Last typist refuses to switch to laptop, gets boot from Writers Room in Greenwich Village, article.
"In the event that there are no desks available, laptop users must make room for typists," read a sign posted in the "Typing Room" for years.
When Ferrante returned to the Writers Room in April after an eight-month break, the sign was gone and his noisy typewriter was no longer welcome.
I guess we can learn something from this, but I'm durned if I know what.
(Except that some people are willing to pay $1400 a year for a cubicle to write in!)
For whatever it's worth, I feel that the death of the typewriter and its more recent cousin the word processor is a huge mistake.
ReplyDeleteThere's a profitable business downtown which rebuilds old IBM Selectrics for the well-heeled office crowd, and they take pride in being able to type a genuine old-fashioned letter on one of those and send it out to clients.
The best-performing word processor that I've ever seen or used is the
Canon Starwriter from 1995. It died prematurely because it didn't use the standard language most computers are using, so its disks couldn't be easily read by computers, even though the machine itself was about 85 percent computer. It had (and still has) an electronic printing system which uses a thermal process to activate the characters through its ribbon, much the same way that a thermal fax machine prints. In fact, just for the hell of it I once rigged it up to use a roll of thermal fax paper in place of its regular ribbon and plain paper, and it worked perfectly.
I've typed thousands of pages of single-spaced typing on mine, and it still works perfectly, even though the identifying symbols are now worn off some of its keys. The only problem with it now is that I have trouble finding ribbons.
There's a certain satisfaction to writing on a machine like that, and I found that simply sitting there and beginning that process seemed to start my creative juices flowing, and the ideas popping into my head. I still miss that, and I don't get that same feeling from these 'Mickey Mouse' keyboards supplied with computers.
Most of these are just shit!
"There's a different commitment when you know you're making a mark on the page, when you strike a key and bleed ink on the page," he said.
ReplyDeleteI agree with him on this. I had a Brother electronic typewriter once that I got rid of. I shouldn't have, because it's a whole different thing from typing on a computer. You commit to what's put down in a way you don't have to on a computer.
If you read some of the comments left about this article, though, most are very hostile.
Here's a nice website for those of us who like old typewriters, or who
ReplyDeletehave had them in years past....
http://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/index.html
Enjoy!
If a member, I'd put Virtual Typewriter on my laptop.
ReplyDeleteVisual Typewriter I mean.
ReplyDeleteOnly a pretentious dick would still use a typewriter these days. What a tool, hauling that thing there when he could have a paper-thin, light-as-air laptop and not have to later recopy everything he typed. Tool!
ReplyDelete