The end of the typewriter

“It saddens me that Brother has packed up shop, but the last typewriter to roll off its very truncated production line was an electric model. I did enjoy the strange ultrasonic hum of my mother’s Brother electric in the 1970s, but while I may have begun typing at around this time, when I first began to seriously produce fiction on a typewriter it was on a manual — my by then late mother’s own Olivetti Lettera 22, which she brought with her from the US when she emigrated in the late 1950s.

“I s...