International Office Machines

There was a recent article in the LA Times about a long-standing typewriter repair shop and its dedicated owner, Martin Quezada, who treats each typewriter with sincere care and admiration. With a couple typewriters myself—one which has a quirky way of starting up and the other in need of repair!—I could quite connect with the sentiments shared in the story:

They belong to an era before planned obsolescence, when people did not just replace, but repaired, what they owned.

Unlike the pager, the PDA, the floppy disk and the VCR, the typewriter has escaped the heap of gadgets defunct and disused… Its slow pace is meditative, not frustrating, an exercise in deliberateness closer to engraving than typing on a computer.

And a typewritten letter is no arrangement of light on a computer screen but a thing…a physical expression of thought and care and courtesy. It tells its recipient: You are worth the time it took to type this.

Continue to the full story here. Photos by Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times