So, I bought a typewriter
How much I use this heavy lump of steel isn't as important as having this thing of beauty in my life.
I like to think of myself as being fairly up to date with technological trends. I’ve had a PC at home since 1995, a mobile phone since about 1997, and a smartphone since 2009. I do own a record player and a collection of vinyl, but 90% of my music listening comes from streaming services, while linear television feels as much like an anachronism as it does to just about everybody else under the age of about 55 these days. To put it another way, I don’t think I’m a luddite.
So, why on earth did I buy a typewriter? Well, partly it was for purely aesthetic reasons. A typewriter is a nice thing to own. They’re nice to look at. It’s a pleasing little objet d‘art to just have sitting around, and as I’ve got older I’ve become increasingly drawn to just having nice things in my life. I don’t particularly need them to be useful, I just need to be able to look at them and have them make me feel an iota better about everything for a moment.
Of course, this is a typewriter and I write for a living, so there is a slightly deeper significance, and it is somewhat depressing that this significance is primarily a reminder of my rapidly advancing years. At 52 years old, I straddle one of the great divides in society; the gap between those who remember a world in which practically everything was analogue and those who don’t.
I had a typewriter when I was at college. I had one when I was at university. The very idea of using a word processor for anything beyond the very narrow task of creating the college magazine would have been complete anathema to me. Just as I had an address book full of telephone numbers, so I had this piece of machinery which I used to stamp words onto sheets of paper.
It didn't take a great deal of looking. Second-hand typewriters are all over Ebay these days, and the good news for those among you who are now thinking of the possibility of buying one yourselves (which I already know to be more than zero) is that they’re really not very expensive. A little over £30 was enough to secure me one, in good condition and perfect working order, in a carry-case with—be still, my beating heart—some Letraset and a few packets of Tippex correction strips.
When you receive such an item through the post, the realisation of what an undertaking this actually might be is immediate. This thing is heavy. And when you open it up, it’s immediately obvious why. There’s a lot of steel going on here, along with the smell of print and metal, always an aroma that will cause a pavlovian reaction in certain people of certain ages.
So, what happens when you actually sit down and type at one of these things, then? Well, the very first thing that you have to do is detune your brain, to slow it down to a speed that matches your fingers. It’s now been 35 years since I did a touch typing course at college, and I have to admit to myself that I am no longer a touch typist. And the very weight that you have to bring down upon a key in order to get it to register is of a different order. Within about a sentence and a half I felt like I might be doing it some sort of damage, but then I remembered… this is what it’s supposed to feel like.
And of course, this is a manual process. I’d decided that I wanted to put a fresh ribbon in it upon purchase, but when that arrived I still needed to double-check in the manual exactly how I was supposed to do it. By the time it was in, my hair was amusingly askew and my fingers looked as though I’d been down the police station answering questions about a series of house burglaries at which fingerprints had been found.
And of course, it’s unforgiving. The backspace button on this keyboard does not do the same thing as the backspace key button on my laptop. If you make a mistake, you have to get the correction slips out and tidy up your mistake yourself, and without getting your mucky paw prints all over the paper that you have been working on.
There are other pitfalls to have to avoid, too. To get an even distribution of ink, half-hitting a key and thinking “that’ll do” no longer flies. You need to watch out for going too quickly and getting the typebars crossed over each other, thereby messing up your work. You also have to make sure that you get the paper in it straight, and that’s not as easy as it probably should be.
The Letraset in the carry-case carry a tantalising hint as to the typewriter’s back story. It’s WH Smiths own brand, and the cube-shaped logo on the packet dates it to some point between 1973 and the early 1990s. And the ticket with the price is still on it. 45p was the price of it then. Nowadays, you’ll be paying upwards of ten times that amount for “Dry Transfer Lettering”, and furthermore the actual company Letraset haven’t even existed since they were sold and folded into another company—which no longer makes anything like this—in 2012.
So, how was it? Well, at first it felt almost impossible. Not being able to make any mistakes in typing felt like a huge challenge, as though I had to make it to the bottom of the sheet of paper to survive it. And then, of course, when I finally did make it to the bottom of a sheet, I’d not paid close enough attention to how I’d put it in, meaning that it came out completely askew. So that’s another 45 minutes wasted.
You need the correction slips. It is inevitable that, at some point, your finger will just stab the wrong key, and in this eventuality your best case scenario is that you spot it and can quickly remove it. But the feeling of satisfaction is enormous. The noise it makes—sufficiently loud that the only time I can reasonably use it is well before the kids go to bed—is just delicious, while the sense of achievement to be taken from having completed a full sheet of paper without a single mistake is immense.
And that, for me, is one of the key points of owning one of these. In my day job, 95% of what I produce will only ever be pixels on a screen. And even of that other 5%, practically all of it will ultimately be produced by someone else. But in this case, I am the means of production. The words form in my head, and I type them onto a sheet of paper. And when that piece of paper emerges from the typewriter I hold in my hands something that I have produced, from top to bottom.
I am categorically not an artist, in the conventional sense. As such, I’ve only very seldom had that feeling that comes with holding something that you produced yourself. Those among us who practise art may not even be able to understand why this in itself is such a big part of the appeal, to which all I can say is that this is something that we don’t normally feel. A lucky few will get a book published and will get to see piles of them in boxes upon publication, but even in those cases the writers involved have not physically produced the book itself. This just hits differently.
And I do feel as though I should remind everybody reading this that a laptop keyboard is a much easier place to do your writing. Not only are there far more characters that you can use, but you can also use italics when necessary, delete any mistakes you may have made without anybody noticing, and at the end of it all the tips of your fingers don’t make it look as though you thought of auditioning for The Black & White Minstrel Show but thought better of it at the last minute.
And what will I do with it? No idea, though I have one thing that I have already typed for reasons and another that I’m just about to type, for altogether different reasons. Hey, if anybody on here wants a hand-typed letter, just hit me up and I’ll do it. If Substack fuck me about too much, I might even be tempted to jack that in and just send out this newsletter by post to you every day instead.
But for now, I’m just pleased with my purchase, a beautiful piece of machinery that will give me a microdose of happiness every time I look at it. Next up, I also want a vintage cash register. They’re even heavier. substantially more expensive and considerably more difficult to come by, but if you think that’s going to stop me, you probably don’t know me well enough.
Beautiful. I'm a similar age to you and remember there still being a typing pool when I first started work at Jaguar Cars in 1990.