A real typewriter

Poet, novelist, dramatist, ballad singer and house-painter Brendan Behan at work in the early 60s/

The end of the typewriter

Paul Bailey in the Guardian

News has come in recently that Godrej and Boyce, a long-established firm of typewriter producers based in Mumbai, have a mere 500 manual typewriters left in stock. Once these have been sold, or disposed of, they will switch to making refrigerators instead. There is, apparently, a small demand still for electric typewriters in America, particularly in schools and prisons. One can understand why the latter could make use of them, since the time hasn't come for prisoners to access porn on a humble piece of office equipment. But these are clearly the last of a dying breed.

I have my old typewriter in my office, but should I keep it there, now just a museum piece?
Museums that contain objects of use from the past or that are in fact the houses of people that display the study of the person as it was left—with the typewriter, for example—show the way that such objects are meaningless unless they are used. They are like the kitchen wood stove without a fire in the stove. They are like the bowl and rolling pin without the live ingredients which bring the objects to life.
What one has is like the skeleton of the animal rather than the animal itself. And in this way photographs, for example, are better, so long as they contain the trace of the human. So the contemporary photograph of the writer’s typewriter is meaningless—it is just a picture of an old typewriter. But the photograph of the typewriter on the writer’s lap or with the writer’s hand or with a fresh piece of paper that will actually be typed on a few seconds after the photo is taken, this is alive in a different way.

man of the crowd

I have been sick for the past week, and the weather has been terrible. Today, after working for part of the morning, I just had to get out, so I came here--to Starbucks...coffee too strong and food too greasy and pasty. But I just needed to sit here, even if I am just looking out the window at the rain, even if I am still not fully recovered. Suddenly, I had a flash of recognition...

Not long ago, about the closing in of an evening in autumn, I sat at the large bow window of the D -- -- Coffee House in London. For some months I had been ill in health, but was now convalescent, and, with returning strength, found myself in one of those happy moods which are so precisely the converse of ennui -- moods of the keenest appetency, when the film from the mental vision departs -- the _____ -- and the intellect, electrified, surpasses as greatly its everyday condition, as does the vivid yet candid reason of Leibnitz, the mad and flimsy rhetoric of Gorgias. Merely to breathe was enjoyment; and I derived positive pleasure even from many of the legitimate sources of pain. I felt a calm but inquisitive interest in everything. With a cigar in my mouth and a newspaper in my lap, I had been amusing myself for the greater part of the afternoon, now in poring over advertisements, now in observing the promiscuous company in the room, and now in peering through the smoky panes into the street.

Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849. "The Man of the Crowd" Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library

But, this is not London and the crowds passing are mostly cars in the rain.