Why typewriters beat computers

By Neil Hallows
They're clunky, dirty and can't access the internet, yet every year thousands of people buy typewriters when they could probably afford a computer. Why?
When asked how he writes, Frederick Forsyth has a simple answer. "With a typewriter."
He admits this is to avoid the more difficult business of describing his creative process, but it also means he can celebrate old friends.
There was the steel-cased portable he used as a foreign correspondent in the 1960s. "It had a crease across the lid which was done by a bullet in Biafra. It just kept tapping away. It didn't need power, it didn't need batteries, it didn't need recharging. One ribbon went back and forward and back until it was a rag, almost, and out came the dispatches."
Then the blooming thing blew up and they told me that it was my fault, and it wasn't, it just burnt out
Maureen HugginsAnd after 50 years and a dozen novels including The Day of the Jackal, why change now, he asks.
"I have never had an accident where I have pressed a button and accidentally sent seven chapters into cyberspace, never to be seen again. And have you ever tried to hack into my typewriter? It is very secure."
Although he laughs as he says it, Mr Forsyth identifies the continuing attraction of a typewriter for thousands of people. They find a computer distracting, unreliable or just plain terrifying, and they have a love for the tangible. As he puts it, "I like to see black words on white paper rolling up in front of my gaze".
Mr Forsyth's novels are so popular that he could write them in the sand and publishers would still queue up for his business. But who else is still pounding rather than pressing their keyboard?
Just as quick
The Japanese multinational Brother sold 12,000 electronic typewriters last year in the UK, which is its biggest market in Europe.

Unruffled by the threat of disk defragmentation errorsBrother UK sales director Phil Jones says customers are generally older people, although his company also sells a number to students. He says typewriters remain a cheap way to develop keyboard skills. The most basic model costs around £80.
"Typewriters are much more straightforward to use than computers as they only have one function - typing," says Mr Jones.
And typing is the only thing that Maureen Huggins wants her machinery to do.
A reporter for 52 years, she uses a manual typewriter for her work at the Norfolk Courts Press Agency. Stories are then faxed to newspapers and broadcasters.
Mrs Huggins tried using a computer about 15 years ago and the memory is still raw. "I had four pages of instructions I had to learn, to send [my previous employers] the stories. Then the blooming thing blew up and they told me that it was my fault, and it wasn't, it just burnt out."
She says she can produce her stories at least as quickly as her rivals, because the risk of technical failure is virtually nil - she keeps a spare typewriter at hand - and because the typewriter encourages her to get the story right first time.
This may sound like an impossibly Spartan ideal, where cut and paste is done with scissors and glue, and deleted words remain on the page as angry little blobs. But for some left jaded and distracted by their smarty-pants computers, it is tempting.
The writer Will Self is a convert. He went back to using a manual typewriter several years ago. "I think the computer user does their thinking on the screen, and the non-computer user is compelled, because he or she has to retype a whole text, to do a lot more thinking in the head," he said in a recent interview.
That doesn't necessarily mean that Royals and Underwoods are elbowing PCs and Macs off the desk with their jabby little carriage return levers. But even for the technologically savvy, they have their uses.
Green screen style
Richard Polt, a philosophy professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio, collects old typewriters but is sufficiently computer literate to run an attractive website devoted to them. He remembers struggling over a book he was writing.

The green screen look - almost as retro, and available to download"There are so many distractions with the internet, it is also so easy to change and delete what you have written. It is too easy to dither."
So he turned to one of his 175 old typewriters.
"I didn't compose most of the book on a typewriter, but every once in a while I would put out a few pages on a typewriter, a first draft, and it was kind of refreshing."
He knows of others, especially in the early stages of creative writing, who have benefited in a similar way.
This can be achieved without a typewriter. The right software can turn the flashiest computer display into a technological boot camp - an early 80s green screen stripped of dancing paper clips and easy escape routes to the internet.
Useful, perhaps, but not beautiful. Turning a computer into a prop from Ashes to Ashes will never have the aesthetic charm of a Remington Noiseless. It is this historical, emotional pull which draws a particular kind of student or aspiring writer to the typewriter.
I don't know why, but they usually seem to be men, and their heroes are hard, brilliant men from the last century. Posing on their blogs with an antique machine, all that separates them from Hemingway are two dozen cocktails and his ability to write.
Car boot sales
If there really is a move back to typewriters, it probably won't come in time to save what is left of the market.
Brother UK's Mr Jones admits he is "surprised" that people are still buying typewriters, and "amazed" his company sells a handful for more than £500, which would buy a laptop. Typewriter sales are falling 10% a year at the company, which is better known for its printers, faxes and sewing equipment.

Often overlooked - the typewriter's place in women's liberationPerhaps more surprisingly, demand in developing countries is also falling sharply. Godrej Industries, an engineering and consumer products conglomerate, owns the last manual typewriter factory in India.
Senior general manager Sorab Barekh says two-thirds are exported, with various typefaces, to Africa and South East Asia. They tend to be used by remote government outposts which have a poor electricity supply. Sales are falling so fast that more than half a century of production might cease within three years, he says.
But for a long time yet, anyone who wants a typewriter will be able to pick one up at a car boot sale for roughly the price of a replacement ribbon.
And even when the last carriage return rings, their legacy will go on. The "qwerty" keyboard was devised as a means of keeping commonly recurring sequences of letters like "th" and "an" apart so typewriter keys did not stick.
There is argument about whether a different configuration of letters would enable faster typing, but an educationalist who tried to change it in the last century likened the challenge to reversing the Ten Commandments.
The biggest inheritance from the typewriter, however, is the fact that lots of people reading this at work will be women. Typing classes mushroomed at the end of the 19th Century, and this helped many women to enter paid work for the first time. By 1901, Britain had 166,000 female clerks, up from 2,000 half a century before.
It was a limited emancipation. The new employees (often called "type-writers" themselves) were accused of stealing jobs from men, depressing wages and sexually tempting the boss, and their chance of career progression was often nil. But for women to have any job outside the home was revolutionary.
So while the pen may be mightier than the sword, the typewriter was once mightier than both.