typewriters

The last electric typewriter I bought was the Olivetti Praxis. Roger Zelazny had shown me his in 1970, with its snazzy Wide Elite Victorian font, and I had to have one. I wrote most of THE FOREVER WAR and a few subsequent novels on the Praxis, along with a couple of manuals. Then the correcting Selectric came along.

From the beginning, though, I had a problem with electrics: the noise. It was like the machine was impatient for me to get working, when maybe I would rather just sit and thin...