I hope many of you remember the IBM Selectric Typewriter. What a marvel! It changed my working life. The best feature was a little white spool -- correction tape -- that you could use to white out your typos. Ah, the beauty of erasure. I believe that only the lowly pencil had that feature until IBM made the leap.
Yesterday I was at the American Writers Museum. There was a collection of typewriters on display. There were the usual clackity-clack black ones. And, among them the sleek Selectric. I started to touch it fondly, maybe tapping into some sisterhood of secretaries.
I'm glad that in the sea of our forgotten words, there were some great authors who were touching the same keys.
I remember the Selectric Typewriter very well! It was like a miracle, and I don't exaggerate. We had legal filing forms that would be rendered invalid with whiteout. I hadn't been so excited about a material item since Christmas as a small child. How archaic it seems now.
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