For writing such as this the computer will do, but for composition of a more creative kind the typewriter is peerless. Dusty, monolithic, and distinctly un-portable, my Smith-Corona Coronet Super-12 electric typewriter is a beast. It does not, I concede, slither into those delicate slipcases which constitute the lingerie of our modern laptops— it resides instead within the shell of an enormous steel suitcase. Neither is it an object you would want to take out and about at all— it has a battery life of exactly zero seconds and is too loud for use in a location occupied by other human beings. Nor should you expect either usability or co-operation— this is an apparatus which rotates clockwise during long sentences. Yet obedience is not a quality on which to evaluate a dinosaur, and this machine is the T-Rex that never died. At nearly forty years old, twenty of which it spent lying dormant in my grandmother’s shed, my Smith-Corona is in perfect working order. And that was before oiling. Now slick with lubrication, this monster adamantly refuses either to have its files backed up or to distract me with Facebook. I am beginning to think it not a coincidence but a nod to ancestral superiority that the longest word you can write on the top row of your computer keyboard is ‘typewriter’.

Writing is called the lonely career, but ‘word-processing’ would be more accurate, for there is no greater spur to solipsism than a virtual interface. The imagined spaces of the computer screen can become a sad and addictive dream-world, and what you write there can be dream-like too; everything is constantly mutable, whole documents can be deleted in seconds, nothing has really happened until you press ‘print’. The typewriter, by contrast, embodies permanency. The perfectionist author left fiddling and stuttering by the computer is propelled onward, ever onward, by the more ancient predecessor, upon which it so unbelievably impractical to make corrections that turning back is no longer an option. Said author must face up to the brutal fact that what he writes is there to stay, on real paper, in the real world. But at least he does not have to face this fact in lonely silence; unlike the frustrating rustle of the modern laptop’s ultra-quiet keyboard, the sound and fury of the shaking typewriter assure the out-of-work poetaster that he is, in fact, doing something. If you want word-processing designed for less processed wording, or the most pleasurable writing experience since biro on banana, then the typewriter is the device you should choose.

Furthermore, it is a contraption not without character. There is a difference between materialism and hedonism, just as there is a gap between luxury and happiness, to which Scrooge, Scarface, and Citizen Kane will all testify. But material surroundings and mental processes cannot always be easily separated; what we write is affected by what we write it on or with. The typewriter, as medium, is halfway between the computer and the tattoo gun: it has an aspect of the ineradicable, demanding that you choose your words carefully. Yet there is, bound up within its ancient machinery, something of the hedonist too; its motto is movement, and turning back is not what this mechanism was made for. Jack Kerouac had little interest in the luxuries of materialism, but equipped with amphetamines and his typewriter he wrote On the Road in just three weeks. Do not imagine that you have to stop at the end of the page, either. You too can write like Jack Kerouac – go now to the post office, buy yourself a 120 ft roll of teletype paper, and begin. Oh, and don’t forget the typewriter, either*.

*This writer does not condone the recreational use of amphetamines.