I’m the sort of girl who carries typewriters home whilst walking through a tornado watch.
The day before yesterday, you see, I discovered there was a Goodwill store much closer to my house than I’d previously thought. And yesterday, I made the trek out there, largely because…well, I can’t resist any opportunity to look at used books, now can I?
And there, I fell in love.
With my very first typewriter.
A Smith Corona Corsair Deluxe, which is exactly the model I have been lusting after for months now — only in a blackish-grey, rather than the gorgeous turquoise blue I’d seen before. I didn’t even know they came in black.
He’s got his flaws, to be sure. (He needs a cleaning and a new ribbon; his ? key needs bent back into shape; and strangely the spacebar itself is missing, though the prongs it sat on still depress properly.) But they just made him all the more charming, to me, and I’m looking forward to fixing him up and writing something with him. ♥
So I scooped him off the random table where he’d been left, paid ten dollars for him, and off we went back home through a tornado watch, me toting the typewriter around in a reusable shopping bag.
And this anecdote perhaps sums me up better than anything else, especially when you through a pile of books into the mix.
Said pile included:
• Book IV of Tanith Lee’s The Claidi Journals, Wolf Wing (I read the first three when I was young — you can actually see them in the header of this blog now, under Halo’s ear! — but I lost them in that horrible move and had never managed to get my hands on the fourth one anyway. So the nostalgia of finding it made me smile, even if I may no longer remember the books enough to follow it.)
• A hardcover of Stephen King’s The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
• An edition of King’s Wizard and Glass I’d not even seen before (0-452-27917-8)
• What appears to be a hardcover first edition of Mario Puzo’s Fools Die ♥ (I love Puzo, incidentally. The Godfather is one of my favourite books of all time.)
All in all, the trip was well worth risking a tornado, I feel.
bookslut & storyteller 
Definitely worth the risk. Did you know the country’s last typewriter manufacturer recently ceased operations?
Crazy to think a day will soon come when typewriters will be completely antiquated.
Hello there! :)
And don’t remind me; that still makes me sad, haha. I fully intend to cling onto mine, at least.
Totally worthwhile. I dunno if I can ever get hold of a typewriter on the cheap where I live…so I’m envious!
Thanks for dropping by my blog.
Amlokiblogs
I wasn’t expecting to find one either, so maybe you’ll luck out too!
And you’re very welcome! I should visit more often. :)
LOL! Now I don’t feel nearly as bad about taking notes through our tornado warning/storm of the century so I could use it as first hand research for my WIP. XD
I remember getting a typewriter from my great grandma one summer when she discovered I liked to write. It was my first ‘computer’ that I didn’t have to share. I loved that thing. Definitely worth wandering through a tornado watch!
The way I see it, if there’s going to be a storm anyway, you might as well make the most of it! :D
And there’s just something so inherently personal about typewriters. They aren’t like a computer, that connects you to the world at large; typewriters are a one-on-one writing experience, where there’s nothing but you and it. It gives them a personality, I feel. ♥