Just My Type

Wednesday is about books/writing. Today it’s about both. But mostly it’s about typewriters. Yay! I got a new (old) typewriter (again)!

I have a brand new typewriter! Well, it’s actually very old. But it’s brand new to me. I bought it on TradeMe a few months back – the sale went down in Hawke’s Bay so I got my father to collect it and save it for me. When I last saw him in Wellington, he’d forgotten where he had stored it so didn’t bring it down, but he  knew he had picked it up from the seller. So the wait was a little longer. When I made it home to Hawke’s Bay for Christmas late last week, my parents pointed to it under the tree. A little Christmas present to myself.

I straight away dashed this out:

There’s a typewriter under the Christmas tree,
and it’s for me! I feel 13 again. I remember when
I’d sit up late at night typing, hitting down hard
on the keys. Then there was a time when I felt
them weighing down on me. But that’s changed
again just recently. The lid has been lifted, the steam
has cooled, and I can collect myself. (Again).

I paid for the typewriter this time – it’s not even
a Christmas present. But I saw it there, waiting for
its lid to be lifted, and I felt so many feelings from
my teen years, where I was living two lives: Out some
nights after the sport was done for the day. Drinking
and laughing, then home to hit down on the typer, to
put thoughts to paper. Sometimes there was barely

any thought in it at all, but that didn’t stop the flow –
and the assignments kept coming. I set them for myself.
I’d decide something was due, because it was what
I wanted to do. It was who I wanted to be, it was how
I wanted it all to work. And it did for so long. Until
it didn’t. Now it can, once again. And that’s what I saw
when I caught a glimpse of the typewriter under the tree.


And it’s interesting, to me at the least, because this is my first poem in several months. Probably since the time I bought the typewriter, or even before. I quietly withdrew from writing poems every single day, and then told a small handful of people that I’d quit poetry altogether. Many might have assumed that poetry had quit me, and far earlier. But I was convinced I needed a break. It has only been a few months, but it’s all relative, and I had been pumping out material daily over the last five years or so – and for many years before that for long bursts too. So to have about five months off from writing a single poem is definitely a huge break/through for me.

And then, just like that, a poem again. The mere sight of the typewriter. It was like olfactory senses.

A while back, I wrote about typewriters – though mostly that was about the musical connection. Still, I talked in that piece about how I was newly obsessed with typewriters (again). And how they had always been a huge factor in my writing. A link back to the tradition.

When I received my first electric typer (about 12 or 13), I would sit in my room at night and type up the lyrics to songs. All kinds of songs. Tracy Chapman, Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Prince, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, The Stones, Split Enz, even Deep Purple. These were some of the musical artists I was obsessed with at the time, and so I wanted to learn their lyrics – even if their lyrics weren’t worth learning. This was never for singing along, instead I displayed many of them on my wall. When I ran out of room I started a folder and just typed up dozens of lyrics (mostly the old-fashioned way: Play/Pause/Rewind/Play)

I was teaching myself to type. The mechanical action. The practice. The discipline. A self-taught typist, and this was my school.

From there I started making my poems. To begin with, I wrote them out then typed them up. Sometimes I’d have a go at improvising directly with the typewriter. It made you think, it made you plan. Other nights it made you just bash keys crazily to see what, if anything, happened.

Many of my jobs have involved typing – and not just freelance writing jobs. I’ve had a sideline doing transcription work for a while, and I was one of well, roughly half of Wellington’s population that was employed for a time by Media Monitors/iSentia to write news summaries and do reports and transcriptions.

I love typing.

And my handwriting was never – ever – good. And so of course it has deteriorated with time. I can now no longer read my own writing at all. I had a tiny keyboard I could use with my phone if I needed it and I have experimented with all sorts of PCs and laptops to find the right travel-combo before finally settling this year on an iPad with a Magic Keyboard. So good. The iPad is now my “Travel Computer” and my auxiliary note taker. It sits beside my main computer with its notepad function ready – for anything, and everything.

The typewriter under the Christmas tree sat there. When all the kids opened their presents on Christmas Day it was still there. It wasn’t wrapped up, and I doubt the kids even knew what it was, but it was very clear they did not care. It didn’t look cool. And it did not have a name tag on it – either for them or for someone else (so they could jealously ask why someone else was getting a ‘bonus’ present).

Just last night I finally sat down and took the cover off it. Had a look.

It’s really just an ornament.

But it’s more than that. It’s a monument. A reminder. And, hopefully, an influence. It feels like it is already. The first poem arriving serendipitously after six months of dry-spell. That’s a big clue there. Hopefully.

A large part of 2022 was spent with me stalking TradeMe typewriter listings. Listening to typewriter podcasts, and reading up on the history of the machine. My son likes to tell people that I’m weird like that. (He watches videos of other people’s book collections on YouTube).

I was telling someone, rather sheepishly, that I’d grown somewhat addicted to researching typewriters and mostly just looking at pictures of all the different models.

“No judgment here mate”, he replied. “I paint tiny toy soldiers”.

And that seemed the perfect shell for this nut. We all have our things. Or would like to.

And now I have the actual thing. The Tippa Adler is mine. And for a very reasonable price. (The price of old typewriters is mostly INSANE).

It will require some work to get it up to fully operational, but that’s not even the focus for me. Just having it is the thing. I like to have the ‘thing’ to help me with the full visualisation. The realisation. The actualisation. I place books around me to promote more reading than I’m doing, I still collect records, CDs, and DVDs, on some level – even though I mostly watch and listen to things that are streamed from a cloud. The thought of having the physical media packed away in boxes in storage is basically devastating. We must make shelf space for them to be seen; to be felt.

But as I said in my previous rant about typewriters I like to think about all of the work that was done on the machine, way before my time. On all the typing machines, that is. The poems, novels, biographies, and journalism that I have loved and continue to love that was created on a Tippa, or some other type of typer. Amazing.

Yesterday, I finished a couple of my holiday reads, books half-completed and waiting to be finished. And I reached for the first brand new book of the break. The latest slim volume from Alan Bennett (one of my heroes). The book opens with the sort of extract/quote I would have once typed out and placed on the wall. (It even mentions a typewriter in it!) Now I can just take a photo with my phone and absently share to Instagram. It’s not the same. But also, I suppose it is.