In terms of current cultural impact, that may be slightly less significant than the closing of the world’s last mustache wax factory. Or the last chastity belt factory.
But for those of us who once earned our daily crumbs as sportswriters lugging Royals or Underwoods from one press box to another, it is the end not only of an era, but of a way of life. The coroner’s certificate, finally issued several decades after the death.
A manual typewriter, for those who have spent most of their writing lives staring at LCD screens, can best be described as “a wireless, single-font word processor with the spell check function permanently disabled.”
It was portable in the way a bowling ball is portable. And just as versatile. When you finished writing with a typewriter on a piece of paper, what you had was a piece of paper with words on it. There was no “send” key. You edited with Wite-Out. “Cut and paste” meant just that: you “cut” with scissors or the edge of a ruler, moved sentences or paragraphs to their new locations and stuck them together with white library paste. A thoroughly-edited document could wind up weighing seven or eight pounds.
But what the manual typewriter lacked in functionality it made up for in simplicity. There was no learning curve. No “Typewriters for Dummies.” The owner’s manual consisted of: Insert single sheet of paper. Type. Remove sheet of paper. And you could use it to write anywhere, even if there wasn’t a Starbucks in the neighborhood. Every spot was hot if you had a manual typewriter.
For nearly a century, it was the tool of writers from Nietzsche to Snoopy. Before IBM Selectric electrified the typing world, most press boxes, newsrooms and offices were alive with the sound of clacking keys and bells that signaled the end of a line.
But, eventually the unplugged typewriter became useful mostly for typing addresses on a single envelope or sending messages to friends and relatives even older than ourselves.
And I wouldn’t want to go back to those days, any more than I’d want to trade my iPod for a boom box.
Still, for anyone who ever came face-to-face with a blank sheet of paper and an editor’s deadline, no computer ever invented could provide the cathartic satisfaction of ripping a piece of paper out of a typewriter carriage, crumbling it into a ball and hurling it across the room in the general direction of a wastebasket.
Clicking “delete” doesn’t even come close.
Contact D.L. Stewart at dlstew_2000@yahoo.com.
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