Visceral, physical

Fleur, in feline muse pose (Smith-Corona Galaxie Twelve in foreground)

Why typewriters? What do I use them for? Writing journal pages and writing letters—those are the two main things. My handwriting sucks, and I love to type on those mechanical beasts. It just feels good. I’m fast, too—no hunt-and-pecking for me. I can touch-type nearly as fast on a good manual typewriter as I can on a computer keyboard.

I was one of two boys among twenty-eight girls in my high school typing class. We learned on IBM Selectric II machines. I took typing rather than an advanced shop class (woodworking, welding, automotive, etc.) because I knew I’d need to type if I wanted to be a writer, which was one thing I’d entertained as a future fantasy life. Computers weren’t part of regular life in 1978, and boys weren’t encouraged to learn to type. It was almost entirely girls eyeing secretarial jobs.

When I moved here to Eugene at age 21, I brought along my mom’s electric Smith-Corona and made rent money typing term papers for University of Oregon students. Back then there were dozens of typing ads in the student newspaper (Oregon Daily Emerald). I started out advertising my services at 80 cents per page, undercutting all the other typists in the classifieds. In 1981 it was highly unlikely that a student would own a computer and printer capable of emulating typewriter print output. You either typed your own papers on a typewriter, or you hired someone. There was lots of business, especially around midterms and finals. Around 1985 I bought a Commodore-64 and letter-quality printer, and transitioned to word processing, keeping my business going through the rest of the ‘80s.

I’d owned a couple manual typewriters since the ‘90s, and used them occasionally. But it was 2017 when I really caught the bug. Richard Polt’s The Typewriter Revolution book sucked me in, and I started collecting. My collection peaked at around 40 machines within a year and a half. Then I started culling, but slowly. I think I have 27 at most recent count. This blog’s readers will be aware that I recently started a new culling phase. But I’m still an avid typewriter enthusiast, and I love typing on my typers!

Typewriters in 2025 are long free of the industrial and menial drudgery associated with office machinery. They were ousted from the workplace decades ago, starting in the early 1980s, by word processors and computers. Today they are creative tools, personal exploration devices, and just plain fun. But they do have a feature that is still not readily duplicated in modern writing devices (save pen and pencil): instant printing. Every character you type appears in print on a sheet of paper, instantly. Typewriters have another distinct advantage over computers: distraction-free writing—no internet, no apps, no required software updates, and—for manual machines—no electricity needed.

There are bloggers who use typewriters to write their entries, posting scanned typed pages to their blogs. These people make up a subset of the blogosphere called the typosphere. One of my favorites in this genre is Seldom Speedy. Kent types, scans, and posts a page every day. Another favorite typospherian is Joe Van Cleave, whose blog and YouTube channel are packed with good information and inspiration. But blogging with a typewriter isn’t my bag. I actually enjoy typing on a computer and using all the editing and formatting tools available in that realm. But for visceral, physical writing enjoyment, nothing beats a manual typewriter for me!