So I’ve spent some time the last day or so reading about what typewriters are available today, typewriter repair and digging around in the archives to see if I have any machines to play with. I do have a big red Selectric, but what we’ve been discussing are manual machines, something that doesn’t require as much infrastructure.
Not a photo of mine, but just like it.
Revisiting the culture and the people around these machines has made me realize how much of the appeal is visceral, something much easier to experience than explain or read about. The pleasure of writing on a typewriter is at least 50% physical, and its relevance as a tonic for ails of “modern” writing” goes far beyond swapping one keyboard for another.
All this led me to the idea of a “typewriter bar”. A place where people can get the experience of writing using a typewriter in an environment that encourages and supports this type of writing and without the cost, confusion and potential disappointment of buying a machine and using it at home.
In addition to providing access to the machines and a place to work, a typewriter bar could provide help using the machines, maintaining them and providing supplies and consumables.
Other educational topics could be incorporated, including sessions on how to maintain and tune your own machine, how to publish typewritten work electronically and other general topics of interest to people who write things.
Or courses being a bar various beverages and suitable snacks (nothing that will spread crumbs into the mechanisms!) can be provided to lubricate the creative process.
The cool thing about this idea is that there’s an incremental path to testing it out. If I can get my hands one a few working typewriters I can probably talk one of our local watering holes to host a “pop-up” version of this, and if people like it that could be come a regular thing. If it grows from there maybe something more permanent will make sense.