Books and stuff for the weekend

The Reading List for 13 Oct 23

Not my typewriter but the Lettera 22 is a popular one. I’ve got three Olivetti machines in my collection including a near mint condition 33. (Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash)

One of the first typewriters I added to my small collection was a beautiful Olivetti 32, made in 1964. I now own three different Olivetti typewriters, all of which have the same basic chassis. They are tidy portables, very stylish and functional, which is why they were and are so popular and collectible.

But they are manuals, which means they are harder to use and so the typewriter I use now regularly for notes and letters to friends and family is my IBM Selectric III made - as a wax pencil note on the inner frame points out - on 13 January 1983.

The Old Regulars have read this before there’s something about writing on a typewriter that makes the output seem different. I say that only because what I am talking about is a feeling, not something I can objectively say so that other people will see a real difference between a letter typed on a typewriter or one printed off by my computer printer.

They will look different, especially the typeface, which is now what people call the font. But are the words materially different? Meaningfully different? Does the typewriter convey greater sentiment? In one sense, using a typewritermight make them different if only because it takes considerably more work to produce a neat letter on 24 pound cotton paper from my Selectric than if I stuffed the same sheets into a printer and hit “print” on my computer.

The words are different not in the final version but in the amount of work and thought it took me to write just those specific words in the version that goes into the envelope having been pulled from the platen. I can write and revise and change a dozen times with the pixels on the screen but in the typewriter I have to make changes either by hand or by typing out a new one. That takes time.

And for some of us, the physical relationship of the changes is massively different when you see all the choices and alterations piled together, some crossed out and others just crammed in between the lines. That also carries some emotional weight because the process of thinking through all those changes becomes important to me in their own right. The final version can sometimes not be as perfect in some places as the feeling that went into one of those other choices among the many phrases that you ultimately abandoned.

But the final version represents in itself a whole that is quite literally more than the sum of its parts. The version that goes into the envelope contains in some way all those different threads of ideas, of feelings, that I sorted through before settling on just the right combination. One recent letter stands out for the days it took to write and re-write and then re-write another four times before finally I abandoned all of them to start clean. The same ideas and feelings went in roughly the same order in the final version but all that practice allowed me to say everything not in the five or six pages of the drafts but in a mere two. It was the epitome of less being more, of simpler words saying things best, and no matter whether the letter went into the garbage unread or sits tucked away as a cherished keepsake, it was perfect when it left my hands. It said precisely what I wanted to say in words that were clear in every respect just as surely as they were chosen for their meaning, rhythm, and sound if read aloud. Even the flaws in the typing, due to the machine’s quirks not my clumsiness, that I corrected by hand in the final version added to its character and meaning. It was intimately personal. It was me on the pages.

Not a business letter of course, but a personal letter, which is these days what I tend to write the older way. Even in business letters, though, we should not lose sight of how the letter can feel more like a personal exchange between two flesh-and-blood people rather than the machines on which they were typed and then printed, these days.

Not so long ago, when we typed letters to people for a business, that hold-over of the typewriters’ process made the letter carry with it that sense of personal communication. That personal communication also conveyed the sense that the business was built on relationships that the business valued.

Ironic. When the typewriter first appeared, some advocates of the handwritten business or personal letter argued the machine took the personality - the intimacy - out of writing. There’s a word: intimacy. Closeness. Deeply personal. A connection between people. Implying a relationship, which, like intimacy, is a word that people tend to reserve these days for contacts that involve sex.

But the word intimate by its simplest definition conveys a level of familiarity that can be and often is as much or more emotional than it might be sexual and need not be sexual at all. We can be physically intimate with people without emotional intimacy of any kind. That seems to be the parallel with electronic writing. You have the equivalent of physical connection without any sense of the individuals involved.

For me, the typewritten note or letter along with a handwritten address on the envelope, a signature, and maybe a postscript carries with it that sense of emotional intimacy and it is why I write to the people I consider my intimate friends and family, not all the time but when I want to convey that sense of the personal connection between us. Surely, it need not be so. A text message the other day from a dear friend after lunch conveyed every ounce of such sentiment and such affection, just to prove my point by seeming to disprove it. In that case, the words were enough for the occasion and the text message was appropriate. But on another occasion, the extra effort may add extra meaning.

All of this is reflected in Marisa Franco’s book Platonic, which some might call an ode to modern friendship. In truth, Franco’s book is about an attitude to that particular type of relationship which can contain within it intense personal feelings that, as Franco explains, are as deep and complex as the relationship between partners who share a romantic *and* sexual bond. Friendships of that sort are not modern at all but quite old, as Franco explains. We have only more recently tended to call one thing a relationship and put everyone else into the vast and undistinguished category of friend, even though that group may contain people we hardly know alongside those with whom we have been literally or figuratively through the wars.

Intimacy is central to those close friend relationships, especially for friends with whom we have shared both highs and lows of life and who we still keep in touch with in some cases decades after we bonded. Some may drift away over the years but if those old friends return, we can easily pick up where we left off even after years of separation. What tends to stand out for me in those cases is what Franco calls “the truest markers of intimacy, such as shared values, trust, admiration of the other’s character, or feelings of ease around each other.” Those are the relationships that we ought to tend to carefully.

Maybe this is just me getting older but there is much value in that personal aspect, not merely among our friends and family but among others as well. There’s gotta be a bit of the person in what we do every day and for everyone. And for those who we love, show what matters to you, show *who* matters to you and why. Not to the world but to them directly. Do it it in the most meaningful way possible, which can often be in what appears to be the simplest way, but like typing a letter or handwriting a note can be a Tardis: an apparently ordinary looking thing but something that may carry inside it an infinite, intimate, and profound meaning.