‘We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake.’

D I V E   I N

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Typewriters

 

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In much-loved ‘90s movie You’ve Got Mail, Kathleen Kelly’s writer boyfriend, Frank Navasky, uses his typewriter to proclaim that Kathleen is ‘a lone reed, standing tall, waving boldly in the corrupt sands of commerce’ (in reference to her small bookshop fighting conglomerate Fox Books). Of course, Frank Navasky was something of a lone reed himself, a man in love with his typewriter as the world opened its arms to computers. Today, he’d be a mere blade of grass, his wave barely discernible in the saturation of it all.

 

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There is something alluring about typewriters. Perhaps it’s their armoured bodies and mechanical levers, their simple movements. They speak of many things: other times and places, sitting with your thoughts, turning the intangible into the material. Typewriters are the vessels on which greatness and culture and life have been delivered to the world since their invention in the 1800s: Sylvia Plath’s poems; Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West’s entire love affair in letters; Ruth Bader-Ginsburg herself, after years at Harvard Law typing up both her and her ailing husband’s lecture notes; the works of greats from Mark Twain to Agatha Christie. Typewriters have also been widely used in popular culture, from the aforementioned You’ve Got Mail to Love Actually (the latter of which sees Colin Firth panic as the contents of his type-written horror novel go flying into the lake outside his French holiday home, compelling his housemaid to dive in and retrieve the sopping wet pages).

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Even smartphone addicts can attest to the magic of the machines, if the popularity of Hanx Writer app (created by collector and — coming full circle — Kathleen Kelly’s happy-ever-after, Tom Hanks) is anything to go by. The app offers a variety of Courier M-style fonts and clackety sounds for users to enjoy when they hit the 2D buttons on their phone keyboards. But if we’re so fond of the distinctive sound of keys punching a ribbon and a typeface that remind us of times gone by, why aren’t typewriters more popular?

 

The answer, unfortunately, is simple: efficiency, or lack thereof. Exhibit A: this zine. The idea of creating something like this on a typewriter seems overwhelming, especially for an editor who was raised on a hearty diet of MSN Messenger, Microsoft Word, and, of course, the backspace key. After all, typewriters don’t allow unlimited editing (electric models allow backspacing as you type, but once you’ve pressed ‘enter’, there’s no going back). They’re not connected to the internet. They’re noisy and heavy and hard to transport. They require ink and, from time to time, mechanical troubleshooting. I’m a long-time lover of typewriters, and yet I too have viewed them only as the effort they require, turning instead to my sidekick, the computer, for bigger writing projects.

 

So, it’s understandable what the app was trying to do – combine the pleasure of typewriters with the efficiency of modern devices. But the innate joy of a typewriter, greater than the sum of its parts, comes from the experience of actually using a typewriter in all of its delicious, rich complexity. It can only be felt as a whole. When the pad of your fingertip touches the concave surface of a key and the weight of your wrist sets the whole mechanical process into audible motion, there’s connection — to your senses, the typewriter, your words. Perhaps this is because typewriters are inherently slow creatures. You have to feed the paper through the paper rest and line it up before you can type. My fingers fly across a computer keyboard, but typewriters don’t allow such disrespect: keys get stuck on the ribbon and letters are omitted on the paper. Typewriters refuse to race through the moment. And so, you have no choice but to slow down, to type at a pace the machines can handle and one that likely suits you — human being — better, anyway.

     

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My sister had a typewriter when I was growing up. It was blue and basic, and my mum got it from a car boot sale. I was lucky enough to inherit it years later. I loved tapping away on the old machine; stories and poems, missives and notes. My second typewriter was a second-hand Olivetti Lettera 25 from a used goods shop in Sham Shui Po. Beige and clunky, it didn’t have the sleekness or panache of the retro typewriters sitting decoratively on people’s shelves on Instagram, and I think that’s why I chose it. It was unapologetically no-frills and functional.

 

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When you use a typewriter, the sheer physicality of it is so grounding and all-encompassing, you couldn’t possibly be thinking about tomorrow’s appointment or what your friend meant when she put a full stop after ‘OK’ in her text message. It insists you remain in the present, in the real world, mindful and awake. You mean what you say because you think first. You have to, really, unless you’re happy typing the same thing over and over until you get it right. As for random typos, they’re reminders of your humanity, not your weaknesses, of the fact that this is a mechanical machine, not a robot. In type-writing your words, you’re also taking time to commune with the recipient (even if that’s you) one-on-one — no work emails clouding the space, no whizzing across a laptop keyboard on autopilot and bashing ‘send’.

 

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2016 documentary California Typewriter, centred around the eponymous family-owned shop, is a love letter to typewriters. It features a variety of typewriter fans, from famous folk like Tom Hanks and John Mayer, to artists and historians.  The documentary ends with the reading of a manifesto, The Typewriter Revolution, which urges us to fight for independence, freedom, and self-sufficiency. 

 

This isn’t to say that typewriters are the superlative medium for writing. In fact, there’s just as much beef between typewriters and longhand as there is between computers and typewriters. Many people, including philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, weren't mad about the machines when they arrived on the scene, calling them ‘impersonal’ and accusing them of ‘working on our thoughts’ (likely how many of us feel about computers today). This essay is not a declaration that typewriters are better than computers (or, in fact, longhand). It is simply a call to embrace the things they offer, perhaps things we struggle to find today in our techno world: physicality, simplicity, reliability, history, the ability to actually see and understand how our chosen tool works. And, of course, the opportunity to slow down.