
Perhaps you would assume I fall for those keyboards that allow me to type the fastest, but I must confess that lately I’ve become smitten with manual typewriters. Recently I purchased a 1960s Smith-Corona Corsair—even new, it was a cheap little thing, but it’s surprisingly durable, and with a little oil and cleaning, I was able to revive my colorful English typewriter. Typing on the device…well, it’s different. It can definitely be described as giving the “tactile feeling,” so many of us look for, but typing on a manual typewriter is just so different than anything else my fingers have graced themselves upon. Type too fast, and the type bars collide and jam, or characters may overlap. Further impeding typing speed is the inability to simply hit “delete” if there is a typing error…(worse yet is the inability to restructure paragraphs once they’re on paper). A certain rhythm has to be established to maximize typing efficiency. Yes, in many cases the downsides of a manual typewriter outweigh the pros; but when I type a letter, I find the required focus to be to my advantage. My letters are concise and thoughtful—I can’t same for my E-mails (or blog entries). Moreover, the recipient is left with something indelible…something material to hold onto…and not something that merely exists in the cloud.
