Friday Foto Follies: An Homage to The Typewriter

It’s time to dedicate an entry to an instrument that has brought us a lot of pleasure in media through the years.

There are few things as heartwarming and as terrifying as a typewriter. A simple glance at the machine and my heart does a flip. It is majestic. It is cold. It is cozy. It can be elegant. It can be nothing more than industrial. Here’s to the typewriter!

“I will now claim—until dispossessed—that I was the first person in the world to apply the typewriter to literature. The early machine was full of caprices, full of defects—devilish ones. It had as many immoralities as the machine of to‑day has virtues. After a year or two I found that it was degrading my character, so I thought I would give it to Howells…. He took it home to Boston, and my morals began to improve, but his have never recovered.”

~Mark Twain, The First Writing Machines

It occurred to me that some may not even know what I am referring to in this post as typewriters don’t have a connection to a cloud. Allow me to offer the definition of the typewriter…

Just your type of entertaining information:

A brief history of typewriters.

Early Office Museum

1958 Remington Typewriter commercial

Mark Twain Wrote the First Book Ever Written with a Typewriter

“The Typewriter,” a song by Leroy Anderson, 1953

The Typewriter Song by Liberace

Jerry Lewis Typewriter routine

From March 30, 1951, here’s an episode of Nero Wolfe on radio titled, “The Telltale Ribbon.” Fun stuff!

A starry typewriter gallery:

LEAD Technologies Inc. V1.01

“A lot of novelists start late—Conrad, Pirandello, even Mark Twain. When you’re young, chess is all right, and music and poetry. But novel-writing is something else. It has to be learned, but it can’t be taught. This bunkum and stinkum of college creative writing courses! The academics don’t know that the only thing you can do for someone who wants to write is to buy him a typewriter.”
― James M. Cain

“This newfangled writing machine has several virtues. It piles an awful stack of words on one page. It don’t muss things or scatter ink blots around. Of course it saves paper.”

— Mark Twain, from his first typewritten letter to his brother, circa 1875.

“I don’t have a computer. A computer’s a typewriter. I already have a typewriter.”

— Ray Bradbury

“The typewriter is so much more to be reckoned with than the sword.”

~Lee Thayer, Persons Unknown, 1941