It’s Canada Day; a pretty warm one, and I am in my back yard with my Smith-Corona Classic 12, a gift from Mimi for my birthday a few years ago. This is a manual typewriter which you could call portable, in the sense that it comes in a carrying case, but it must weigh ten kilos, so it’s not a typewriter that you’d want to bring anywhere. I laugh to think about it, but a years ago—the year I turned 30, to be precise—I travelled with my mom to Indonesia. By this point I owned a laptop, my first, which was a Toshiba. But this was before the Internet, and I still tended to write mainly on paper, that is, using a typewriter. My mom flew from Montreal to LA and I flew from New York, where I lived, to LA, where we met and rented a compact car to drive down to La Jolla, to vist her elder sister, my aunt Elsa, en route to crossing the Pacific Ocean.
I decided, for reasons that now feel a bit obscure, that I needed a manual typewriter to bring with me to Indonesia, so that I could write while I was there. In a free newspaper in San Diego, in the classified ads, I found a used manual typewriter for sale. I drove over in the little blue hatchback car to buy it off a Ukrainian woman, as I recall. In my memory it was not a particularly light typewriter; nonetheless I lugged it onto the plane and then all over Bali and Java. I was glad to have it, and I did do quite a bit of typing while I was there, while sitting in the shade with a cold drink. Who did I think I was, W. Somerset Maugham? I must have later lugged it back to New York, but I certainly don’t have it now. I have no idea what happened to the thing.
I am feeling good this afternoon because I successfully switched out the ribbon on this typewriter. It’s hard to find ribbons for manual typewriters anymore. I looked online and found this amazing deal: five typewriter ribbons for $20, complete with a photograph. Looked legit. I oredered them, but when they came the ribbons, while a standard width, were wound on tiny spools, about the size of toonies (a regular typewriter ribbon spool is about the diameter of a billiard ball). So I took the old ribbon, which is faded and has no more ink, off of its spool on the Smith-Corona, removed the ribbon from the tiny spool, and wound the fresh ribbon onto the bigger spool. It was a messy job. My hands got covered in ink. But who fears a bit of ink?
I wonder what are the tiny typewriters for which these little ribbons I got are actually made? I want one of those typewriters. I bet those little guys are portable: perfect to schlep with you all over Southeast Asia!
I am not too sure what draws me to manual typewriters. I think one thing is that they are marvels of technology; they really are quite ingenious. This one even has a half-space and a power space, and a gizmo to set and to clear a tab. The only thing is that it appears (horrors) that when the ribbon winds out all the way to the end, the winding mechanism is supposed to automatically trip, to wind the ribbon back onto the other spool; this one does not do that and you actually have to click the little metal piece by hand to get the ribbon to start to wind back the other way. Other than that, it’s a thing of beauty.