This is one of the things I need to get rid of. I moved it from the lateral filing cabinet in order to put the laptop there. It's an Olympia. It is not exotic or rare or even particularly beautiful. It has no special meaning to me as it came from my husband's side of the family. It works, although the ribbon is sad and tired. I didn't learn to type on a manual as it was felt my arthritis would be made worse by it, but I have to say, there is something satisfying about the "chunk, chunk, chunk" sound of the rods striking the page. There are programs out there for the computer apparently, which reproduce this sound, but they can never reproduce the sensation of the keys receding from one's fingers, the judder through the machine to your hands at the moment of impact. There is the iconography as well, of the great writers lugging their typewriters into foreign countries and battlefields. One feels that one will be able to write great things on it as they did. When I established it there, before I bought the laptop, I thought, "I shall go and make myself write in there, poetry that can be copied back to computer easily." This one feels like it weighs as much as our computer, monitor, speakers and keyboard combined, probably with the surge bar thrown in for good measure. There was a "portable" which I already parted with in it's own suitcase, weighing as much as four laptops. I'm not sure what to do with it. For a while I played with the idea of it as art--but it needs to be alone on suspended glass shelves in a room with leather and chrome furniture.
And the problem with a conversation piece is that they need to be used judiciously. A room full of conversation pieces is just cluttered like wearing to many fantastic pieces of clothing at once.
And, unfortunately, I have seen Naked Lunch, the Cronenberg film, too many times to be entirely comfortable with a typewriter lurking in the dark waiting to spread it's beetle wings and gut my laptop.
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