Tiny Tea Dispatch #036
![]() | ISSUE 036 | ![]() | ||
In bloom
# Made #
# Vacation #
# Seen #
Nottebohm Room
Another highlight of our vacation, but this time in a sunny Antwerp, was a guided visit to the Nottebohm room of the Antwerp Heritage Library. There’s 3 floors, 1 of which can walk in, which house the first 150,000 items of the library. The whole library has a fantastic history behind it but this room is a bit of a marvel to visit. I also just discovered they have a virtual tour you can check out. Highly recommended.# Pictures #
The drawings of Rick Barton
Chances are, you’ve never heard of Rick Barton and that would make sense, since his work only got discovered a couple years ago, in the collection of The Morgan Library & Museum. A Beat era artist who never really got his big break, which is a real shame. I wish I could go see the exhibit but I’ll have to do with this video and a couple of blog posts on Rick Barton’s work.# Moving pictures #
Tobi-ass
My cousin Tobias spend a few years in China and recently started a YouTube channel, vlogging about his adventures looking for Chinese/Taiwanese things in Europe. While it is spoken in Chinese, there’s subtitles in English. Anyway, I think it’s pretty funny, check it out here:California typewriter
I heard that this documentary is what introduced a lot of ‘new’ people to collecting/trying out typewriters a few years ago. The big draw was Tom Hanks showing off his machines and talking so nicely about writing personal notes to people. There’s a couple of other (semi-)famous people in there and a bit of a tragic story about a small shop in Berkeley. While it all looks very nice and pretty, I find the contrast between the (wealthy) white people full of nostalgia and the folks working in Berkeley (or in art) to be really off-putting. From what I’ve read, the shop didn’t really get any benefit from whatever small media sensation and boom in popularity this documentary caused. But like Hanks said in one of the interviews himself, he’s tried to foster a community around typewriters for years and it hasn’t done much for its popularity anyway. These will never be fashionable items in the way mechanical watches are.# Heard #
For the Dutch-speaking folks reading this, here’s a compact 4-episode podcast series about Sherlock Holmes. I started listening to it after having seen an exhibit on vacation, about Arthur Conan Doyle. The hosts are Vitalski, a Belgian writer, and Jean-Paul van Bendegem, mathematician and philosopher. They’re both quite funny and play off of each other and their guests in a really entertaining way. Oh, and if you like that, there’s a 4-episode series by van Bendegem about the city of Ghent that’s very interesting as well. https://klara.be/vitalski-en-jean-paul-van-bendegem-brengen-sherlock-holmes-opnieuw-tot-leven# Watch report #
# Retro corner #
While on vacation, I brought a recently acquired Adler ‘Tippa’ typewriter with me, to document the trip. A daily journal type of thing, where I also stuck some printed photographs to the paper. With this, I took a bit of time every morning before breakfast, to write a bit of text about what we had done the day before and I used some time in the evening to print a few pictures of what we’d seen (using a very small black & white thermal printer). It was a different experience than I’ve had in the past, when I brought a sketchbook or notebook with me. Mainly because there was 0 stress or expectations. I wasn’t stressing out about either having ‘missed’ opportunities to draw something we were experiencing/seeing, or taking up too much time doing the drawing. Next time, I might bring a small quare sketchbook though, with a very limited tool set (eg. 1 black pen), so I can at least do a drawing if I really want to. The museum would have been a great place to draw a couple of the masks on display, for example. We also saw a few typewriters in the wild, once in a design/brocante shop in Wimereux and another time in the Arthur Conan Doyle exhibit.An Olivetti Studio 44 and a model I’m not sure about.
An Underwood n°5 from the exhibit
The Tippa I brought with me