My journalistic career began at the dawn of the computer age – at least as it pertained to the Scottish newspaper industry, which wasn’t in what you might call the vanguard of the digital revolution. If you want a year, let’s go for 1993.
So in my first job, and ever since, I have used a computer to write. Various examples came and went. Most are stunningly unmemorable, apart from the bubble-gum pink Sunday Herald iMac I battled with for a year or two. But the one piece of kit I have never forgotten is the one I never actually used – the manual typewriter stowed on the window ledge next to my desk on that very first job. Whose was it? I never found out. But it was there when I arrived in 1993 and there when I left five years later. The building later became a hotel, the wood-panelled features department a bar – possibly one with a typewriter still nestling among the whisky bottles.
Increasingly, I miss that typewriter. Or I miss what it represents at least. We have heard a lot in the past decade about the slow movement – slow food, fashion, travel, even reading – and by now we understand its various exhortation. Slow the speed with which you produce and consume! Think more deeply! Choose more carefully! With COP26 looming, it isn’t hard to join the dots and see the slow movement as an important part of a proactive response to the climate emergency.
Colleagues on ever-tighter deadlines won’t thank me for saying this, but isn’t the typewriter the perfect tool for another addition to the slow movement’s portfolio of activities, slow writing? It doesn’t crash, and never needs recharging. Most important, it makes you ponder every word, unless you’re prepared to resort to rows of XXXs or (yuk) correcting fluid to rectify your mistakes).
If my slow writing movement takes off, it will require a patron or figurehead. Tom Hanks is the man. The actor is a long-time typewriter fan and owns some 250 machines. In 2017 he published a short story collection inspired by them, Uncommon Type. So much of a fan is he that when he received a typewritten letter from fellow enthusiast Tom Hodges, owner of Edinburgh’s Typewronger bookshop, he wrote back. On a typewriter. He called Hodges a “hero” for “keeping typewriters alive”. Typewronger Books, if you haven’t been, is also a typewriter shrine-cum-workshop, and well worth a visit.
Of course it’s only in the context of today’s frantic, inter-connected, social media-obsessed world that the typewriter looks slow. As is made plain in Typewriter Revolution, an exhibition at the Royal Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, it was the machines’ speed relative to hand-writing which made them so integral to business from their advent in the mid-19th century until, well, the dawn of the computer age. But if we are to decelerate and reap the benefits, I think their clackety-clack is due a comeback.
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