TypeTown #3: Away we go
✈️ Global travel, secret confessions, suspicious packages -- and Taylor Swift
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Hello, TypeTowners.
Please fasten your seatbelts and prepare for take-off.
As international travel wakes from an 18-month slumber, we’re heading on a whistle-stop tour of the world.
We start 30,000ft in the air, somewhere between London, UK, and Perth, Australia, with the professional class getting some serious work done.
We can thank Qantas, Benoit Vienne, and CNN for bringing this long-lost moment to life.
» READ: From 10 days to nonstop: How London to Australia flights have changed
Where next?
Pack your bags and read on to find out.
Kobe one be homely
Head 7,676km north from Perth and you’ll find us in Kobe, Japan, laying back and admiring the walls of the
Peanuts Hotel
-- a giant homage to all things Snoopy.
“It’s nice to have a home where your guests feel comfortable.”
»
VISIT: The Peanuts Hotel website
.
Goa, Goa, gone..?
Final stop on the itinerary is a trip to Goa, India, where earlier this year The Guardian and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation reported from Panaji about a typewriter repair shop now in its 83rd year of business.
Luis Abreu, 78, inherited the trade from his father and continues to this day. But not all is rosy.
“How long can a person continue? As long as the main door is open, I will have to do it. I prefer to go till the end.”
» READ: Revert to type: how Goa’s last typewriter repair shop defied the digital age.
“I walked in expecting to fall in love with books, not the person I walked in with.”
You. A typewriter. And your deepest secrets.
What would you write if you’d just dropped into
Literati Bookstore
in Ann Arbor, Michigan?
» READ: 23 Anonymous Confessions Left On A Public Typewriter
» READ ALSO: ‘Notes From A Public Typewriter’ Muse On Everything From Cats To Commencement
Worth pausing the platen
📬
How the typewriter propelled women into the office
—
MarketPlace Morning Report
📬
Romance novelist Arlene Hale churned out the pages in prolific career
—
Des Moines Register
📬
Your responses to
California Typewriter
—
MarketPlace Morning Report
Share the word
If you’re enjoying this issue of
TypeTown
, please do share it by social media, email, carrier pigeon or even in a good, old-fashioned, typewritten letter. Thank you!
And finally… typewriters in the wild
On CBS Boston, which picked up on the resurgent success of Cambridge Typewriter…
In a “suspicious package” in a
parking lot
in Woodland, CA, before the bomb experts deemed it safe (just like
this one in Manchester, UK
, back in 2016)…
And twice, briefly, as a key plot device in
All Too Well
, the new short film written and directed by Taylor Swift (
read the Rolling Stone review
)…
Until next time
PS: If you’ve got one more trip in you, head to L.A.
On Saturday 4 December, visit 441 Seaton St for live poetry, letterpress arts, original artwork and vintage typewriters.
“Typewriters are alive and well, even in an age when we’re so used to picking up our phones,” says Aaron Therol, founder of Typewriter Connection. “Tactile art and gifts are a welcome change from our digitally dominated lives.”
PPS: New here?
TypeTown
is a fortnightly celebration of the typewriter’s place in modern (and not so modern) culture.
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.