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.
