Thoughts on a Typewriter

Why would anyone want a typewriter in 2023?

Why would anyone want a typewriter in 2023?

I asked myself this when I was given this Smith-Corona Galaxie Twelve by the gorgeous folks at Philly Typewriter. Its beautiful, cool, and fun, but would I actually use the damn thing, and for what?

A typewriter is inherently impractical in the 21st century.

It is noisy, prone to mechanical issues, error prone, and so damn heavy.

There’s not a ton of logic to this thing, but perhaps that is the point.

Computers deliver logic in a perfect and exponentially improving form.

Each day digital becomes faster, smarter, cheaper, more powerful.

The typewriter, meanwhile, stays the same; stuck in the year it left the factory, a few years before I entered this earth. It is a rock.

A typewriter appears as an anachronism…

But then I sat, loaded a sheet of paper, and began clacking away.

As a writer who has spent 20 years working in MS Word, I was stunned by the sheer mechanical pace. Each letter is an effort, a physical act to bring down the key with enough force for that THWACK, striking the ribbon with enough force to put letters onto paper. It is slow. It demands concentration. It tests your stamina. It is the opposite of a laptop.

I love it.

I am constantly asked what the appeal of analog tools and ideas are.

People are baffled at the logic of buying typewriters, turntables, film cameras, and other non-digital things. It offends their very sense of logical reasoning, and the narrative of linear human progress through technology. But progress is not linear. Something changes, and something is lost in the process: pace, aesthetics, touch, smell, limits.

We work hard to improve these things, but then realize they have a certain value to us now.

In some ways writing on a typewriter is hard. My fingers hurt now, and I’m not even done a page. I have made a ton of errors, and the formatting is the work of a deranged maniac (save your Unabomber jokes).

But these words have flowed without pause, and with more fun than anything I’ve written in years, because I can’t go back. The typewriter is the best new writing tool I’ve used since that first school essay on a computer. Today, when the new is ubiquitous and easy and free, we all need a challenge. Something to slow us down, a cognitive roadblock to force us in a new direction. So here we are, writing a blog on a typewriter.

Stay tuned for more. David Sax