pictures and games. “It was kind of endless,” he said. “I think my mom was worried.”

Wichary attended university in his hometown of Szczecin, a prominent port near the Baltic Sea, and pushed himself to major in something hard: computer networks with a specialization in cryptography. He truly loved making aesthetic elements like website buttons and icons but felt compelled to study “real” coding, the type of programming careers done by adults around him. “You get a good job at a bank or something,” he said. “I felt like I had to grow up, you know?”

But then he stumbled on user experience design, or UX design, and the “two people in Poland” who knew about the term. “I just didn't know it's a legitimate thing you could do,” he said. “I finally found a name.” Suddenly, he realized his insecurities about being a poor programmer stemmed from a categorical error. The whole time Wichary had been trying to fit into the mold of a back-end computer scientist when he was already functioning as a UX designer.

In the early aughts, Wichary moved to the United States for a position as Google’s senior user experience designer. During his seven years there, he created the Pacman Doodle in honor of both the game’s 30th anniversary and his father’s job as an arcade game technician. “He’s had his hands in a lot of really impressive things,” said Fischer, who described him as a Renaissance man. As a 2013 fellow for the nonprofit Code For America, Wichary helped devise the software Streetmix for modeling streetscapes. “Anytime somebody’s trying to make a presentation about how a street is going to look if you add bike lanes or sidewalks, Streetmix is still the standard tool all these years later,” Fischer said.

While working in 2015 as design lead and typographer at the blogging platform Medium, Wichary conceived of the book idea that ultimately evolved into Shift Happens. He had previously covered everything from video game cheats to the history of pinball machines for Polish magazines. “I wrote a history of graphical user interfaces, of spreadsheets like Excel, of Macintosh at some point,” Wichary said.

But after moving to the United States, he lacked confidence in his English writing abilities. To practice, Wichary started publishing articles on Medium, and his interest in technology and design kept leading him back to keyboards. Through articles on Polish key bugs and secret shortcuts, he realized the topic fascinated him enough for an entire book. After adding up the word count, the length started to amount to a full-length manuscript. So he decided to write a book. “It wasn’t very romantic,” Wichary said. “I almost arrived at it mathematically.”

Over the more than half-decade that followed, Wichary wrote and designed the entirety of Shift Happens himself. (The title, which beat out contender Holy Shift, was a temporary stand-in he never replaced.) The winding journey led him down rabbit holes such as acquiring copyright permission for hundreds of images, chasing down professionals such as a Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) expert and digitizing historical fonts for the first time.

From interviewer to historian to author, Wichary alternated between a dozen hats, none of which matched his actual job description. In a 2018 Medium post titled “What’s been really scary and really hard while writing the first draft,” he noted his self-doubts. “[It’s] really funny to approach a book feeling pretty certain I could handle its typesetting, but much less so that I could handle what’s actually being typeset.”

In 2016, Wichary initiated Shift Happens’ long process by creating a research database on the app DEVONthink. He amassed a wide-ranging set of keyboard paraphernalia, which now totals over 30,000 tags and 700 GB of data. In December of that year, Wichary sent a letter to his colleagues explaining his decision to take a three-month break. He planned to work full-time on “a book of stories your keys want to tell you.” “I’m terrified, to be honest,” he wrote in the message. “But I want to pull on this strand quite a bit more.”

While Wichary was in the middle of his rough draft, writer and entrepreneur Glenn Fleishman reached out and offered to help. Fleishman, who eventually dedicated 300 hours as an editor and consultant, pushed back at times against the book’s unconventional design choices. For example, the cover opens onto chapter one. Wichary eschewed the sequence of title and copyright prefaces he described as “throat-clearing.” (The table of contents is tucked in the back like European books.) The editor eventually acknowledged that self-publishing relieved the project from standard publishing constraints. “He’s like, ‘Listen, this is my book. I could do whatever I want,’” Fleishman said. “I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, it is your book!’”

After writing the first draft in early 2018, Wichary spent the next few years editing, finishing the layouts in Adobe InDesign and arranging the printing. Although he will likely continue tweaking details until the pages hit the press, Wichary announced he had arrived at a finalized version. At the start of this year, he finally launched Shift Happens’ promotional website and announced the book’s Kickstarter campaign. The release news reached thousands of people, from Wichary’s Twitter following to people who registered for the website’s mailing list.

With the manuscript slated to print in July, Kickstarter supporters reserved over 4,000 coming hardcovers for $125 during early bird pricing and later on for $150. The remaining copies will be sold through preorder on his website. Norwegian designer Kim Bøe, who began following Wichary’s Twitter and newsletter around 2018, pledged as number 55. A collector of rare typography books and printing presses himself, Bøe recognized a fellow nerd in Wichary. “Obsessive people see a book like Shift Happens, and we’re like, ‘This is my kind of guy,’” he said.

Launched in early February, the crowdfunding initiative succeeded wildly. The Kickstarter hit its initial goal of $150,000 within two hours, and when the project closed a month later, contributors had donated more than $750,000. “Several podcasts, including some Top 100 on iTunes, got in touch. Publications wanted to write about him,” Fleishman said. “He did all this publicity we didn’t have to do any work for.”

But instead of seeking to pitch Shift Happens as widely as possible, Wichary turned down over a dozen media offers. He found the promotion exhausting. “It started being this game of, ‘I could be the number one book on Kickstarter in a certain category.’ It’s very seductive,” he said. “I’m not going to get rich off this book, but it’s not like that was ever the goal.” He had already fulfilled his original ambition, as laid out in his 2017 Medium post What do I want my book to be. Without foreseeing the effort – or accomplishment – to come, Wichary wrote, “I don’t quite know what ‘success’ means, yet, but let’s say finishing the book, and finishing it in a way I feel happy about and proud of, would be a start.”

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