Why Use a Typewriter

And How This Explains Why Bookshops Will Never Die

Typewriters are fun to use. Partly for the novelty, and partly because I don’t have to use them to create final versions. Also, a typewriter makes writing a wonderfully visceral experience—one has to almost beat the keys into submission and imprint their will (also known as letters) onto the page.

Which brings me to the real reason drafting ideas on a typewriter is great: immediacy. Once you've finished a page, it’s there in your hands. For me, this makes drafting much easier, and you can hold the result of your work—it’s much more tangible than pixels.

What the immediacy of the page in your hand also does is that it makes you look long and hard at your work. It’s easy to type, retype, tweak and refine on a computer—but after awhile you can begin to wonder if what you’re producing is any good. Especially since it’s not hard to press Ctrl+c and then Ctrl+v with sections of text you want to keep.

There’s none of that with a typewriter. If you want to keep it in the final draft you've got to type the whole thing out again onto your computer or laptop. Sound like an unnecessary extra step? I assure you it isn't. This is one of the best ways to proof your work because you have to reread every word as you type it onto the computer.

And if you get bored halfway through? Well, if your own writing bores you what’s it going to do for everyone else? I myself have gotten bored halfway through and realised that what I thought was good—shouldn't be inflicted on other people.

So, there’s that going for the typewriter.

There’s also the following to consider:

How much do you want to tell people about your idea? How patient are you with your idea? Having fed more than a thousand pages through a typewriter, I can say that some of my best work has been spat out of a typewriter and then transcribed onto the screen.

What a typewriter does to the creative process

When you are on a screen it’s easy to highlight and delete a word, a sentence or entire paragraph. You can’t do that on a typewriter. Not unless you go back and ‘x’ out the word or sentence, or just cross out a paragraph with a pen.

Wrote a word you wouldn’t normally use? What happens if you work with it? Not really sure about that last paragraph? How will the work turn out if you keep it. Of course, you could do what a lot of people do and just start again. But I’ve found it interesting when I’ve resisted the urge to throw a piece of paper away and go with it. The writing becomes a sort of stream-of-conscious writing where you just go with whatever word spills out onto the typewriter—sometimes it works, and sometimes it’s an interesting experiment.

This changes how you think; and people I have spoken to go one of two ways—they work with it and their writing becomes more free flowing (that is, they stop being so hung up on literary ideas and just get their initial idea down on paper): or they toss the paper out in frustration and type painfully slow, terrified they’ll ruin the page.

As you might the imagine the latter group doesn’t spend a lot of time on typewriters.

How is this relevant to brick-and-mortar bookshops?

Immediacy.

I was fortunate a little while back to be featured on the #AskGaryVee show on YouTube (it was episode 68), where he answered my question about marketing a brick-and-mortar bookshop.

While I agreed with most of what Gary Vaynerchuk said; there was one thing I didn’t. And perhaps to add a little context it should be noted Gary Vee has said, on a number of occasions, “I will probably end up writing more books than I’ve read” (to date he’s written three books); so he’s not quite the target audience for a bookshop.

The one thing I disagreed with was people would rather shop online than enter a bookshop. If the bookshop’s got a good range of stock, and staff who know what they’re talking about, (and it still astounds me when bookshops don’t hire book nerds: there’s millions of us, and we are the best people to sell books because we’re always reading and it’s one of the few topics we’re comfortable talking to strangers about) bookshops will be beat online shops any day.

Because: immediacy. I walk into bookshop see a book, pick up a book, go to the counter and I go home with that book. No waiting, no exorbitant shipping fee (which is why I normally use bookdepository.co.uk it has FREE shipping internationally and is faster than Amazon US), and you know exactly what condition the book is in.

Immediacy is why people will still shop in bookshops. I wouldn’t do a Blockbuster and say people go to bookshops for human interaction…it’s a bookshop people want to buy their books and go home, or to a coffee shop.

How typewriters are still even a thing

Typewriters are still a thing because for my generation they’re a novelty. In primary school, we used those giant brightly coloured Macintoshes that sucked, and then PCs got better (or cheaper) and we used those.

Then there were those oldey-timey war photos of rows and rows of people bashing away at typewriters. Then photos of people like Hemingway, and Kerouac with a typewriter—I mean if Hemingway and H.S.T. used a typewriter they must be good…

On a more practical note

The lovely gentleman who I buy my typewriters from also explained that people of his generation (55+) like it because if they hold a key down too long they don’t suddenly have three lines of that letter. There’s no repeat function on a typewriter—and they’re friends don’t have email, and their hands aren’t so steady: so they send each other typewritten letters.

Which makes sense.

A quick aside, the guy who sells me typewriters (and to whom I send all my friends who are interested in buying typewriters) is like the Ollivander of typewriters: he sizes you up, asks you a few questions and then brings you a couple of typewriters he thinks will suit you. His name’s Alf and he’s a genius.

Typewriters and Bookshops

While I can’t say how much longer typewriters will be around, I can’t see bookshops going anywhere. When the kindle came out, everyone said that books would be gone in five years…well, people who didn’t buy books said books would be gone in five years. The first kindle was released November 2007. So, nearly eight years later and books (proper books, not e-books) are still going strong.

Proper books are better than e-books/e-readers

E-readers have battery life, and don’t have (and will never have) the aesthetic appeal of holding a book, the look of a book (the smell of a book…), or the individuality of a book.

At the end of the day it comes down to the end-user experience and in this contest e-readers will always lose out to books. Always.

Thank you for reading.