
Schildt and Kreutzer have approached the collection in an editorial way: each style has its own specific voice, atmosphere, and function. Our Polite Society Type (Jens Schildt and Matthias Kreutzer) examined the material for four years and gathered it into a beautiful type-driven publication that is rich in additional texts and imagery, and features a specially designed series of four unique typefaces: Favorite, Placard, Cubic, and Facitype. It represents meticulous visual research into the ephemera produced between the 1950s and the 1970s by the Swedish typewriter and office machine manufacturer FACIT AB. The FACIT Model opens the gates to a specific archive that has barely been explored until now. They promise access to endless knowledge and information - but retrieving it, as most type designers know, can be difficult. I would say more about this typewriter, but Robert Messenger offers an excellent write-up here: Facit TP1 portable – The Prince of Typewriters (quoted earlier).Archives are ambivalent places.


Perhaps it is incredible that one would buy a typewriter because of a woman - but I don’t find it so incredible - but, truthfully, Inga was not the only consideration. Even the smallest elements are elegant, for example, dots to indicate single, double or triple spacing. link.ĭesign was not a secondary consideration. Bernadotte’s enduring designs appeared in functional objects, for which he adopted geometric shapes, leading a movement away from the long-standing natural, organic forms of Art Deco and Art Nouveau. His work also included furniture, kitchenwares for Husqvarna, flatware for Scandinavian airline SAS, bowls for Rosti Margrethe and radios for Bang & Olufsen. Collector Robert Messenger writes:īernadotte is best remembered today as one of Sweden’s greatest industrial designers. The Facit was designed by Sigvard Bernadotte, a Swedish prince and great-grandson of Queen Victoria.

The “Facit” mark, spaced letters on the rear of the machine, is chic, perhaps one of typewriter’s more visually commanding features.

It is elegantly industrial with graceful, swooping lines (more the T1, but also the TP1).
