Monday, July 29, 2019

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy - the first 20 pages

Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" has so many iconic scenes. One of them is when Wendy Torrance (Shelley Duvall) finds Jack's typewriter. The page in the typewriter, as well as all pages in the adjacent cardboard box are featuring seemingly infinite copies of that one sentence: "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" (different language-specific pages were used in different releases. E.g. in the German release, the text is "Was du heute kannst besorgen, das verschiebe nicht auf morgen").


In the movie, one can see the page in the typewriter, plus the upper 17 pages in the cardboard box. In addition to these 18 pages visible in the movie, I found two photos on the web that showed two further pages with additional, different layouts.

Nowhere on the web, however, I was able to find good-quality images of the individual pages. Since I love movie props, and I wanted to have printouts of these pages, I decided to re-type these myself. While (as the story goes) Kubrick's assistant had to type all of these (in fact, a total of 500 pages) by hand, I used copy and paste. The real work was to add the little imperfections (typos, variations of line spacing, etc.).

I used a set of three typewriter fonts from the (free) Gabriele family and typed everything in Open Source Desktop Publishing software Scribus. Since only the upper 75% of the pages are visible in the movie, I extrapolated the bottom parts in a consistent way.

The first 18 pages appear in the movie clip above at the following times:
0:40 - 1 double spacing - no periods
1:04 - 2 full page, not formatted - 6 paragraphs
1:21 - 3 unformatted + 3 "verses"
1:23 - 4 all formatted
1:26 - 5 all formatted
1:27 - 6 like 3 - different
1:30 - 7 unformatted
1:33 - 8 formatted
1:35 - 9 formatted
1:36 - 10 formatted 1.5 space
1:37 - 11 triangles 
1:37 - 12 formatted double/single spaced
1:38 - 13 formatted - verse
1:40 - 14 unformatted double spaced
1:42 - 15 unformatted 1.5 spaced
1:44 - 16 formatted single
1:46 - 17 formatted single - shifted right
1:47 - 18 formatted double
on the web:  19 zig-zag
from therpf.com: 20 page with tiny margins

And here are the 20 pages in letter size and at 150dpi resolution. Serving suggestion: Display them in a box, next to your typewriter (get one at a yardsale) and make your visitors think you're insane.
(To get the full quality, click on the images, then right-click on the new image, and select "open image in new window" - there you right-click: "save image as".)




















Bound Paperback (Note-)book

After I created these pages, I wanted to have them in a bound book. I created a 5.8" x 8.2" book with 82 pages which features all the typewriter pages on the right (odd) pages, printed in light grey while the left (even) pages are empty. So, it can be used both as a notebook - or as an item for movie buffs (or both). The cover artwork is based on the carpet pattern.



The book is available here: http://www.lulu.com/shop/jack-torrance/all-work-and-no-play-makes-jack-a-dull-boy/paperback/product-24432397.html

The Carpet Pattern

Here is the image that I created for the book cover.


And a high resolution pdf file can be downloaded from my Google Drive


5 comments:

Unknown said...

This is amazing! I have considered attempting this project in the past but you really nailed it. Bravo!

Jack's Typewriter said...

This is cool

Y sin embargo said...

Amazing and marvelous. Thank you very mucho.

cyberef said...

Thanks for your work! :) I have a Adler Universal 39 typewriter which I'm going to type these on

Markus said...

Hi cyberef, this sounds great.
If you could send me a photo, I would love to post it here. Also images of your hand-typed pages.