| Life moves in a cycle. Something that is new today will become old tomorrow and the thing of the past will become todays fashion symbol. Typewriters, a thing of the past, which were replaced by computers, are now finding a special place on the desks of budding young writers. |
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 Think typewriter. Think clunky, cobwebbed, and obsolete? Think again. In a culture focused on the smallest, quietest, quickest gadgets, the trusty manual typewriter is attracting an unlikely new fan club.
Once doomed for dusty basements, the old manuals are ending up in the hands of people who practically grew up with Notebooks and Palmtops. But some young adults find those sleek technologies unsatisfying when its time to channel their inner novelist or correspondent. A typewriter feels more intimate than a blank screen and a blinking cursor, they say.
"It just seems like the computer and printer are too much of an intermediary between me and my writings," said Mariah Pospisil, who pecks away on her 1960s Olympia in coffee shops or her back yard while her computer sits idle at home.
Its tough to tell how many young people are buying typewriters. Some pick up restored ones in retail shops, but others find them on eBay "Theyre the writers, the artists," said Permillion, a shop owner.
Popular wisdom would hold that typewriters are a dying breed, replaced by ever-faster personal computers that do far more than type text. "We have no feeling about their computer, but we like our charming little typewriter," says Peggy Tidwell, who owns a Los Altos Typewriter since 1967. "Its got character, and its more alive than a computer is."
For a generation raised with technologies that can be outdated within months, theres something impressively permanent about a typewriter. And for those used to computers often operating mysteriously and practically in silence, its refreshing to use a machine with visible working parts. Its similar to teens choosing the hiss and pop of vinyl records over the clarity of MP3s.
"A lot of young people who only experienced in their early youth these types of digital, totally electronic experiences find the tactile, analog stuff very appealing," said Robert Thompson, a Syracuse University professor and popular culture expert, noting that a couple of his students have submitted typed papers. Young people who choose typewriters "are very careful about what they do" when they write, he said. "It doesnt seem as disposable and casual."
With a typewriter, writing is a sensory experience. The ink has its own special smell. Some are drawn by the romantic notion that real writers-like Hemingway, Hunter S Thompson-created their masterpieces on typewriters.
Though many people own typewriters, not everybody understands the appeal. Pospisils father said, "Technology has come farther!" when she first brought it home.
But not all advances have been good ones; there is no button on a typewriter, which will lose your document. Score another point for the typewriter.
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