June 23 is always a celebratory day for us … in part because we are increasingly surrounded by vintage typewriters (and the cats who are fascinated by them…)
John’s rather vast collection of typewriters, from a late nineteenth-century Smith Premier to myriad portables to a growing mid-century collection, has offered much entertainment for the felines of ACP.
Aside from entertaining our feline staff, the typewriters are beautiful bookends to our hundreds of books, as well as a fun reminder of the “old days” in which the job of all writers was a bit more challenging (remember tangled typewriter ribbon? jammed keys? “Wite-Out”?).
But in many ways, those days may have been a bit more interesting for writers as well … having to type without a backspace key made us think a bit more before we put down words. It made us sit with our “mistakes,” which may have turned out to be the best thing we wrote that day, before deleting them too quickly. Nothing back then was nearly as easily erased or forgotten as it is now.
Last year, John sent our then-eight-year-old niece a typewriter — for her, truly an antique. This is a child who, growing up in the age of smartphones, had never answered a landline — but she immediately started typing away. She herself is a prolific writer (and illustrator), and due to her writerly sensibilities and natural brilliance, she is an expert. And she surely now has a deep appreciation for how writers worked in the “old days.”
We hope you’ll find a fun way to celebrate Typewriter Day … and of course you can always send a greeting to your favorite writer with one of our typewriter notecards. If anything is better than a typewriter for old-school writers like us, it’s a hand-written note sent by snail mail!