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Thursday 29 December 2011

Treating Typewriters With Due Reverence

While doing a "summer clean" (as opposed to a "spring clean", which I somehow missed), I came across this article that I had clipped out from The West Australian newspaper when I was back in Perth in September last year. I thought I should share it with you.
It turns out the columnist's grandfather, George Emery, had been for many years a very well-known typewriter mechanic in Western Australia.

6 comments:

maschinengeschrieben said...

Interesting article. I like the thoughts, but find the final thoughts a bit incomplete. Thanks for sharing this!

Bill M said...

Interesting. The article makes me wonder if anyone would look at my music collection, or my books, or my garage that is bursting at the seams...

Anonymous said...

Being an Oasis fan proves she has good taste.

notagain said...

Nice article. There are a lot of neat freaks and anti-clutter activists taking over the world who need to read this.

teeritz said...

I shudder at the thought of having an entire library of books reduced to a bunch of ones and zeroes on a SD card. I detest watching an episode of "Mad Men" on a 15 inch computer screen where all the detail of the production design is lost. And I can count the number of songs I've downloaded from iTunes on one hand ('cos I didn't want to go out and buy an entire album, yeah, that's right, I said 'album', for just one song.)
All of this 21st Century tech is all well and good, but sometimes I just want to feel the reassuring weight of a Len Deighton paperback, sometimes I want to load a CD into a player and hear the music reverberate off the walls (not piped directly into my ear-drums), and sometimes I just want to sit down at a typewriter and just write without waiting for it to boot-up or get distracted by the internet.
I realise that I'm preaching to the converted here, but all of this old analog technology that we covet holds a beautiful simplicity that isn't reliant on recharge cords, scrolling down pages or anti-virus software.
Rant over.
And yes, it was a nice article. I wish there was more to it.

Duffy Moon said...

I suppose one could still judge a person by their goodreads.com profile and reviewed, but who would want to?

I'm definitely a judge-a-home-by-its-books kind of guy. A home without books is no kind of home at all, even if it has the latest electronic reader thingummy.