Typewriters are hard beasts. But they’re honest.
By that I mean, they present what they are.
Look at this old ad from the teens for a Corona 3. (Used by Agatha Christie on her travels, as well as Hemingway, Lawrence Durrell, and a few others).
The copy-writing is brilliant, for one thing. And you really could take one of these out to the furthest reaches of the world, and write. [I have a very epic Corona 3 here and sell them generally here].
I think of sleek apple marketing as a little bit of a lie.
I have a Macbook pro, for instance. Very small, nice machine. Ok, but are you going to use it? Well, you’d better get a charger, yes, a big bulky piece of material, a 10 foot cord, and any adapters for their unrealistic ‘cutting edge’ displacement of normal digital ports.
So I like the honesty of a typewriter. It is what it is. It’s not really a thing that’s trying to be another thing.
I mean yes, they mention convenience a lot, and that seems risible in the digital age. However, now we need another artifact if we want to see our words upon a page… a printer. Wait, one needs cartridges. It’s not working on the wifi, plug it in. Etc.
To just traipse off into the forest with a machine is an epic haul, if you ask me.
I had a client buy a Remington 5 to bring out into the desert of Egypt, out beyond the pale of the electric grid. I think that is such a poetic image: this boxy case rattling on the side of a camel. Hearkens back to Lawrence of Arabia.
Peter O-Toole on the set, scribing on an Olympia SM3.
Profound photo of the hell-raiser.
Here’s another very different man on a similar machine (another SM3) upon which he wrote most of his scripts:
I know the picture is blurry, it was lifted from somewhere.
With honesty, comes great responsibility. Once all of the gloss and allure fades away, we’re just forced to sit with ourselves, and our words. And see if we can get a little more of ourselves onto that ominous blank page.
Obviously, machines don’t lie: marketers do.
Most machines don’t live up to their promises. I think that even in the 80’s typewriters started to embellish their functions a little, with the weird keys on the Smith Coronas,the power space, and the ‘Jeweled escapements’.
Earlier machines are more my style, from the glorious heyday of vintage typewriter lore: probably from the teens to the 60’s (though I’ll venture off of either end in a pinch).
Anyway, this is our humble effort to fight the lie that machines are always getting better and improving the quality of our lives. Some are: some aren’t. Watch any teenage stagger out onto the street with a screen still plastered to their face, and tell me that there isn’t some collective understanding to do.
Or, lay the words down and brand your deepest self across the brow of this flawed, glorious humanity.
Write on my friend.
Steven Budden Jr.
The Classic Typewriter Company.
PS. For paid members of this fiasco, I do special calls and other events. Sign up and get on the inside, and welcome to the wild “new” refreshingly vintage life-alteringly non-digital writing technology. Welcome to better writing.
I also have a writing challenge with deliriously original prompts that are bound to either enrage you or shift you into Shakespeare mode, and hopefully both.
PPS. We had a Hollywood film studio order quite a few typewriters so we are catching on on orders, however it is nice to see the world moving in the direction of ‘reality.’