Giovanna Faso recently got in touch to flag up her Casa Museo Olivettiana – a ‘house museum’ in Ivrea:

“Set within the Unità Residenziale Ovest – a remarkable horizontal skyscraper carved into a hillside just a 15-minute walk from the historic center of Ivrea – Casa Museo Olivettiana is a domestic archive dedicated to Italy’s visionary, yet often overlooked, computer culture of the 1970s and ’80s.”

(The house also has the rather lovely Olivetti poster (shown above) designed by Belgian artsist Jean-Michel Folon on its walls.)

Check out this short film about the place.

Giovanna got in touch because of a post I wrote back in July 2016 about an Olivetti exhibition at the ICA “showcasing the spatial and graphic design of typewriter manufacturer Olivetti during the post-war era”.

I had a look back at that post, and it’s got some great links in it (like this Typographica post about typewriter typefaces).

Reading it reminded me about Marcin Wichary’s fantastic book Shift Happens, from which he recently posted an entire chapter on his Aresluna website, all about the QWERTY keyboard. (I’ve linked to these over on Bluesky, but hadn’t posted here yet.)

I hugely recommend having a look if you haven’t already.

And while you’re on the site, check out his utterly fantastic piece about Gorton lettering, The hardest working font in Manhattan. (I messaged Marcin when he posted this, to say “I just finished reading your glorious piece. It made me very happy – wonderful writing, brilliant research, and fantastically well designed. If I could hug an article, I would hug it repeatedly.“)

And heck, if you’re still not sated, maybe get lost in Marcin’s extensive Flickr albums for a while, including this wonderful piece by Jenny Holzer.