(Balti)more Artyping & ASCII
Our collection of Julius Nelson’s Typewriter Mystery Games series continues to grow. Newly added: an order-sheet direct from 3200 Southgreen Road, Baltimore. The 8.5” x 11” single-sided, once-folded page was bundled in an auction with a couple of booklets and the above typed owl specimen. The order sheet lists a total of five books, so the gold cover (below) and a brown cover (yet to be scanned) must have come after. Not sure how many total were made, but the sampler is from 1982—the latest I’ve found. Booklets from that auction also all contain a front-page stamp, “Property of Instructional Department. Middle East College”.
During the 1950s, Middle East College—now Middle East University—was a Seventh-day Adventist education hub in the Sabtieh foothills above Beirut, Lebanon. It functioned as the premier training ground for Adventist church workers across the Middle East and North Africa. (Google summary, Encyclopedia of Seventh-Day Adventists). The prior owner of the books had picked them up from a fundraiser sale at a Seventh Day Adventist church in College Place, WA. Normally, I’d think I don’t have much in common with the Adventists, being that I frequently work on Saturdays and don’t tend to wait around for things—but it’s nice to know at least some of them got into artyping.
I was wondering how these booklets got into their program, and it turns out the Adventist educational system is managed by a group out of Silver Spring, Maryland—about an hour north of Nelson’s Artyping HQ.
I was poking around to see if Nelson had any connection to the church—didn’t find one—and accidentally came across this great ad from Federal Hill Software. It appears in The Rainbow Magazine (Radio Shack Color Computer) (December 1983), and is the only direct reference I’ve seen between an ASCII art project and Artyping, in name. The company was based in, you guessed it, Baltimore—at 825 William St. That’s about 30 min drive from Nelson by today’s roads.
