The New Very Old Typewriter

I have been looking for a working old manual typewriter for a long, long time.  In fact, I wanted very much to give The Banana an old typewriter for Christmas last year, but the only old manual typewriters we could find were far away, and expensive to ship. I knew my girl who loves to push buttons would get a big kick out of a typewriter.   For more than a year, I’ve been keeping my eyes open, so you can imagine my extreme excitement when I came across this old Smith Corona Clipper (probably from the 1940’s or 1950’s) at the thrift store in a pile of junk for only $14!  That’s way cheaper than I expected to find an old typewriter for, and all the keys work except U.

The Banana does in fact love the typewriter.  It turns out that EVERYONE around here loves the old typewriter, which is a bit smelly, but the scent hardly stops it from being well-loved.  There have been lots and lots of squabbles about who is using the typewriter and who gets to be next to use the typewriter.  The Banana loves looking for her favorite letters to push.  Mr. SP loves pressing things randomly as fast as he possibly can.  YaYa, however, might be MOST in love with the typewriter, which I didn’t really expect.  She’s been using it to type letters and poems and she’s even typed out pages to write old fashioned doll catalogs on.  She types the description of the dolls and then draws an illustration.  Fun stuff!  YaYa’s love for the typewriter is very much inspired for her love of historical fiction, I think.  She’s mentioned many times in the past few days about how she feels just like such and such character from various books who used their own typewriter.

The ribbon for our typewriter was not in the best shape, but the replacement that I ordered today has come in the mail, and so I expect an afterschool typing frenzy.  I think there is just something so gratifying for them to be able to put the actual sheet of paper in the machine themselves and then see the letters pop right onto the page and not have to wait for them to come spitting out of a printer.  I have terrific memories of getting to use my Grandma Jan’s electric typewriter when I was a little girl.   I spent hours using the typewriter.  It was one of my favorite things to do at her house.  I think there might have even been a manual typewriter lurking around Grandma’s house too.  I vaguely remember a blue manual typewriter.