The Typewriter Revolution: A Typist's Companion for the 21st Century

by Richard Polt

But whatever we create on our typewriters, whenever we turn to them, we’re choosing something that violates the digital Paradigm—something durable, intimate, focused, and self-sufficient. When our typescripts intersect with the digital world, they aren’t defined by it. We rebel against the totalitarianism of the Information Regime.

“To Save Time is to Lengthen Life,” proclaimed the Remington Typewriter Company.

Matt Chojnacki, who sells and fixes typewriters in Toronto, puts it simply: “The problem is that every time we save time, we find other stuff to muddle into, and we end up spending less time on stuff that’s more important.”

We process information so efficiently that we don’t dwell on thoughts and words anymore—we flit incoherently from one set of distractions to the next.

Maybe to save time is not to lengthen life, after all. Maybe the more efficiently you speed through life, the quicker you reach your death.

Turn to a typewriter and you’ll find yourself focusing on writing—the reason the machine exists. You’ll find the impatience and anxiety of your computing mind ebbing away. You’ll gradually stop wanting to be interrupted. You’ll concentrate on the page.

The typewriter doesn’t push “content” at them; it draws words from them.

From the writer’s standpoint the permanence of each keystroke is counter-intuitively liberating in that by erasing the option to erase each gesture must be clean & decisive

The machine is unforgiving. It is reality bled on paper. The punch of the key must be deliberate. Mistakes are indelible. Real action can’t be recalled, only regretted. Typing is as real as blood on the evening news and as unavoidable. The virtual is ephemeral, a fog until it’s printed. Even then the paper is only painted, not punched. Typing, like reality, hurts. It bruises the paper. When the letter is received, one knows an effort was made, that the writer had to sweat, that he had to meet the real, that he cared. —Martin A. Rice, Jr.

Nearly everyone I know feels that some quality of concentration they once possessed has been destroyed. Reading books has become hard; the mind keeps wanting to shift from whatever it is paying attention to to pay attention to something else. … My time does not come in large, focused blocks, but in fragments and shards. The fault is my own, arguably, but it’s yours, too—it’s the fault of everyone I know who rarely finds herself or himself with uninterrupted hours. We’re shattered. We’re breaking up.