Typewriters

I don't think anyone would mind reading some short stories revolving around our beloved typewriters?

Last year, I started reading a series of anthologies edited by Richard Polt (from The Typewriter Revolution) titled Cold Hard Type.

When I started it, I had no idea this was a series at all, each one focusing on a specific theme. I just picked up Escapements—a mechanism that enables forward movement, step by step because it was about people in the near-ish future doing their best (after our digital world has collapsed) while using their typewriters. After maybe the third or fourth story, I was hooked and rushed to order the first volume (I had realized I was reading the second one in the series).

I finished this first volume like a kid eating a plate of cookies he had just ‘borrowed’ from his grandmother’s kitchen, and started the second volume the day it arrived at my door.

Paradigm Shifts—Typewriters Tales of Digital Collapse, focuses on the collapse itself seeing how people manage to get through it… with their trusty typewriter. It was as much of a blast to read as the previous volume. I wanted more of those yummy cookies.

So I did what I had to do and and asked my grandm... ordered the last three volumes.

I've started the third volume, Dead Keys (horror stories) with some some great texts in there too but I must admit I have a harder time finishing it. Don't worry too much as it's probably just me being very picky as, beside a very few authors, I'm not much into horror stories. And then life happened and I had to put the book away. That was almost a year ago. Shame on me.

But I've picked it up again this morning, and this time I will finish it and then I will dive into the two remaining volumes. Margin Releases—a mechanism for bypassing the normal bounds of a line of writing and Backspace—A device that allow a typist to return to a former position (quite surprisingly, focusing on time travel).

Icing on the cake, each story is printed in its own typed form (with info on the exact model(s) of machine used). At first, I thought it would distract and annoy me but it has not. Quite the contrary.

There is also a few illustrations and photography.

I expected to read a kind of funny but odd little book, maybe slightly better made than our fanzines from the good old days. It ended up being a very exciting read and one of the nicest surprise I've had in a long time.

The books are sold through Amazon’s print on demand service. Which means no exorbitant shipping rates, no matter where you live, and they aren’t expensive: Cold Hard Type

Crossposted from https://lemmy.world/post/30443525

A fascinating history of a unique prototype for typing the Chinese language long thought lost