Manual typewriters aren’t going gently into the good night of the digital era. The machines have been attracting fresh converts, many too young to be nostalgic for spooled ribbons, inksmudged fingers and corrective fluid. Fetishizing old Underwoods, Smith Coronas and Remingtons, they recognize them as functional and beautiful machines, swapping them and showing them off .
At events called “type-ins,” they’ve gather ed in bars and bookstores to flaunt a post-digital gravitas, tapping out letters to send via snail mail and competing to see who types the fastest.
“You type so much quicker than you can think on a computer,” said Brandi Kowalski, 33, of Brady & Kowalski Writing Machines. “On a typewriter, you have to think.” She and Donna Brady, 35, began their vintage typewriter business last April. So far, they have sold more than 70 machines, many to first-time users. Their slogan? “Unplug and reconnect.”
In the last three months, type-ins have clattered into Seattle, Phoenix and Basel, Switzerland, where they called the event a “schreibmaschinenfest,” or, literally, writing machine festival.
Why celebrate the humble typewriter? For one, old typewriters are built like battleships. They survive countless indignities and welcome repairs, unlike laptops and smartphones.
“It’s kind of like saying, ‘In your face, Microsoft!’ ” said Richard Polt, 46, a typewriter collector in Cincinnati. Mr. Polt teaches philosophy at Xavier University, where he’s given away about a dozen typewriters to enthusiastic students and colleagues.
Typewriters are good at only one thing: putting words on paper. “If I’m on a computer, there’s no way I can concentrate on just writing,” said Jon Roth, 23, a journalist . “I’ll be checking my e-mail, my Twitter.” When he uses a typewriter, Mr. Roth said, “I can sit down and I know I’m writing. It sounds like I’m writing.”
And there’s something else about typewriters. In more than a dozen interviews, young typewriter aficionados raised a common theme. Though they grew up on computers, they enjoy prying at the seams of digital culture. They appreciate tangibility, the object-ness of things.
But for many younger typewriter users, the old technology rests comfortably beside the new. Matt Cidoni, 16, keeps a picture of his favorite machine, a Royal No. 10, on his iPod Touch so he can show it off to friends.
What do literary stalwarts of the original typewriter era make of all this?
“ It makes us feel young again to think there’s a new generation catching on,” said Gay Talese, 79, journalist and author.
Robert A. Caro, 75, the Pulitzer-winning biographer, said he was not surprised by the typewriter renaissance. “One reason I type is it simply makes me feel closer to my words. It’s like being a cabinetmaker. It’s like laying down the planks. This is the way it’s supposed to feel.”
By JESSICA BRUDER
