It was, to be sure, a little bit rich for my blood. I liked the bolt band, but not enough to pop $75 for the trio.
Plus, I figured I could make the same sort of thing, and what's more, it might be even more interesting with found nuts and bolts. Rusty things.
The coolest thing in the shop, really, was an old typewriter. I heard a piece on NPR about how the cool kids are onto them, complete with a handful of old faithful authors who never gave up and switched to a computer.
I'm not immune to typewriter nostalgia, I really liked the IBM Selectric I learned to type on, the noises, aromas, the action of the keys. I'd still pay handsomely for a keyboard for my iMac with that touch.
And apparently the folks at Liberty Belle heard that the hipsters were dabbling in old school typing, because this relic was marked a mighty $125.
I bet the yuppies spending big bucks for a manual typewriter to drag down to Starbucks and clack at while listening to the iPod and running five apps at a time on their Droid don't know this sentence, the one my Dad always used to test a typewriter. For instance, after changing a ribbon, something aforementioned yuppies probably won't need to do.
The fad will die out before they use one up with all the breaks from writing they'll have to take to talk about the charm of a typewriter. I wonder how many of them will tweet about how they can't find the shortcut for 'undo' on the thing.
Lest you think I'm kicking them too hard, my own nostalgia for an old Selectric comes down to that dream of being a novelist. A small, silly part of me thinks if I had the old school typewriter in front of me, I'd be on my way. As if the machine would write the book for me when my iMac won't.
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