Kat Lister
, May 17th, 2021 09:49
In our monthly subscribers only essay, Kat Lister discusses how finishing her first book and a year of being locked down alone steered her towards buying a typewriter, only to discover these machines are going through something of a reversal of fortunes. Homepage photograph: the author s portrait of her own Olivetti Valentine
Kat Lister
When I was a child I would often fall asleep to the sound of metal typebars hammering on paper. The
clack clack clack of words in motion. A cacophony of heavy blows and jabs that ricocheted from wall to wall like linguistic bullets; scudding and darting, banging and crashing in the room next door to mine. Space was scarce in the small terrace house where my family and I lived in the late 1980s. Consequently, my father s writing bureau was lodged in the only quiet nook he could find: the postage stamp-sized workstation was sandwiched tightly between the far corner of my parents bedroom and the wooden frame of th