Random drawing for prizes: Typewriter buttons!

The buttons were designed by the talented Christina Siravo and are even more gorgeous in person. If you're the winner, be sure to thank Speculator for supplying the prize!

Letters & Journals Magazine website launch

Letters & Journals magazine, scheduled to launch in print form next year, has unveiled a website that is both beautifully designed and full of in-depth content, which should tell you what to expect from the print version next year.

I am looking forward to subscribing (all the more these days I treasure the opportunity to read content offline) but the website is certainly the next best thing. If you're not already reading it, head over there for information about postcards, fan mail, travel journals, writing community and events, links to stationery and paper-related articles and resources, and all that sort of thing.

More about L&J:

• Follow Letters & Journals on Twitter.

• Sign up for the Letters & Journals online newsletter. If you're registered, you're eligible to win stationery-related prizes in periodic contests.
  

It's protest time: typewriter user kicked out of writer's colony in New York City

The typosphere's own Speculator brought the following item to my attention this morning: The Writers Room, a Greenwich Village nonprofit that rents workspace to writers, has banned typewriter users from the premises, presumably because their once omnipresent sound offends the delicate ears of MacBook Air acolytes.

Writer and typewriter user Skye Ferrante was given the choice to switch to a laptop or end his membership with the Writers Room, and was quoted as saying "Some people like to listen to vinyl. Some people prefer to drive a stick shift. I just wish that there were some typists out there that would back me up, but I don't know any."

Typosphere! If that's not a call to action, what is? How I wish we could all pile into a bus and head straight to Greenwich Village with our Olympia SM9s and Royal Quiet De Luxes for a good old-fashioned type-in protest, which would be a damned site more fun than what most of us have planned for the afternoon, I'm going to guess. However, we're going to have to come to Skye Ferrante's aid another way. Letter writing campaign! Gentlepersons, start your carriage returns.

Silent type 2, Microcosm, Portland Zine Symposium

I owe you an update on Silent Type II. For a few weeks in June (a time that falls mercifully between grad school quarters), I plan to finish up the scanning and assembly of the zine, with a hopeful mail-out date falling not too long after that. So no, your poems did not fall down a rathole, Silent Type just happens to be no different than any other literary journal that takes forever and a half to be produced.

Did I mention that Silent Type will shortly be distributed by the zine distributor Microcosm?

Speaking of Portland, I have this half-baked notion to take Silent Type to the Portland Zine Symposium this August (which is this year sporting a rather strange Space Invaders design theme) and just want to know: who's with me? Tell me at least one of you typecasters plans to show your face down there and represent the typosphere.

Keychop an iPad today

 

It’s not just the journalists who are losing their livelihoods in the digital age. Saw this bit about New Zealand newsroom typers being hacked for bracelets. "This is the age of recycling and we will see more of this type of recycling and re-using outdated machinery and pieces as time goes on,” a jewelry maker is quoted as saying about the practice of removing keys for jewelry, known lovingly in the typosphere as keychopping. (So. Any of you want to volunteer to write the fair and balanced Wikipedia entry for this term?)

If you haven’t read it already, revisit the Collapsing World post from 2006 (how time flies) An open letter to key harvesters for a nice summary of how your typical typophile feels about stripping old writing machines for jewelry parts. Hint: they don’t like it. I don’t like it either, but I acknowledge this: outside of the rather small realm of analog admirers, typewriters are perceived as having no functional value. The digital era espouses that each new technology (e.g., the iPad) is a revolution that overthrows its predecessors (the laptop), which are thereafter only useful as symbols of backwards thinking and the dreaded act of growing old.

In fact, the typewriter, in the short backwards reach of technological history, has attained a status analogous to that of a Chinese dynasty, presiding over the written word for an unthinkable century, a statistic that laughs long and loud at the inevitably small months-long footprint of influence for which the iPad is destined. If any device is deserving to be worn in parts as an ironic statement about the ceaseless march toward cultural irrelevance, it is the iPad.

So stay ahead of the trends, and chop one today.