I type for a living, I'm a secretary in a law office. I come home from work and I often find myself back at the keyboard, laptop as entertainment. I type fast, the last time I did a typing test my numbers were good, over 100 wpm with 99% accuracy. I doubt that I can type that fast any more, my accuracy is now very poor, auto-correct has made me sloppy, but I think I'm still pretty fast.
At my office there are still a few typewriters kicking around. Recently a new girl was hired. She's young, younger than some of my sister's children. Someone had told her to fill in part of a form using the typewriter, she had no idea how to use it. I was a little bit horrified. How could you not know? Oh, right, you were born years after I started working, working with an IBM electric. That's why I was such an accurate typist, we had to use correcting tape and sometimes when things were dire you would use a razor blade to scrape the ink off the page so you could type-over.
Our Dad had an old manual typewriter in his office in our basement, I used to love banging away on it, the red and black ribbon was faded but it was fun to "play office", using his rubber stamps, punching away on the adding machine. I took the "qwerty" photo at an antique store last summer, it reminded me of that typewriter.
When you enjoy something, don't you love finding things that enhance your enjoyment, especially when you can combine more than one thing that makes you happy?
My point? I love to read, I take stacks of books out of the library and often have more than one on the go at a time. I also love book marks. And now, I've discovered I love the look and memory of old typewriters.
Last summer, I found this bookmark:
I love the feel of the old key. The "F" in floating is beautiful. I had to do some research to discover what floating shift meant, it's not that important, it was just another way of creating upper case letters.
Sometimes when I look at it, I misread it and see the words floating shit. Which can also be meaningful some days!
Etsy and Ebay are great places to start looking for some crafty items. For a more elegant choice, check out Tokens & Coins.
I've just bought some cute things at Etsy. Both typewriter related .... I'll show you when I get them.
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