A lovely obituary for a typewriter repairman in this week's issue of The Economist:
“ANYONE who had dealings with manual typewriters—the past tense, sadly, is necessary—knew that they were not mere machines. Eased heavily from the box, they would sit on the desk with an air of expectancy, like a concert grand once the lid is raised. On older models the keys, metal-rimmed with white inlay, invited the user to play forceful concertos on them, while the silvery type-bars rose and fell chittering and whispering from their beds. Such sounds once filled the offices of the world, and Martin Tytell's life.
Everything about a manual was sensual and tactile, from the careful placing of paper round the platen (which might be plump and soft or hard and dry, and was, Mr Tytell said, a typewriter's heart) to the clicking whirr of the winding knob, the slight high conferred by a new, wet, Mylar ribbon and the feeding of it, with inkier and inkier fingers, through the twin black guides by the spool. Typewriters asked for effort and energy. They repaid it, on a good day, with the triumphant repeated ping! of the carriage return and the blithe sweep of the lever that inched the paper upwards….â€
I also loved this graf:
“When his shop closed in 2001, after 65 years of business, it held a stock of 2m pieces of type. Tilde “nâ€s alone took up a whole shelf. The writer Ian Frazier, visiting once to have his Olympia cured of a flagging “eâ€, was taken into a dark nest of metal cabinets by torchlight. There he was proudly shown a drawer of umlauts.â€
We talked about typewriter nostaglia in an earlier episode of “A Way with Words.â€
I remember playing with an old manual typewriter as a child, you could push down multiple keys at once and they would rise up and get stuck. It was fun (although in truth, I now feel bad about abusing the poor machine.....)
Yup, those are formative experiences, RR! I did the same thing with my dad's. Much more sensory experience than clacking away on a computer keyboard, eh?
I learned to type on a manual - the big, boxy upright kind. Imagine the sound of 30 high school students practicing typewriter drills, “Ad at are eat ear sad sat sew,†followed by the ding of the bell, then the "z-i-i-p, thunk" of the manual carriage return, all over the room. The challenge was not just to find the letters, but hit them with enough force so the fabric ribbon printed each letter equally dark, being careful to type rhythmically enough that two (or more!) keys did not become entangled with one another. Now THAT was typing! What we do today on keyboards is sissy stuff by comparison.
Those memories make me appreciate my keyboard and delete key even more!
Heh. Yup, I can still hear Miss Varnadoe walking through the classroom repeating "f,d,s,a. j,k,l,semicolon," with the ding and zip-thunk. Thanks for the memories, Pam! 🙂