The experience of writing with a typewriter can be special… if you’re the right kind of writer. Every tap of the key delivers a satisfying punch to the page. Every inked letter unique and special in its own way. It’s this direct and mechanical scribing, from mind to page, that can give whatever you feel like writing the feelings an emotions that you want to pass to the reader.

On top of that, no copy is ever alike. Sure, you can make a photocopy, but that’s no the original. That one doesn’t have the indents on the back of each letter, where the hammer struck the page.

Typed pages are also so much more raw. There are no do-overs, no whiteout, no erasing. If you want to do it only once then you had better get it done right the first time. If you do screw up, the best you can hope for is that you weren’t too far down the page so you wont have much to retype on the new one. It’ll make you slow down; not because you have to, but because you want to. So you can think faster than your fingers are moving. Slowing you down, but in a way that helps improve you as a writer.

The problem is you don’t see too many honest to goodness typewriters out in the world. And if you do, well, good luck finding a ribbon for it. You can still buy something that looks like a typewriter, maybe even sounds like a typewriter; but really, it isn’t. It’s probably a word processor; the cyborg of the writing world. Half analog, half digital; The typewriter with the brain and editing ability of a computer. With a word processor, you can delete words off the page, as if they were never there. A really fancy one will probably even let you type an entire line without ink hitting the page, all so you can run the spell checker first.

So where have all the typewriters gone? The back rooms of libraries, old storage sheds, yard sales; Maybe. Truth is, they could be any where. I gave up my typewriter in favor of a computer long ago; young and foolish.

Then again, I wouldn’t be the person I am today were it not for that first computer. The first computer that was ever truly mine.

But that’s a story for another time.