Wild Art Wednesday
I’m finally back into my site after experiencing a degraded login “captcha” problem. Did you miss it?
Did you know manual typewriters are making a “comeback?”
I had a hint last November, when my 7-year-old nephew said that’s all he wanted was a typewriter for Christmas. Yeah, that’s what I said, “HuH?”
How many of those old machines ended up in the landfills of North America? I would have to say the number has to be around a million. How many typewriters have I passed up at garage and estate sales? It would have to be in the hundreds. Now the only thing in the hundreds are the price tags for this faddish beast.
I think the first typewriter I ever owned was electric – barely electric, but electric. And I upgraded along the way, while in college. That went along until I dropped out of college, and by the time I went back to finish? I was pounding my 40-wpm on IBM Selectrics in the basement newsroom at North Texas GAB building. Yes, we still used whiteout and we typed to our professor’s content on hashed newsprint – the cheapest paper in the world, one step above papyrus or an actual tree.
It didn’t matter though. Our nicely typed black-on-brown copy with whiteout, was handed back to us so bloodily marked up … that’s all we could see – red.
Read more about the resurgent manual typewriter mania here:
- New York Daily News – New Generation Writers
- Tom Hanks Helps the Typewriter Comebackh
- Sales are Booming – The Washington Post
Category: Body-Mind-Soul, Culture on the Skids, Wild Art Wednesday
