Typewriter stays relevant in technology-saturated world

Alex Pham of the LA Times wrote a piece about a typewriter repair shop in Los Angeles that's enjoying a small resurgence.

The simplicity of the typewriter is alluring to writers who may be overwhelmed (or underwhelmed) by increasingly elaborate technology. A typewriter is also appealing in its transparency -- whack a key, and watch the typebar smack a letter onto a piece of paper. Try figuring that out with a laser printer. Many people also find typewriters charming ambassadors of a bygone era. One recent customer asked Flores to fix her mother's college typewriter so she could type letters home when she went off to college.

All that helps to keep U.S. Office Machine humming at its inconspicuous corner of Figueroa Street and Avenue 58. Watch the video to see how three generations of the Flores family have helped keep the typewriting tradition alive.

Typewriter stays relevant in technology-saturated world

• [foobar]

  But… how do you get your files off it when you’re done?

• [Anonymous]

  Gilbert Anonymous says:
  I love my old manual typewriter. I have a habit of resting my fingers on the keys when composing a thought. I did that with a Selectric and nearly blasted myself out of the chair LOL.

• [Takuan]

  I like to write in blood and fire myself. After a bit,I look back to see what my words have created.

• [Anonymous]

  Nietzsche tried a typewriter. It was a funny little ball of a thing. And, a century before Marshall McLuhan, he had this to say: “The things we work on are also working on us.” Now compare what this means in terms of the discussion at hand. In other words, how does writing on a typewriter affect how you write, as compared to writing with a pen and paper, or a computer? The philosopher Ivan Illich, and the novelist Robertson Davies, both claimed they could tell a text that was written on a computer from one that was not. Indeed, the length of an average English language novel has swollen tremendously since word-processing programs became common. One has to wonder what kind of Hemingway could ever have emerged had computers been available? Purple prose and prattling on was once almost anathema to a good writer. Now it is ubiquitous.
  I am a writer. I write a first draft by pen, and after that use an old Selectric. How the finished work becomes “electronicized” and published is none of my concern.

• [SimplyAaron]

  Takuan… thats freakin awsome!

  I’m no writer, but I did used to work on IBM typewriters and I can say with a big sigh that I wish I still did after watching this video.

  Office equipment, and technicians, just aren’t what they used to be…

• [chromal]

  Writing with a typewriter today makes about as much sense as programming with punch cards today. Sure, if you’re stubbornly anti-tech or refuse to learn beyond what you learned a half-century ago, then, well, more power to you.

  me? I prefer to have electronic copies of my documents. Makes them. Uh. Useful?

• [Cool Products]

  I recently picked up a semi-mint condition typewriter at a garage sale around here, and it works great. Flores made a good point about how typing on a typewriter has so many fewer distractions than when writing on a computer. I’m already in love with the thing.

• [Jack]

  I still have a Royal portable typewriter I purchased directly from the owner who lived down the block from me in 1993. She bought in her 20s when she was the equivalent of a temp back in the day. The thing is heavy. Very heavy. But she lugged it from job to job. Pretty awesome considering how excited people get at lightweight laptops nowadays.

  And FWIW, many times typewriters are still the best way to address and envelope.

• [billstewart]

  Tom Hale, I’d be surprised if your wife could out-type a good manual typewriter; I had a friend in high school who could type 120wpm on a manual (not quite as fast on an electric), and above that you’re really into Jack Kerouac territory. The QWERTY keyboard design does a good job of keeping the typewriter from jamming by spreading out which moving parts need to move at the same time.

  Back in the late 1980s we went looking for a portable manual typewriter for a friend who was moving to Africa. Everything was electric by then, and we had to settle for a kids’ model. Back in our back room we’ve got my wife’s father’s old Olympia, but I don’t think we’ve been able to find ribbons for it for years (maybe this Web thing has some :-)

• [Anonymous]

  It always amazes me that the most articulate and well written responses to articles such as these are always by typewriter users.

  @Sonascope – great response. Food for thought.

  Personally, I would love to use a manual sometimes, but since I use the Colemak layout, I don’t think that will happen.

• [David Carroll]

  SoupIsGoodFood (#5)

  Ask and ye shall receive:
  IBM Lexmark Personal Wheelwriter 2 Typewriter with Spell Check

  P.S. My favorite soup is Italian Wedding.

• [WordyGrrl]

  I do miss the hum of the IBM Selectric II. For some reason, the sound just cleared out all distractions so you could focus on composing good, concise prose at 60 wpm.

  Still have most of the stuff I wrote in the typewriter days. Missing are all the electronic documents I wrote with now-obsolete software( MS Write, Word Perfect and DBase II, etc.).

  “It’s digital! You don’t NEED to print it out!”

• [CDC]

  I picked up an IBM Selectric at a firehouse auction for $1. It’s not easy to get ribbons for it, but I love it.

  There is a wonderful finger/hand feel to it that you just don’t get from a computer. If you’re writing something of length, who cares about spellcheck, you can scan it with an OCR program and fix those problems later.

  My grandfather had a Royal manual typewriter – I’m not even sure if it’s still in the family or not, but if it is, I so very much want it!

• [Takuan]

  Description

  This section is from the book “The Boy Mechanic Vol. 1″, by Popular Mechanics Co.. Also available from Amazon: 700 Things for Boys to Do.
  Renewing Typewriter Ribbons

  Roll the ribbon on a spool and meanwhile apply a little glycerine with a fountain-pen filler. Roll up tightly and lay aside for a week or ten days. Do not apply too much glycerine as this will make the ribbon sticky–a very little, well spread, is enough. The same application will also work well on ink pads. –Contributed by Earl R. Hastings, Corinth, Vt.

• [soupisgoodfood]

  @9 Does it come with a up-to-date NZ or UK dictionary?

• [David Newland]

  Using a typewriter instead of a word processor is like using a bicycle instead of a mini-van: it’s not an either/or scenario; there are times when you simply want, or need to travel at a slower, more deliberate pace, unencumbered by excess capacity and complexity.

  For a heartfelt appreciation of typewriter craftsmanship, check out this ode to Martin Tytell, an apparently legendary typewriter repairman who died last month.

  This was a man who kept a drawer full of umlauts!

• [Roy Trumbull]

  I learned typing on an Underwood that was older than I was. It was my passport to the future. My handwring was poor and not likely to get any better.
  We enrolled out children in an after school typing class little knowing the future involved keyboards. So they were in great shape when computers hit.
  A Selectric bridged me over the years when I needed a clean typeface for reproduction but composition programs were in their infancy.
  I have some nostalgia for typewriters but mainly I appreciate what they permitted me to do when they were the only way to do it.

• [Anonymous]

  A fascinating article and it is interesting that the most eloquent comments come from those who advocate typewriters. I think it may have more to do with the people who support typewriters having much more emotional involvement with the subject and that’s what making them

  When’s the last time the average computer user really got enthused about their input device?

  That said, I completely agree with #40 using Colemak and I use Dvorak and I can’t even contemplate the effort that would be required to put a typewriter into that layout while it was nothing more complicated than flicking the tops off my regular keyboard and replacing them in a different order on a computer.

  Just because you can see the mechanical system that connects human and paper doesn’t mean it’s in anyway easier to understand.

• [Takuan]

  and what new interface will make the current generation quaint?

• [slywy]

  I have a Royal Sabre manual from college.

  I used to, and still do, write everything in pencil first.

  A great portable alternative is an AlphaSmart NEO. I get all kinds of comments when I’m typing my handwritten stuff on it.

• [sonascope]

  I’m amused by the language that gets invoked whenever mention is made of contemporary users of “obsolete” tools. We insist on sticking with old things, we’re stubborn, we refuse modernity, we’re anti-tech, we’re luddites—all for using the tool that produced the greatest novels ever written. Being a typewriter fan is a lot like being a vegetarian in a house full of meat-eaters, who can’t seem to quell the urgent desire to bring their quarry back into the presumably righteous path (I am not, for the record, a vegetarian, but I’ve seen that hunt, time and time again).

  It’s funny, since enthusiasm for a typewriter isn’t anti-technological, not by a long shot. It’s not as though typewriters dangle heavily from the branches of the Underwood tree, waiting to be snipped off and carted away to communes of unwashed hippies in yurts—these are amazingly intricate mechanisms, the best of which are as finely-tuned and precise as Swiss watches (particularly the Swiss typewriters).

  As I write this, I am sitting at a desk with two computers facing me, and there’s a small case of software-based digital synthesizers, MIDI controllers, a small MIDI keyboard, and effects processors under the main monitor. To the side of the desk, there are synthesizers ranging in age from 32 to 19 years in age, and a cheap electric guitar from 1966 with crappy brass-plated hardware and an action that’s so high that every normal guitarist hollers that it’s unplayable (I’m into slides and eBow). Someone seeing my desk looking like a planetarium in the dark would have an awful hard time thinking me an anti-technological sort, at least till I mention that I prefer to write with a typewriter.

  There’s also a forty year-old Olympia SM9 portable typewriter with an Elite typeface and a rare 1 key perched there, and man, oh man, is it ever pretty. When I’m in the mood to write in that raw and wonderful way I write at my best, I set it right in front of me, put on a little music, and go at it like Hendrix went at his guitars. People claim that typing isn’t like playing an instrument, and if that’s true for you, and if you manage to generate product in the jangling, glaring, blinking, grammar-suggesting nightmare world of Word, well, good for you. Me—I love the physicality of the act, of how faster rhythms require actual force, and how the machine has a music to it, a clockwork lyricism in action that my literary predecessors knew so well, and produces an actual thing instead of just light and numbers.

  Because I make music, I think a lot in terms of an instrumental paradigm, and wonder how it would be if aspiring guitarists stuck their noses in the air about vintage Gibsons and Martins and Fenders, or if pianists said “ugh, an old Steinway? No thanks, I’ll take the shiny new Yamaha Clavinova, please.” You can work with whatever you have at hand, and I’m a big fan of that kind of pragmatism, but having a long-term physical relationship (hush up, perverts) with your tools is a wonderful thing, too.

  That’s the funny part. Everyone seems to think writing with a typewriter means you won’t ever touch a computer, in essence suggesting some kind of self-castrating asceticism in the enthusiasm, and turning it into a contrarian act. Does riding a bike on a regular one mile trip to the grocery store make you anti-car by default, or does it make you the kind of person who applies appropriate technology to specific situations? Should you drive those four blocks to the library because you can, or walk? Can’t all these means work together?

  And yet, in virtually every post I’ve ever seen on this site or on other similar sites, any celebration of the typewriter always brings the same tired old repudiations and the same old cliches, because of course you’d only use a grimy old typewriter because you’re a luddite, a hipster, a steampunk, or some kind of weirdo. I use mine because the weirdos who inspired me to take up writing did perfectly well with their cranky old machines, and often waxed lyrical about their qualities.

  Don’t like ‘em? Don’t use ‘em (and send ‘em my way).

• [wolfiesma]

  Power. The new generation of laptops will generate their own electricity. Solar tiles will replace cumbersome plug and battery pack.

• [maxximoo]

  I had my typewriter tuned up there. took all of 10 minutes and cost next to nothing. and i got the full tour of all the insane old typewriters they keep around to repair or part out. hooray!

• [Anonymous]

  I don’t miss the writing I did in college over 30 years ago, banging on an old Remington manual portable at 2:30 in the morning the night before the paper was due.

  Thank goodness my profs were willing to accept papers with entire sentences Xed out. Imagine such a thing today. Now students turn in pristine, erasure-free pages, but it hasn’t made them better writers.

  The truth is that despite the romance of the typewriter, a word processor is just plain more efficient at turning thoughts into words. Turn off the bloody spelling and syntax checkers, which disrupt and corrupt the thoughts, and type away. Then go back and edit — just like retyping the manuscript in the old days, except faster.

  All that said, I still have my typewriter, and I still use it now and then. That’s because printed forms are still around, often used for some of life’s most significant functions. No matter how clearly you print, a hand-written form will never be as neat, legible, and (sorry) impressive as a typed one. Ever try filling out a printed form on a laser or inkjet printer?

• [technogeek]

  I’ve been regretting having jettisoned my father’s old reporter’s portable. It was the right thing to do at the time, but now that I’ve got a suitable place to put it…

  The one thing typewriters still do better than PCs is typing into an existing form. Software to scan forms, figure out where the data entry should go, type into those spaces, and print out the completed form does exist, but it’s a Royal (if you’ll pardon the pun) pain to use. And alas, not all forms are available in prescanned/pre-fielded versions, never mind fully electronic versions. With my handwriting, a typewriter is still useful for that purpose.

• [Takuan]

  was hoping for something more Vingeian.

• [trickpony]

  My typewriter sits heavily on my desk adjacent to a rotary phone and a portable wind-up clock. These things make sense to me; they are straight forward and without pretense; they were designed to preform a function, and as all things which are well designed, they are beautiful. My typewriter is a 1953 Underwood. It is the end of the deco typewriters and it’s electric. It hums, purrs, and dings. It types smoothly.

  A novel is not written in the first draft (show me one that was worth its weight in salt and I’ll pull out my red pen and mark across the manuscript); but rather by careful revision. I find that the typewriter allows this. I get the space I need to work out a first draft, sans my compulsive need to check my email.

  Then I have a thick pile of ink saturated pages which I read, turning each page, marking thoughts and changes in the margins. Satisfied with my progress, I am then able to keyboard a well edited second draft into electronic document.

  A good craftsmen is as good as their tools. Knowing yourself and your tools is paramount.

• [Kyle Goetz]

  A lawyer I worked with this summer had an old typewriter on his desk as a conversation piece. It was a really nice, old one.

• [blassfamous]

  My wife teaches at a college here in Brooklyn NY where one of her students has a business as a typist, but not in the usual sense. This young woman gets paid to schlep her 1960′s portable to the birthday parties and barmitzvahs of brownstone Brooklyn’s children and types. That’s right. She sets up her machine and the kids line up and they tell her what to type and the kids get the party favor of a freshly typed page. Apparently she’s booked almost every weekend. On a related note… What did my daughter, who turned 8 in September, want more than anything in this world for her birthday? Yes, a typewriter. We can’t drag her out of bed on school days, but come Saturday and Sunday mornings, my wife and I have been awaken by the familiar sound of the click and clacking of my daughter’s favorite present. What is she writing? At first, thank-you notes, for her other presents. Now she’s on to her first “chapter book”.

• [sonascope]

  I have spell check on all my manual typewriters.

  It’s called my brain, and it’s uncommon to see in use these days, when every printed page is littered with those specific typos created by spell check and the little dialogue boxes that continually ask you what you really meant to write. I could train my spell check algorithm to recognize the unusual words and contractions I like to use, or I could just pay attention when I write and proofread. If spell check could rid this dimwitted country of the grocer’s apostrophe, I might be swayed a bit, but that’s not going to happen anytime soon.

  I’ve often heard the complaint “well, I’d love to use a typewriter, but I need to be able to correct my writing,” to which I point out that that’s what red pencils and second drafts are for. You’d think you were asking people to build the pyramids, to suggest that they type their typescript out twice. Writers actually managed to survive before the written word turned into little twitchy shapes made of light, but we’re all little drones in the big machine nowadays. Besides, writing time is writing time—you mess up, you cross it out, carry on, and fix it in the next draft so you don’t confuse the writing mind with the editing mind.

  Let the objections fly, though. I love watching the competition surrender to the machinery of mental degeneration. Don’t you need to check your email, check on the weekend weather and the stock market, see how that eBay bid is going, and watch something funny on youtube just about now?

• [zombieite]

  obsolete

  from L. obsoletus “grown old, worn out,” pp. of obsolescere “fall into disuse,” probably from ob “away” + solere “to be used to, be accustomed.”

  adsolete

  neologism i came up with recently, meaning “old, but coming back into favor due to previously overlooked charms or advantages” (ad = “toward”).

• [sammich]

  Personally, I’m hoping that switching to a computer keyboard from a vintage 1950s typewriter with a 2-inch action will have saved me from arthritis in my later years.
  However, I can’t help but feel we’ll be needing these non-electrical machines in the years to come…

• [Digital Artz]

  As a child in 1947 I found (at one of my Dad’s
  art opening’s at a NY gallery) a typewriter in the
  galleries office it was the most amazing mechanical
  tool I ever saw ,almost erotic ,well almost erotICK.

• [chatterton]

  Huh, I had to read the linked article and then go re-read the piece to be sure, but this is definitely the same repair shop a friend of mine wrote a story about a few years ago. The story has always been a personal favorite, and I’m glad to hear that the Flores family is still in the business.

• [Alys]

  I had a typewriter, but I suspect it was one of the things that I ‘lost’ when my mother was cleaning before the big move.

  I really don’t like composing directly to computer, and if I could find a typewriter small enough to actually be portable, I’d use it. In the meantime, I write the old fashioned way – with a pen and notebook.

• [chuckheston]

  Loves my Adler Meteor Portable. It’s loud and smells funny, but it forces my ADD brain into a nice groove, a steady flow of linear thought. On the laptop, I constantly edit and often get stuck overworking sentences. On my typewriter the only way to edit is to backspace and overwrite with XXXXXXs.

• [seandavid010]

  Glad to see the typewriter getting a little attention here. I know I’d be lost without my IBM Selectric III.

• [Tom Hale]

  I wish I could write.

  I read about modern authors that still insist on using their old type writers. I guess, that other than being a good luck charm or a memento they can’t give up – it forces them to slow their typing, also making them slow their thought process. Which I can see being a good thing when writing a book, rather that a report.

  My wife types so fast, a typewriter would jam up in seconds if she were to attempt using one.

• [adralien]

  I love the mechanics of typewriters; as a kid I was always fascinated by the ratio of the speed of key depression to the speed of the letter hitting the paper (and the ribbon coming up to meet it and retreating!). Don’t even get me started on those electric ones with the ball of text spinning and whacking. Pure joy!

  However, I’m a huge fan of cntl-Z and alt-bksp and I often search for them in reality when making something… damn, soldered that wrong… cntl-Z cntl-Z… as such I would be doomed on a typewriter today… also, no spellcheck or syntax highlighting!

  “So, um, where’s the Python module for this thing?”

• [soupisgoodfood]

  When you can get a good spell-checker module for one of them, let me know. For me, a type-writer would just slow down my thought process, forcing me to immediately deal with little mistakes that I’d rather deal with latter. Plus, none of them are as thin as a Macbook Air.

• [Pipenta]

  A person isn’t smarter/stupider/hipper/wiser for choosing to write with a computer/typewriter/pen. Different (key)strokes for different folks.

  I’m all about speed. The faster I can go, the less I’m involved in the mechanical interface, the more I can get into a groove, find a rhythm, really write. I usually don’t slow down to fuss with spelling or grammar until I’ve made a first pass. If I’m writing something other than a note to a friend or an intraweb post, I will proof carefully. I need to do this because I really get riffing and I tend to repeat phrases almost as if I were improvising musically. These repetitions help me establish a rhythm, but they look sloppy in the end product so I go back and switch them out for close variations. But I’m still drumming, just below the surface.

  So a computer helps me go lickety-split and I love that. I love being able to use different fonts. I adore cut and paste, it makes editing easy. And yes, the spell check is pretty nifty too.

  A typewriter would be my second choice. But the mechanical aspect of typing is more tiring on an old keyboard. My hands cramp. Bad typing form I suppose. As it is, I’ve worn most of the letters off of my keyboard, rendering it pretty useless to folks who don’t touch type. If I used a typewriter I wouldn’t have all the wonderful fonts at my fingertips, wouldn’t be able to cut and paste, to email. I suppose if I did use a typewriter, I’d have an excuse for not using the spell check.

  But at least I would be able to read what I wrote which can’t be said for the things I write with pen and pencil. My handwriting is shockingly bad. I should have been a doctor.

  And even for folks writing with goose quills on parchment, there’s someone off in the background, some storyteller proud of the oral tradition.

  All this writing stuff is pretty newfangled after all.