The Gizmo collection starts with a book.
Gizmo: Retro-Tech We Loved and Lost, published by Laurence King in May 2026, is an illustrated history of consumer technology - the gadgets, devices and machines that shaped how people listened, learned, played and worked across the late twentieth century. Synthesisers and boomboxes. Early home computers. Pocket calculators. Handheld games. Objects that were, in their time, genuinely new ideas about what technology could be.
The illustrations are the engine of the book. Each one is a precise technical drawing of a real device - accurate in proportion, detail and character, built to show what made each object distinctive as a designed thing rather than just a piece of hardware. Working on them over several years sharpened something I'd felt for a long time: these objects deserve to be looked at properly, not just remembered fondly.
That's where the collection comes in.
The prints take the world of the book and give it another form. Part of what makes this era of technology so visually interesting is that devices wore their functions openly. Buttons, displays, vents, labels, speaker grilles - the physical language of a product told you what it was and how it worked. The constraints of manufacturing and interface design produced objects with more graphic character than almost anything made today. A Roland TB-303, a JVC RC-550, an Apple II - these are strong pieces of design as well as significant pieces of history.
The collection isn't limited to the book. Gizmo the book had editorial boundaries; Gizmo the collection doesn't. As the range develops it can extend into adjacent objects from the same era - anything that sits in the same world of purposeful, characterful, now-vanished technology.
The aim isn't nostalgia, though nostalgia is part of it. It's to look at these machines as images - designed forms with structure, atmosphere and cultural weight. Objects worth preserving not just for what they did, but for how they looked.
Gizmo: Retro-Tech We Loved and Lost is published by Laurence King in May 2026. The prints are here.