 Hi, I'm Emma Harrison, curator of the exhibition Writing, making your mark. My favourite item in the exhibition is this lovely piece of machinery. It's the Double Pigeon Chinese typewriter. This particular example was manufactured in Shanghai in about 1975, although the model was in manufacture from about the early 1960s. It's called Double Pigeon because that's its brand name. As you can see at the front here, there is its logo, Double Pigeons. The invention of typewriters is incredibly important to the history of printing. It democratised print technology, taking the technology of movable type and putting it into the hands of the individual. This happened across the world and China is no exception. What I really love about this item is how ingenious it is. It's a solution to a particular problem proposed by the Chinese script. Instead of having an alphabet of 26 letters or thereabouts, Chinese has thousands of different characters. In a Chinese typewriter, there are no keys. Instead, there's a tray bed of over 2,000 different pieces of type which you pick up using a roving selector tool. What you can see here is a tray bed of over 2,400 individual loose pieces of type. The idea is that they're arranged according to similarities in their structure and also in their frequency of use. You travel over the tray bed using this roving selector tool and when you find the character you want, you depress the lever, it picks it up, you keep on depressing it, it strikes it against the page, it's back up again, it goes back to where it came from and then you can go off and find your next character.