Tom Hanks collects typewriters. And now he’s written a book on them, which means he’s being interviewed a lot. In these exchanges he always extols the beauty and the usefulness of the machines, noting that when you type on a typewriter, as opposed to the keyboard of a computer, you can hear the sound of production.
I agree with him about the aesthetics of typewriters – a heavy, black L.C. Smith & Corona sits here in the office with me – but not their practicality. I never enjoyed writing on a typewriter because of the difficulty – impossibility almost – of revision. Writing in longhand you could, in the same stroke, scribble additions in the margins. Then the word processor came along and suddenly you could reshape and refine without leaving a trace.
In the history of writing, the typewriter had a very brief life. The first commercially successful model (according to last weekend’s Wall Street Journal) appeared in 1874; in 1978, word processors were introduced into the newsroom where I was a feature writer (at the Trenton Times). For just over a hundred years the act of writing was accompanied by a racket; for centuries before that there had been silence, or near silence; today there’s a discreet rattling of keys. What we lost visually we gained aurally – and technically.
