Today, I pay tribute to the typewriter, with this wee one photographed next to a nickel so you can see that it’s Barbie-sized.
In fact, I used it once for a Photo Friday shot in October 2011.
It’s possible my first experience with a typewriter was going to work some nights with my father at the ROTC building where he taught military history in South Carolina. I’ve probably mentioned before that most of the equipment that had him there during off-hours was in the basement. I was in fourth or fifth grade, and those were pre-available copier days, so there were mimeograph machines, that used stencils, and ditto machines (properly called “spirit duplicators”), the machines that print purple and everybody sniffed the “spirits” (ink) when they were fresh off the machine.
Daddy would set me up at a desk with a manual typewriter. Who knows what missives I was composing, but it kept me occupied, other than the times I requested his assistance in stomping on the palmetto bugs that crossed my sight line. South Carolina is The Palmetto State, after all, and it’s the favored tree of those females-can-fly, males-are-dumb bugs otherwise known as tree roaches, often featured in stories on this blog.
I do enjoy looking at the keys on the tiny typewriter (it’s a pencil sharpener) because the letters have no similarity to an actual typewriter. Or so I thought until I began coloring this vintage typewriter from a recently-acquired coloring book.
When I began researching vintage typewriters, I found many versions that differed from modern typewriter key placement. It blew my mind. I filled in the letters on this drawing using some of those vintage keys and some modern ones, making it one of a kind.