Today I fired up the IBM Wheelwriter 5 and made some covers for the new Spirit Duplicator album Gelatin Duplicator. My typewriter's 1984-era brain is able to store an album cover's worth of liner notes in proportional-spacing type* (Thesis PS in case you were curious)**, so I stored a bunch of text in memory with the intent of mass-producing album covers on a typewriter.
This is obviously a situation in which nothing could ever go wrong. I realized something was a little screwy and the left margins were going all over the place. A competent typewriter technician could fix this, but I decided to live with it. I mean, you could make your Chartpak/Letraset lettering straight, but that would not be very punk rock, would it?! So this is like a lazy version of that.
With all that being said, it is totally impressive visually and sonically to let a Wheelwriter go nuts. I took a slo-mo video and it is pretty hypnotic. And toward the end of the batch, the typewriter appeared to ungum itself and create consistent margins.
I'll draw a bunch of ring modulators with silver Sharpie in the next few days and put this thing up on Archive.org and Blandqlampt. Watch this space.
* I could store a lot more monospace type - Letter Gothic has featured on multiple album covers so far and will come up again I'm sure - but come on, proportional spacing on a typewriter!
**OK, rabbit hole descended into with thecomputerarchive.com. Currently looking at a 1980 Cromemco catalog and totally loving how neatly it sits at the interface between 70s and 80s aesthetics. Calligraphy on a computer front panel - how much would it blow up the world if a modern computer used hand lettering on its front panel? I could go on.
