In Praise of Typing, the Clattering Kind. (The New York Times, 5/30/2012)
Excerpt: When I stumbled across a Web site mention of it a few months ago, I immediately envisioned an enclave where Mark Twain would feel at home. You know, dark-paneled walls, period carpeting, maybe a large, stuffed bird in the corner.
And of course a boxy, aggressively unergonomic typewriter, with a surfeit of levers, spools, guides, knobs, releases, gauges, clamps and keys.
Naturally, the Typewriter Room is nothing like that. It’s a cubicle-size room with glass walls that expose it to the rest of the library. It has a utilitarian, built-in desk. And while a small sign advises that the space is “designed for a maximum of two people to use comfortably,” that’s an optimistic assessment given the room’s single wooden chair.
The Typewriter Room’s typewriter is similarly bereft of romance. It is electronic, a TA Adler-Royal Satellite 40, with the beige plastic contouring of a fax machine from 1987 and a 700-character memory that allows you to go back and correct typos you made three sentences earlier. And yet despite its utter lack of charming Luddite clunkiness, it’s just ancient enough to deliver a completely different experience than one has when typing on today’s increasingly vestigial computer keyboards.
Fill in the blanks.
2010 @ the _________Public Library
2011 @ the ________Public Library
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