"Typewriters: Do you have any with an LCD display?"

I was talking to a friend on the phone last night and commented I was going to St. Paul to meet a guy on Tuesday. That sounded suspicious, so I had to explain a little more. I said, "Oh, it'll be quick... I just need to get something from him." Then I realized, gah, that sounds even more crazy. "I met him on Craigslist." Not helping. So finally I explained, "Look, I'm going to meet this guy by his car Tuesday night near Grand Ave and he's going to give me two typewriters." And my friend could not stop laughing. I waited 5 minutes, 10 minutes, got my long white beard out, all that stuff. Still laughing.

That's the reaction I get from people when I say I'm interested in typewriters. They say, "What the heck... TYPEWRITERS?" I'm not obsessed with them (yet), but they've always fascinated me. And I've been pretty consistant, always using the manual kind. There's satisfaction to me knowing that they don't need power... just paper, ribbon and machinery. So I was changing my inside dog kennel around a few months ago, and saw I had used a typewriter (in its case) as a thing to hold up one of the walls. I hadn't used it in five years or so, so I opened it, read the manual (1950s manuals ROCK!), got some paper and started pounding out some stuff: Christmas letters, thank you notes, one-page correspondence. It was very satisfying.

There were a few downsides. I noticed the letters on page weren't uniformly filled-in, it did take a little extra effort to push the keys down, and I type fast so I was getting jammed up occasionally. If only they had typewriters that fixed all these issues!

Enter the electric typewriter! Now it turns out they've had these for a long time, since the 1920s even, and they were made WELL into the 1980s and beyond, so I had some studying to do. I remember the name "Selectric" appearing again and again, so I did some searching and yeah, THAT's the one. That's the typewriter that changed everything. (It's the one with that little golfball thing on it.) The Selectric kept coming up and being referred to as classic design, groundbreaking, and as the New York Times said in 1961, "The new IBM Selectric is Piss-in-your-pants exciting!!!"

Here's a link to some Selectric stuff: Selectric Wiki

Wanting the Selectric, I went to Craigslist and posted in the looking-to-buy area. The responses started to come in and most of them didn't get it, that I wanted a "Selectric model 1" Some of the replies were "I've got some 3s," or "I've got a 1985 smith corona with built-in dictionary" etc etc. Gah. Does this same thing happen with cars? If I ask for a '57 Chevy do people say, "I don't have a '57 chevy, but I do have a 1991 pontiac that has airbags!"

The funniest example to me was a lady who said, "Why would you want a selectric 1? The Selectric 2 has a backspace which erases the last character you entered." That's nice I thought, but I can also use Microsoft Word if I want to do anything serious.

Like The Rock says, you've gotta know your role. And the role for my Selectric is to just turn on once in a while and type a one-page letter. Maybe I'll get a model with a spellchecker someday