Death of the Typewriter

My first typewriter, back in the late 1960s, was a manual Smith-Corona. A couple of years later I graduated to an electric Smith-Corona. And in graduate school, because my mother worked at a university and was able to arrange it, I ended up with what for then was a top-of-the-line IBM Selectric. When I went to teach in Germany for a year in 1981, I bought a portable Olympia, with an umlaut key, and I kept that machine until I got my first computer contraption (and that’s what it was, weirdly connected through a phone to a mainframe down on campus where I would go in the middle of the night to pick up print-outs). But the last typewriter factory, Godrej and Boyce, has closed and there won’t be any more typewriters in the near future except as museum pieces. I have no regret for the death of typewriters. While there was a certain tactile pleasure in pounding out a text on a typewriter, especially a manual model, the speed and ease of a digital machine (as typed out in this post) is so much more gratifying. Nostalgia only goes so far – and not all that far.