This is my Mid-1960s model Smith Corona Electra 210.

My Smith Corona Electra 210

Blue Beauty, can only barely keep up with the words that sparkle from my fingers.

I love this typewriter. My dad bought it for me several months ago on eBay, and presented it to me. Penny (my now-10-month-old daughter) and I used to sit down to it together and type up wonderful stories about princesses and kings and unicorns and wicked witches and who knows what else. Sadly, it stopped moving past the 75th stop mark without manual intervention. That makes it very difficult to commit a stream of consciousness to the page.

Occassionally, I sit down to it still and battle my way across several lines of text, or pretent I have A4-size paper, and set the margins very far to the left, leaving a column about 55-60 characters wide. When I type in those small columns, I feel like I’m one of the good guys, one of the old, undiscovered pulp authors, one of the writers who takes it to heart that what he is writing is important to somebody, that one day, a reader will hear the tone or feel the power of a specific metaphor and be enamored enough to read the rest of story.