Typists of the world, unite! A new book looks inside the 'typosphere'

Some might call typewriters a dead technology but a quiet revival is afoot, claims philosophy professor Richard Polt – spurred, in his case, by a fear of surveillance

At the Miami Book Fair earlier this month, Richard Polt arrived equipped with both a PowerPoint presentation and a Groma Kolibri, his vintage “laptop typewriter” made in East Germany in 1956. The antique machine – incidentally, the same model preferred by the writer Will Self – is stylish and durable, less of a prop than a symbol of an insurgency aided and abetted by Polt, author of The Typewriter Revolution: A Typist’s Companion for the 21st Century.

You’d never guess that the mild-mannered professor of philosophy at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio, is a radical. Yet, his book opens with a manifesto that asserts the right to “resist the paradigm” and “escape the data stream”.

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