You need a Model M keyboard

You know that you need a Model M keyboard. Proceed directly to Unicomp, do not pass Go. I wrote about my Model M keyboard awhile back (one of many posts rendered image-free --somewhat problematic when you're talking typecasts-- in the great web hosting migration disaster of 2008) and recently had the opportunity to provide a rambling sound bite to Martin Kaste of NPR on the topic.

Here is the story, which discusses Unicomp's noble effort to carry forward buckling spring technology into the 21st century. I own an old Model M from Lexmark, made in 1995 and purchased from eBay, but Unicomp has a solid advantage to consider: they come with a built-in USB port. This is no small matter-- the original keyboards come with a PS/2 port, and sometimes present a challenge to interface with your computer. Unicomp also make custom keyboards for gamers and operating systems, I believe.

If you're typing on a disposable rubber dome keyboard made in China at this moment, think again. You too could instead enjoy the clatter of an indestructible, IBM Selectric-like keyboard, while bringing business to one of the last companies in the US committed to mechanical integrity in peripheral devices.

He stands there thinking, the kids keep coming, they keep crowding you up

Updike. Unequivocally my favorite writer, ever. In fact, I used him as a litmus test for marriage-worthiness: my husband is the only other person I know for whom Rabbit, Run is too their favorite novel. I was a literature major in college, but no longer read much in the way of fiction. I tried for too many years to find a writer as heart-stopping at the sentence level as Updike, but I am not sure that writer exists.

Lately I have been drifting around in antique stores in search of battered Nancy Ann dolls from the 1930's and 40's on which to practice micro-scale clothing construction (another of the countless hobbies I take up and discard, about which my husband wisely never comments) and I came across an Add-O-Matic for $18 bucks. It was of a more recent vintage than this one, and rather than levers had rows and rows of square plastic buttons, like my old Underwood 319 (picture from Olivander's Machines of Loving Grace: I think it goes without saying that he has the best typewriter collection of any of us). After reflexively grabbing it and heading for the register, second thoughts of recession-era temperance took hold, and I begrudgingly returned it to its shelf.

Rats.

The picture at left of me was taken just today, in a bookstore photo booth. When I saw it, I thought of this picture, and laughed.

Rhodia, Sharpie, Myndology, layoffs

Here is a Pen Addict review of a Sharpie pen, not the exact one I have, but one of the Sharpie 2.0 designs.

UPDATE: Pen Addict addresses actual Sharpie retractable

Rebound typewriter

While F. Scott Fitzgerald famously observed that there are no second acts in American lives, it seems improbably that domestic typewriter repair may have a slender hope of persisting further into the 21st century.

It occurred to me that this is a rather good time to be collecting these machines. Keychoppers aside, they're still everywhere: they've somehow not yet attained the status of coveted antique. That will change in the next few decades, I predict, as people increasingly feel a sense of virtual overload and ecological remorse about the excesses of round-the-clock computing. Certain romantic young persons will increasingly seek typewriters out, at premium cost, to channel great writers of a pre-digital age. At least one of those will download a copy of "The Typewriter Repair Manual" by Howard Hutchison from the Obscura Ebook-porium, and figure out a way to cash in on the trend.

Currently, and fortunately for us, admiration for the machines is still largely confined to a fringe group of aging collector nuts. (Cough.) So, reserve that Remington Noiseless for the young person in your life today.

Neocast: Drugstore Cowgirl

(Neocasts are verbose. It's just the nature of the medium. You've been warned.)

Like many of my fellow Americans, I'm doing my part to undermine the U.S. economy by declaring a personal spending freeze. To test my resolve this evening, I wandered through the office supply section of Bartell Drugs.

For those of you not of the Pacific Northwest, Bartell Drugs is your classic drug store (itself a marvelously anachronistic institution, I've written about this before). Despite its slender selection of USB cables and related doodaddery, one could safely meander the aisles of Bartell's with no knowledge that the computer age had yet arrived. The office supply section unabashedly implies that paper and pen transactions are the bread and butter of modern communications technology: old-timey carbon-backed office forms, embossing label makers (yes, they still make them; wish I'd known that when I bought this pipe wrench on eBay a few years back), old-school steno pads, and some intriguing writing implements: Parker Jotters in red and blue, PaperMate Mirados in cardboard boxes that look like old packs of Marlborough cigarettes, and then this: a pack of Mead typing paper. There was one left, sitting there looking long-abandoned by market forces, with the words 1993, The Mead Corporation, Dayton OH, Made in U.S.A. printed on the cover. Could this item have been hanging around the stockroom of Bartell's since I was a lovesick college undergraduate, waiting for its chance to be discovered by one of seven global typecasters in 2009? (I'd like to think yes.)

I'd picked up and put down a dozen pens by this point, valiantly defending the five wrinkled dollar bills lost somewhere in the bottom of my purse, when I saw the typing paper there. What made the purchase all the more foregone was the song on the faint and crackling sound system: Joni Mitchell's Help Me. (This song transports me at once to 1978: wearing my tangerine polyester double-knits and playing with my Darci urban penthouse.) No one writes lyrics like Joni Mitchell. This song kills me.

Back to the typing paper, does Mead still make this stuff? If so, they won't admit it on their Web site. If you have the inside scoop, enlighten me please.

Typecast: In which some visual effects distract from a lack of theme

Did I mention that I am getting a little desk of sorts to replace the notorious Dave?

So, this Hermes 3000 and I, we don't have the best relationship. It just sits there like a stubborn turtle with its arching, spoon-handle carriage return lever and chicklet keys and crumbling, duct-taped platen knobs, and I can't seem to see what Larry McMurtry sees in this machine.

What I want to know is, where the rest of you clock in on the Hermes 3000? It's the Cadillac of typewriters, right? Someone set me straight here.

2008 in type

Did I mention the story above turns out improbably well? For the relative, not for the fate of typewriters, I mean.

Ah, the Old Mill is the name of the place we were, thank you interweb. I hear a recent fire did some damage to the structure.

Enough about me. While we're sitting here drinking moonshine and reminiscing about the year in typewriters, what was your favorite typewriting moment in 2008?