Shift Happens is a beautifully designed history of how keyboards got this way

It's the 150th anniversary of the QWERTY keyboard, and Marcin Wichary has put together the kind of history and celebration this totemic object deserves. Shift Happens is a two-volume, 1,200-plus-page work with more than 1,300 photos, researched over seven years and cast lovingly into type and photo spreads that befit the subject. You can preorder it now, and orders before October 4 (Wednesday) can still be shipped before Christmas, while orders on October 5 or later will have to wait until December or January. Preorders locked in before Wednesday also get a 160-page "volume of extras." Wichary, a designer, engineer, and writer who has worked at Google, Medium, and Figma, has been working in public to get people excited about type, fonts, and text design for some time now. He told the Twitter world about his visit to an obscure, magical Spanish typewriter museum in 2016. He put a lot of work into crafting the link underlines at Medium and explaining font fallbacks at Figma. Shift Happens reads and looks like Wichary's chance to tell the bigger story around all the little things that fascinate him and to lock into history all the strange little stories he loves. He also did 40 interviews, made two custom fonts, wrote 5,000 lines of InDesign automation code, and uploaded 350 books and articles from his research to the Internet Archive. Wichary answered a few of our questions about Shift Happens, particularly one chapter on the "Shift Wars," when typewriter companies entered fierce competition—with press-announced typist showdowns—to prove which layout was more efficient: keyboards with separate keys for upper-case, lower-case, and every other character, or keys which physically shifted their type mechanism to switch between them. The reasons shifting won out are not quite as obvious as they might seem.

Ars: Your book sets out to connect the realms of ink/type-based machines and computers. Have those two realms been researched and written about separately all this time? Why do you think that is? There have been a bunch of interesting books about typewriters—some appearing as early as the 19th century—but indeed nothing that extended from that into the world of computers and mechanical keyboards today. I’m curious why myself! It’s possible that the scope was too daunting or that before the recent resurgence of mechanical keyboards it didn’t seem like it would be a subject of interest to anyone? But also, in 2016, Matthew Kirschenbaum published a great book about the history of word processors that connected both of these worlds on one specific axis, and reading that at the same time I was doing early research made me so excited. It seemed like keyboards were a space of so many fascinating, almost fractal stories, that they could support not one more but many more books.

Ars: What kind of work was required to set all the specialty footnote glyphs and key characters into the text? (Meta note: I would be tremendously intimidated to try to lay out a book that would be read by type enthusiasts). I am a web guy, and I used to think that the web (just like typewriters, once) took away a lot of hard-won typesetting nuance and tradition. But it turns out that the web also makes it much easier to do certain things. To have a word be surrounded by a rounded rectangle—a visual representation of a key—is a few lines of CSS or a few clicks in Figma. But for the book, I had to cut my own font and then write Python scripts to do typesetting inside the font-making software, which I’m pretty sure you are not supposed to do? Similarly, I wrote a lot of long scripts to have the footnotes do exactly what I wanted. That’s the beauty and also a curse of being a once-in-a-while programmer: Instead of accepting the footnote limitations in common software, I could imagine writing something better, but at that point, I also had to start from scratch and own the entirety of my messy footnote-placing engine. And it turns out, writing typesetting engines is really, really hard. As for footnote glyphs… I had a lot of fun finding keyboard symbols throughout history and repurposing them here. In this and a few other ways, I wanted to keep the book lightweight and fun. There are tons of little moments, Easter eggs, and even an intentional typo or two.

Ars: In the chapter “Shift Wars,” there’s an argument that the victory of the Remington No. 2, and the single-letter shifted keyboard, was not certain and maybe could have gone a different way. It’s hard to imagine that our iPhones could have capital and lower-case letters on a single screen, but… is it possible? This is an interesting question. During the “Shift Wars” of the late 19th century, the typewriter manufacturers were figuring out how many Shift keys was the right amount. One? Two? Three? Or zero? The one-Shift keyboard (specifically, the subvariant with the singular Shift duplicated on both sides of the bottom row) won, but like with many keyboard “decisions,” it was never proved scientifically. In part, it just happened to be attached to the first really popular typewriter, the Underwood No. 5, and who knows if, in another timeline, a different typewriter with a different Shift layout would’ve sold better and changed the trajectory of the keyboards? (Like the title of the book alludes to, Shift sort of happened.) On the other hand, the human body is what it is. There’s no way to adjust the size of people’s fingers, eyes, or arms. Numeric keypads disappeared in part, for example, because most laptop sizes cannot easily accommodate them. You can imagine adding more rows of keys—indeed, some ThinkPads used to go wild there!—but you have less space horizontally. But most of the shiftless typewriters were vertical, so it’s possible to imagine shiftless laptops (although maybe without trackpads?), BlackBerrys, and even modern mobile phones. They would perhaps all just get taller. And it’s fun to imagine the consequences of that: maybe the phones would never get that big (because then they would become too tall), maybe we would all hold our phones differently, maybe trousers and skirts would start getting bigger pockets. Or maybe we would still go through Shift Wars, but maybe only 20 instead of 140 years ago. Ars: What was the hardest part of this project?  It turns out writing a book is only a small part of writing a book, especially if you decide to do it on your own. Photographing and processing over 1,200 photos, figuring out publishing, researching the paper and printer options, starting a newsletter, writing scripts to get feedback on the book and then lay it out, making a site with a fun 3D visualization, re-creating a font, supervising the actual printing, even running Kickstarter were side projects that were sometimes as big as entire earlier projects in my career! In many ways, the hardest overall part was pacing. I have never done anything on this scale, and I was painfully aware that a full day’s concerted effort would move a needle by about 0.05 percent at most—and later realize that it was only 0.01 percent. For many years, I would go to the site announcing the book and would swap “the book is going to come out in 2018” to “2019” and then “2020” and so on. When the pandemic disrupted the supply chain and I had to delay the pretty-finished book for a year was perhaps the hardest singular moment. Ars: What was the best part? As cheesy as it will sound, people’s willingness to help. Perhaps only this made it possible to weather the hard times. I started this project in part because I grew up admiring books (my mother was a librarian) and thought writing a book was among the most amazing things you can try to accomplish. It turns out that many people feel the same kind of a reverence toward books—once I mentioned I was writing a book, without stating any other credentials, people were just eager to help. Outside of one museum that shall remain unnamed (we'll get back to this), so many individuals and institutions opened their doors and volunteered their time. One person helped me resurrect and reverse engineer the once-hated PCjr keyboard, an astrophotographer in the UK sent me a beautiful photo of a rare ZX Spectrum artifact, someone on Twitter allowed me to use their photo as a kid playing with their first home computer in the most adorable way—the list goes on and on and on. Even the historical cover photos of both volumes of the book didn’t come from established photo archives, but I got them through the generosity of friends and strangers. Ars: How did you set your scope for what would be covered and considered? Were there rabbit holes of history or research that you had to “cut” or keep yourself from getting into? I was always interested in centering the book around great stories and also had a few big goals in mind. One of them was navigating the really complex story of what exactly happened in between typewriters and computers—the scary, meandering, incestuous world of teletypes, key punches, calculators, electric typewriters, terminals, and word processing machines. I barely understood it myself and never saw it explained fully, so I thought: what if I figure it out and then help others understand it? It ended up being an incredibly fascinating journey, with tons of great artifacts I learned about, traces of which are all on today’s keyboards. I also worked with a great editor—Glenn Fleishman—who helped me chisel this book into something so much better. We got rid of the already-written chapters about cryptography and keyboards like Enigma (too disconnected), about keyboard collectors (didn’t arrive at interesting conclusions), and about the biggest keyboards ever (felt like a listicle). But then again, there is always room for great stories. Just a month before the final writing lock, I discovered something amazing at Stanford University archives and completely rewrote and redesigned one chapter. So in that way, the pandemic delay yielded at least one very tangible benefit. At 40+ chapters, it’s a big book, but I don’t think a lengthy one. And, maybe counterintuitively, half of the book is photos—all high quality, all carefully selected—and I hope so many visuals along the way will actually help people remain engaged.

Ars: What were some of the hardest objects or photos of objects to track down or acquire the rights to reproduce?  I’ve had a bunch of really fun and interesting experiences. One was a very rare SGI laptop prototype with a unique “ergonomic” keyboard. I found some old grainy photos of it on an old website only available on the Web Archive, found a way to contact the owner, found a way to contact the person whom he gave the prototype to, waited months for this person to travel back to the country he kept the laptop, and then gave instructions on how to take photos of it with a cellphone in a hotel room… and spent a bunch of time in Photoshop to remove the bed and clean things up. I think the photo looks great, and you wouldn’t know any of this story. I also convinced someone from the NSA to take great photos of a rare Soviet debugging device, requested the Library of Congress to scan a wonderful photo of an early census machine, and got into an eBay fight to obtain a rare train ticket. Yes, all these objects have to do with keyboards! (And yes, there were many more eBay fights). The one object I couldn’t get—one museum refused to allow me to publish a photo of an early typewriter prototype—I hired a 3D modeller to re-create. This ended up working even better. The rendering looks real, we got better angles that the original photo didn’t show, and the museum’s prototype was a replica anyway! So in a way, the 3D model is no less real. Ars: What made you want to take on this project? There’s this saying that whether they realize it or not, every writer puts out the kind of book they would like to see more of. I think I always wanted to have books like this one: not just a book about keyboards but a book that’s this kind of nerdy, this kind of gently obsessive, this kind of visual, and with this kind of strange balance between something you’d put on a coffee table and “a book I wanna grab into my backpack and read.” But also, I was curious about all of these strange keys on your keyboard. Now I know so much about each and every one of them. And you can, too! Ars: Each and every one of them? Well, one goal I originally had was to figure out a mysterious key on the first QWERTY typewriter ever—a key with three dots—and after so much research and investigation, I‘m not sure I ever got a conclusive answer. But there’s something endearing about it: QWERTY keyboards are turning 150 this year, and they can still hold a mystery or two.