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I was in a charity shop recently and happened to find an old non-electronic typewriter for sale. It's an Olivetti Lettera 35 which was made in the 70s. It was only £20 but I debated with myself weather I could justify buying it, it's heavy and comes in a bulky carrying case and I didn't know if I would use it very often if at all. Despite that I have thought about the prospect of having a typewriter before but never really pursued actually acquiring one. There where two main justifications I convinced myself to go ahead and buy the thing. The first was that as someone who is trying to get into writing but has issues with procrastination, a typewriter offers a distraction-free way of typing compared to a computer. The other was that being an old school typewriter it doesn't require electricity to function. I have dyslexia and my handwriting is slow and messy, I have always found it much easier and quicker two write by typing, but all the modern ways of typing require devices that use electricity to function. Should (for whatever reason) electricity become unavailable to me for any extended period of time (there was serious talk in the UK at the start of 2023 about potential power blackouts), I would have no way to write. So I thought, even if I don't end up using this thing very often it is at least good to have as a backup should I need it. My reasons where purely practical, this was not a novelty purchase for me. I found you can still affordably buy ink ribbons for this typewriter, so I bought a couple to replace the spent one that came with it. It was otherwise in perfect working order.
I'd never actually used a typewriter before this one and it's quite a different experience from typing on a computer keyboard. Of course you still have the expected "qwerty" layout for the most part though some punctuation characters are in different places. Mine like many of these old typewriters do not have a "1" key[1] (on mine there's a blank dummy key where it would be) and you instead have to use the lower case "l" which passes for a number 1 symbol, though it can be confusing at times when you need a 1 and an l to be next to each other (e.g when writing recipes and you have to write "1lb" which ends up looking like "llb", I get round this by putting "1LB" in upper-case). One of the most difficult things I've found adapting to (as you can probably imagine being so used to typing on computers) is of course not being able to delete characters. My typewriter does have a "backspace" key and sometimes depending on the character I've found you can get away with typing over the incorrect character (if you don't mind it looking a little rough) but barring that you of course can use tipp-ex, correction tape or as I have done cutting up little bits of white sticky paper (I've not yet invested in either of the former two), all of which are much slower than being able to delete a character digitally, so you have to learn to be a bit careful how you type. One of the things I intuitively understood going in was that you need to put considerably more pressure on the keys than you would a computer keyboard as they have considerably longer travel and you have to make sure the character is properly stamped, (I've sometimes found my pressure is too light and the typed character is barely visible requiring using the backspace key to go back and type the character again). A couple times I have also found I've typed two concurrent characters too quickly and the type bars have collided and gotten stuck. Maybe I have to consciously type slower?
So far the only real typing sessions I've had have been copying recipes from books in preparation for Yuletide so I can't speak to the experience creating original writing yet. When I write articles like this for example, I do a lot of re-editing and re-structuring as I go. I'll probably have to work in drafts.
1: https://www.daskeyboard.com/blog/why-did-old-typewriters-not-have-a-number-one-key/