Strictly speaking, this should be called typewriter art, since the ASCII acronym didn't come into use until 1963, and this piece, but a young gentleman named Bob, apparently, wasn't created until the mid-thirties. And unlike the thousands of lovingly pecked-out Simpsons characters and ironic meme conversions you're used to seeing in rendered in type, "The Dream Ship" sails with purpose. It's part of an apology, to a fair young maiden!:

Dearest Hazel,
I wanted to apologize for the way I treated you yesterday. I really am ashamed of myself. I don't know what is the matter with me but I guess I just don't know how to treat a lady.

There's a carefully lineated ship up there that begs to differ, Bob. Full letter at [SquareAmerica via BoingBoing]

He's not giving it up because he yearns for a newfangled bit of gear though. He's trading it for an identical model and only because it's not working as well as it should anymore. The original typewriter will be auctioned off by Christie's with all the proceeds going to a charity.

What got to me about this whole thing though isn't that McCarthy is doing something charitable or that he's replacing a gadget. It's how he describes it in the authentication letter to be given to the winning bidder:

It has never been serviced or cleaned other than blowing out the dust with a service station hose. ... I have typed on this typewriter every book I have written including three not published. Including all drafts and correspondence I would put this at about five million words over a period of 50 years.

Despite the lack of maintenance given to the gadget, it's easy to see that he has a genuine attachment to it, both in his words and in what he's doing. Then again, I guess we've all got some piece of old school tech that we're sentimental over, don't we? [NY Times via Obsolete]

It's easy to see what happened here: faced with a failing fleet of typewriters—used for property and evidence vouchers, and little else—the NYPD could either upgrade and computerize their entire system, possibly saving time, money and morale in the long run, or just fix and replace their existing equipment. For a variety of plausible and sympathetic reasons—upfront cost, time, lack of cooperation from the government, etc—they chose the latter route.

But don't let that tarnish the glorious absurdity of the situation for you. This a 21st-century big city police force, nearly all of whom own personal computers, that spends—and will continue to spend—its days slaving away in front of machines that the rest of the modern world only waxes nostalgic about. [NYP via Yahoo via Reddit]

In 1979, I wrote all my stories to the accompaniment of a grating hum, which sometimes modulated to a low growl. These, along with the greased metallic Gatling-gun clicks that punched out my prose character by character, were the sounds of my Olympia Report deLuxe typewriter.

Compared to using a word processor on a PC, using the ORD was an earthy process: Hands-on ribbon changes, the smell of ink, and cranking the platen to see what you just typed. Not to mention an unforgiving process—all too often I was faced with the option of swabbing Wite-Out on a typo or an infelicitous phrase, or simply using a pen to cross it out and scrawl a correction in the blank line between double space. But in 1979, an electric typewriter was the tool of choice, and my was the Olympia.

I'm not quite sure how I first settled on the Report deLuxe. I know I didn't aspire to save my pennies for the high-end of typewriters, the IBM Selectric. Certain professional writers swore by them: These were the clerical Clydesdales with the type-ball, sometimes referred to as a golf ball. You'd press a key and by some magic, the ball would jump forward, revolve and peck at the page—like an indignant woodpecker— with just the right character. You could even swap out the ball for an italic font. The output of the Selectric was very clean and orderly. And the motor hum was low and calm, like soft classical music. You would always come across Selectrics desks of secretaries working for people who made you wait to see them. The Selectric wasn't for me.

Instead, as best I can remember, one day in the late '70s I went into a typewriter store to replace the Smith Corona from my college days and emerged with the Olympia, a more traditional typewriter where hitting a key sprung a lever that make a little arm jump up and hit the page. I think it cost around $300. Its two-tone looks weren't exactly modern, but not retro. It had a plastic shell, but was pretty solid. It was a "portable," meaning it came in a case slightly smaller than a cinder block, and not much lighter. It wouldn't fit in the case unless you rolled up the electrical cord just right, squeezing it into a gap in the plastic.

The Report deLuxe did a lot of things right. It was easy to put in the paper so it wasn't tilted at a slight angle. And when you had to Wite-Out a mistake and then go back and type over it, it was pretty easy to adjust the platen to find the approximate positioning and type in the correction so it almost looked like you did it right the first time. And most important, when you got excited and started typing really fast, it could handle the flurry, only rarely getting jammed.

Once you bought a typewriter, you held onto it for a while. It wasn't like a new upgrade or a rival model would come out in a year or two that had you lusting so much you'd ditch your present model. You'd just keep the one you had. It's not like you were waiting for some sort of spiffed up UI or anything-with an electric typewriter, you just turned the thing on, twirled a piece of paper in it, and started banging away. The trickiest thing you did was set the margin.

When something went wrong, you took it to a little shop when some guy who had been there since World War I put a tag on it and told you to come back in two days. And he would fix it. Every couple of months you'd change the ribbon, a messy process that made your finger look like you'd just been to the police station.

I'm not going to bother comparing the virtues of typewriters to computers when it comes to writing books and articles; you'd have to torture my family to make me go back. Typewriters force you into a linear process of writing-hammer out a draft, revise by pencil, type the next draft... By comparison, I'm writing this post by jumping from paragraph to paragraph, moving things around, shaping and reshaping. It's almost as if the final draft just emerges, like a photograph in developing solution (if you don't mind an old film reference). Computers are much preferable, and no scissors and glue are required like in the original "cut and paste."

But I was quite happy with my Olympia Report deLuxe. Of course, I didn't go around raving about it. People didn't talk much about their typewriters. It wasn't until I had long given up my Olympia that I learned via one of his columns that Ron Rosenbaum, one of the great magazine writers of our time, had a fetishistic relationship with his Olympia Report deLuxe that lasted well into the computer era.

In the movie You've Got Mail, Nora Ephron created a character based on Rosenbaum. When asked what kind of typewriter he used, he said the name of the model, adding, "Report, as in gunshot."

I still can hear it.

Steven Levy is a senior writer for Wired, most recently writing about Google's ad business and the secret of the CIA sculpture. He's written six books, including Hackers, Artificial Life and The Perfect Thing, about the iPod. In 1979, he had just left his first real job, at a regional magazine called New Jersey Monthly, to become a freelance writer, and had yet to touch a computer.

Typewriter image source at Rider University

Gizmodo '79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analog age gave way to the digital, and most of our favorite toys were just being born.

Apparently, by maneuvering the two levers, there's a grabber that can pick up the character and print it on the page. This method let the fastest operator type at 20 words per minute. You could also swap characters in and out of that silver bed in front of the roller to choose more words from the Chinese language.

Sorrel also went deeper with his research and found other models that adopted a button system which would mash together different brush strokes or half characters in one spot to form full characters. One such model used 72 buttons and could form 9000 words. But that's just the tip of the iceberg—there are plenty other interesting facts over at [Gadget Lab].

The Clacking Never Stops

Of all the lessons I learned as a greenhorn journalist during the Clinton Era, the most valuable by far involved how best to judge the relevancy of reader mail. Every week, I'd get a few letters from my magazine's subscribers, most of whom fell into one of two categories: schoolkids who wanted me to help them with an assignment, or retired know-it-alls who quibbled with my facts. (Sample quibble: "In your June 20th article, you misstate the average diameter of a diplodocus nostril; according to my extensive research on the subject, it is five inches, not four.")

There was also the occasional letter from a reader who fell into category three—people who are absolutely buggin'. Often the level of such a reader's insanity was not immediately apparent, at least from the context of the letter—they'd start off with the typical salutation, or maybe a learned quote from Thomas Hobbes. But by the end, they'd be accusing me of conspiring with the Malaysian government to place radio transmitters behind their eyeballs, and would I please stop it?

After wasting far too many minutes reading through such dreck, a higher-up explained to me that there was a simple way to tell a crazy letter on sight: "The crazy ones," he pointed out, "always use typewriters." And wouldn't you know it, he was right.

So, where does today's slightly off-kilter conspiracy buff go for his/her typewriting needs, especially if they're short on cash? The gadgetry world is still churning out a limited number of these devices of yore, though the fanciest models are still surprisingly expensive—guess the economies of scale aren't working in favor of the industry. After the jump, everything you wanted to know about today's low-end typewriter market but were afraid (or simply unwilling) to ask.

Now, I know what you're thinking: writing about typewriters is the easy way out. I mean, we've all seen those USA Today and Akron Bugle bits, run every six months or so, about some lovable old coots who refuse to upgrade to the PC era. Okay, granted. But I've come not to praise old coots, but rather to ponder how the typewriter industry is able to soldier on in the age of the $288 Everex Explora.

As far as I can tell, there are only two companies still making typewriters in any sort of quantities: Lexmark, which purchased IBM's Selectric line, and the Italian company Olivetti, which has the manual market locked down. Smith Corona went bankrupt a while back, though there's still a branded website that offers two models, starting at a decidedly non-low-end $149.99. And don't even venture into the "New" section at Typewriters.com unless you've got Paul Allen type of money: even with an 80-character LCD display and a built-in spellchecker, no typewriter on the planet should be retailing for $599.95.

Thankfully for typewriter aficionados, there's plenty of old stock out there, particularly from Brother. The winner by a country mile is the GX-6750, with the trademark Perfectype touch keyboard and, best of all, "automatic carriage return." Prices start at $30 for units that have been slightly scuffed while sitting on the docks lo these many years.

Of course, there's also a sizeable number of second-run typewriters out there, some of which betray signs of the industry's late 1990s effort to compete with laptops. There's no better example of that misguided fad than the Brother PY80, which weighs in at a not-that-impressive 2.8 kilograms. Eat your heart out, Fujitsu Lifebook.

All kidding aside, I do understand that there's a certain niche market for typewriters that's not gonna go away soon. They're still ideal for doing quick fixes to forms, which is why Brother pitches its typewriters to the government and education markets, rather than mainstream consumers. And at least for the manual Olivetti, I can see the usefulness in emerging markets; just because your village has yet to be granted reliable electricity doesn't mean you should be consigned to a life of pencil and paper. (Hat tip on that last point: Everyone who wrote in to lambaste me for not recognizing the Third World applications of the Polaroid OneStep.)

Also, of course, you've got that vast market of newsmagazine readers feel an overwhelming urge to write letters-to-the-editor regarding those secret Major League Baseball satellites. That's certainly not a consumer base that's gonna dry up anytime soon; the main challenge for the Lexmarks and Olivettis of the world is getting such folks to upgrade to new typewriters, which requires imbuing said products with a certain degree of affordability. (The overly conspiracy-minded, in addition to favoring weird margins and single spacing, are notoriously budget conscious.) Suggestions for how that can be done? Drop me a line.

Brendan I. Koerner is a contributing editor at Wired and a columnist for both The New York Times and Slate. His Low End Theory column appears every Thursday on Gizmodo.

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