▲ of the Mind [013]

Hi, you may not remember me, but I’m Steve and I write a newsletter that hasn’t come out with a new issue for a while. In ▲ of the Mind [012], I said that the next issue would be out in a “week or so” and that it would be a typewriter themed issue. Half of that ended up being accurate.

You may notice that things look different around here. That’s because I migrated all my writing to a single location and the web version of ▲ of the Mind now lives there too. I wrote about the migration activities here and the motivation for it here. And now… back to your not-so-regularly scheduled newsletter.

I grew up writing on typewriters. This occurred almost exclusively at the office of our family flag manufacturing factory. I would go to the office in the evenings or weekends or spend the whole day there when I didn’t have school. Before I was an official employee, I’d do all sorts of odd jobs around the factory and then when I had any downtime at all, I’d jump behind the humming heavy-duty electric typewriter at either my dad or my grandad’s desk (whichever one wasn’t occupied at that moment). I knew how to slide it out of its massive cabinet that took up one side of the desk. It was sitting on a spring-loaded shelf that would slide out and then lift so that it was sitting beside the desk with room to slide your knees under it in the chair. It was the desk equivalent of a motorcycle sidecar.

I spent countless hours, reams of paper, ribbons of ink and manual correction tape (before my dad upgraded his to the newer electric model that had that built into the cartridge) typing away at just about anything I could think of. At some point, I became utterly fixated on one of the employee’s and started typing out all sorts of official looking documentation about him. He was a Vietnam war veteran that had so many stories that I thought he’d be the perfect subject to fill a manilla file folder with pages and pages about. His name was Francis J. Patrick, but everyone called him Pat. Pat entertained my insanity and never seemed at all put off that I was basicly stalking his every memory and documentable data point. I was a one-boy data farm focused on only one identity before it was all the rage.

I’m pretty sure all that time spent behind a typewriter led to lots more slamming down keys on a computer keyboard. When we got our first computer at home I journaled like I was Dougie Howser, MD during opening credits. For most of my life, if you put me in front of a QWERTY keyboard, I’m going to try and do something with it to generate some words that someone or no one may read someday. Today, most writing is published on the web in some form. My efforts land here in your inbox or on my blog.

What’s missing for me from those early days of typing is the tangible aspects of the end product. Pulling out that folder, seeing what I’d written, deciding what to write next and then filing it back in the folder to slide into the giant filing cabinet where my mom and dad were kind enough to give me a little section of one of the drawers for my stalker stash. Writing online is like digital photography. It’s cheaper and easier to put your creations out to the world. You can type volumes and take photo after photo without consuming a costly resource like paper or having to take a spent roll to the Kodak store for developing. But there’s not that feeling of leafing through the pages that has the indentation of the letterform that slammed itself at high velocity into the page with the poor bastard ink ribbon begging for mercy and to make the beatings stop.

So… I bought a typewriter. This was some time ago now, and it wasn’t overly costly. I did my research on what features I wanted it to have. I was going for a certain aesthetic as well. It’s not the gigantic heavily humming electric beast like the one I started on. This one is a manual typewriter where you have to do the work to make sure the keys are being pressed with enough force to get the job done. It isn’t difficult, but it’s so different from even the tactile feeling of mechanical computer keyboards. It’s an AEG Olympia Traveller de Luxe. I learned from a co-worker that lived in Germany for many years that AEG is a similar “makes it all” company to General Electric (GE) here in the United States. I’ve written little notes to the kids and my wife and the kids think it’s pretty neat to type on it. I like that no matter what I put it through, with a little mainenance, it will work for another 100 years beyond my lifetime. It’s battery won’t ever drain for the last time. It’s memory won’t ever be inadequate to be useful. It will serve the same purpose it has for the 70-ish years it’s been around so far.

I was a typewriter kid, and I’ll be damned if that’s not why the essay you just read had the chance to be written.

1️⃣ Something I bought…

AEG Olympia Traveller de Luxe

More and higher-res photos can be viewed here.

2️⃣ Something I found and loved…

The Olympia Traveller site

In trying to research an issue I experienced with the typewriter when it first arrived from Italy, I found this amazing site. It will forever serve as my encyclopedia of knowledge when it comes to this model and all the ins and outs of maintaining it.

I even reached out to the author of the site by email to say thank you for creating it and putting it out for others to benefit from. Just awesome.

3️⃣ Something I watched…

California Typewriter Documentary

I’d heard about this documentary awhile back when Tom Hanks released a text editor for iOS called Hanx Writer. It tries to bring the typewriter experience to a mobile device (in UI/UX terms). It’s a great film that features one of the last operating typewriter shops located in Berkeley, CA. While the documentary did create a spike in business, California Typewriter was forced to close its doors permanently in March of 2020.

Trailer:

📬 Thanks for reading!

You made it to the end of the newsletter! 🚀

If you found this worth the time we both invested, consider throwing a few coins in the empty typewriter case or simply sharing this newsletter with a friend.

If you have feedback on how to make this newsletter better, email me.

For more of my writing, check out Tangible Life.

Angles Outside 180 ▲

This section is only for the folks that scroll to the bottom of a newsletter the way true fans sit to the end of the credits in a movie hoping for a little more…

Clicks for iPhone is a physical keyboard accessory for the iPhone is developed by one of the creators of the Blackberry Bold 9000 keyboard. I was once a rabid Bold 9000 user and could type faster on that phone than any other I’ve ever owned.
I’d had an idea that Tangible Life would be a site purely populated with posts that I’d written on the AEG Olympia Traveller de Luxe. I was going to scan them and with the stellar OCR on Apple devices of today, I figured it would be a fitting method for the site name. Then I remembered I hadn’t even found time to write an issue of ▲ of the Mind in months and decided that was a nice idea (full stop).
I know there are several new subscribers since the last issue went out, so I’ll use this final bullet to say thank you for your patience and welcome!