Photo and Commentary ©2023 by Maylan Schurch
Friday, June 9, 2023
This past Monday I swung by the University of Washington bookstore near its main campus. I was moseying here and there on the first floor, checking out my favorite book-categories, when I spotted the delightful display you see above.
These three typewriters were positioned on waist-high tables, and a note beside the middle one said, “Go ahead! Try it! You know you want to!”
So I did. Two of these typewriters are Royals, and one is an Underwood. All are “manual,” which means no electric cord is attached. When in college, I myself owned a manual of another famous brand, Smith-Corona, and I typed my school papers, several articles for publication, and my first three published books on that superb machine.
So Monday, as I stepped up to that table, I knew exactly what to do: Hit those keys hard. Commit to your sentence. Don’t worry about errors—you’ll make them, and you’ll have to correct them. If they’re minor, you can use a special eraser and then type over the erased part, or you can brush on a gooey concoction known as WiteOut. If those errors are major, you’ll most likely have to retype the whole page. To make a copy of what you’re typing (if the photocopy machine hasn’t been invented yet), you’ll need to insert two sheets of paper, with a black “carbon paper” sheet between them.
I think back on manual typewriters with a sort of wild regret. They were engineering marvels, with many moving parts, most of which functioned faithfully for many years. I no longer have my Smith-Corona, but I do have a couple of more ancient models up in our attic.
But do I haul them down and type on them once in a while? No.
That’s because in the early 1980s the incredibly miraculous personal computer arrived. And from personal experience I can tell you that those who have wrestled with typewriters rapidly forsook them for devices which would mean their fingers would no longer be stained with ribbon ink or WiteOut. But we still, at first, had to force ourselves not to type hard!
As a Christian, I often have to remind myself that what God has in store for us in His happy eternity is far above and beyond even our greatest joys on earth. One way to keep this in mind is to read what the Bible has to say about heaven.
To survey a few texts, click the link just below:
https://www.bibleinfo.com/en/topics/heaven