For her eleventh birthday, my daughter Maddy asked for something I never expected: a typewriter.
I knew what I had to get her: one of those old upright Underwoods or Royals, looking like a heavy metal church organ with the keys fanning out in front and the case sitting up tall, its letters like slugs of lead type from the earliest days of printing.
I went to the recycling shop, and there among the refugees buying used mattresses and particle-board furniture was the typewriter–a Royal, ten bucks and in working order. I could barely lift it. It must have weighed 25 pounds.
When I got it home and tried typing on it, it became clear why this was an obsolete appliance. Each key had to be pounded–none of your little-finger touch-typing here. It was just as well I’m a two-fingered typist….in fact, I am a two-fingered typist because I learned on a brute of a machine like this one, the letters sooty and unevenly pressed into the page. No correcting, either. A good writing exercise in more ways than one: you had to be pretty damn sure of what you wanted to say before committing it to paper.
But what would all that mean to a girl of the laptop generation, for whom typing and correcting are effortless, and whose first act is to decide what font she wants to use? Oh well. If she didn’t like it, I could always use it as a planter.
How wrong I was.
“Cool!” she gasped. She loved the long lever that turned the platen. (Don’t you love those obsolete words?) She had seen on movies that when you reached the end of the line a tiny bell inside went “Ding!” and couldn’t wait to make it happen for herself. She addressed herself to figuring out all the little arcane levers that set tabs and margins. The inconvenience was part of the attraction–and when her friends came over, they couldn’t wait to try to make it work themselves. They even liked unbundling the keys when they all clumped together.
It’s now the central feature of her desk. She can type amazingly quickly–faster than I can–and she’s already used it to write to friends and relatives and type up ersatz historical documents for school projects. I was going to get a wire brush and clean the gunk out of the loops of the o, e, d, b, a and g so the print would be cleaner, but she likes them that way: that’s one of the qualities that separate the typewriter from the PC, which now seems boring and even stupid in its dull quest for efficiency.
Progress is a funny thing. Every gain, no matter how successful, means that something is lost. I should start looking for an old treadle sewing-machine, too. And a grandfather clock, the whole house starting to smell faintly of oil, and the history of human endeavor.
Maddy was born in 1995, so this must have aired on NPR in 2006.
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5 users responded in this post
3. As someone who enjoys old things, and wants to keep things considered antique around, (i.e. film cameras, type writers, hand-written letters,) I appreciated this piece, and the way you describe the type-writer.
3. Fun and true
3 this is so steam punk. I love it. Makes me want to go get one and give it my kids.
Do it! It makes such a cool object around the house, too. My students have made my typewriter the mascot of the Champlain College Publishing Initiative, and named it Harris.
2, because it’s just too short! It also makes we wonder if she kept it/still uses it…hmm, maybe because of that it should be a 3.
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