Ribbon in Time
By Michele Bazan Reed | bazanreed@hotmail.com
For Christmas, my daughter gave me a book, “Olivetti” by Allie Millington.
It has two narrators: a boy and an Olivetti typewriter.
Though obviously written for a middle school audience, its universal themes resonate for any age. Part fantasy (a given, unless you believe typewriters really do talk), part family drama and part mystery — it’s wise and funny and heartwarming.
The minute I opened the gift and saw the illustration of a vintage Olivetti on the cover, one thing came immediately to mind: my late husband, Bill’s, portable mid-century typewriter, which saw him through our shared years in college and grad school.
It came in a tweed-covered case that was hinged in back and flipped up, revealing the machine. It was a sturdy light gray, metal job, nothing like the flimsier plastic typewriters that would follow. Bill would hunt and peck with two fingers, but managed to put out term papers at a remarkable rate of speed and with relatively few mistakes. Till the end of his life, although he was skilled in using a computer and could do research, conduct business, play games and type plenty of reports for his job, he only ever used his two index fingers to type.
There was the day that old antique saved me. We were in our junior year at Syracuse University in 1972 and I had a newfangled portable electric typewriter from Smith Corona, a high school graduation present from my parents. Ever the procrastinator, I waited till the day before a term paper was due to begin typing it. I wasn’t a very quick typist and it got later and later and I got more and more tired. Finally, I ended up falling asleep with my finger on the e key. The electric machine kept trying to strike the e, apparently over and over again, but when I woke up, the e key wouldn’t work. Now, a high percentage of words have an e in them. And mine did not work. I ran to Bill’s room — this was before cell phones, of course — and he pulled out his trusty old manual and finished typing up the final pages of my handwritten essay.
And that memory put me in mind of all the typewriters I’ve loved and lost over the last half-century. A writer’s best friend is their writing instrument and I’ve been blessed with many true writing buddies, equipped with keys.
There are plenty of great writers who still create their work on the clacking keys of a manual “typewriting machine,” including, famously, actor, director and author Tom Hanks, who has a collection of more than 250 vintage machines and uses them for thank-you notes and letters. His book of short stories, “Uncommon Type,” features a typewriter in each story.
The film “California Typewriter” features Hanks among many other creative people loyal to typewriters to produce their work.
When I was a child, I frequently went to auctions and estate sales with my father. At one auction, he got me the most unusual typewriter I have ever seen. Instead of four rows of keys with a shift key to change from lower case to capital letters like a modern typewriter, it had two sets of keys, one for upper and one for lower case. The double set of typebars was set in a circle on the top of the machine and the platen cut across the middle of the circle, where the typebars would strike the paper from the underside. Although he was quite the mechanic, my father was never able to get those typebars, which had seized up, to work again. Still, we cleaned it up and it made a lovely conversation piece which held a precious memory of my father for me.
There was something about those old typewriters with the satisfying clacking of the keys, the gratifying force with which you struck them and the cathartic act of slamming the carriage back to the left. And then there was the cheerful “ding” at the end of a line. It really felt like you were accomplishing something with every word you typed.
Each typewriter had character to its letters, minute differences which made each machine’s type distinctive. So much so, that at one point, forensics used typewriting analysis to identify suspects in crimes like kidnapping, where a ransom noted was used.
When I went to work in the 1970s, the IBM Selectric was the workhorse of the day. Introduced in 1961, it was the first major innovation in a machine designed more than a hundred years earlier. It introduced the “type ball,” allowing typists to change fonts by switching out metal spheres, about the size of golf balls, which replaced the typebars of the older versions. The bars could get tangled up if you typed too fast, so the Selectric enabled faster typing. I remember being excited that there were balls for straight type and italic, allowing us to use the proper style for titles of books and movies in our stories.
The accoutrements of typing were fun, too — ribbons in red and black, white out and lift off tape to correct mistakes and erasers shaped like pencils that you sharpened to a point. These had fanlike tufts of nylon bristles on top to whisk away the dust made by the eraser breaking apart as you rubbed.
And then there was carbon paper. Everything needed to be typed “in duplicate,” so you slid a piece of black-coated paper between two sheets, creating a second copy, which always smudged, got all over your fingers and crisp white shirt and never contained those corrections you made using the methods above.
Then came the day in early 1984. I was working at Ed Vayner’s ad agency in Fulton and Ed gathered us all into the conference room, where he unveiled a new tool we’d be using and one which would change the world as knew it: the first Macintosh computer. Who would have thought that little beige box would usher in a whole new way to create, compute and communicate and usurp the typewriter’s role as king of the office.
I believe typewriters will never disappear from our lives. Nothing can take away the satisfaction of pounding away on a sturdy, metal workhorse, which can do its job basically forever with minimal maintenance. That may be part of its appeal. But like in that book I was given, I think it’s a bit of typewriter magic.