Welcome to the Typosphere (or my little piece of it, at least)

Welcome to my new blog, Typing Safari. The name of the blog was inspired by the name of my very recently acquired typewriter, a 1969 Royal Safari, which my wife found for me at an estate sale here in town for only $5. I had actually already bid on an Olivetti Lettera 22 on Ebay a couple of days earlier, and I was thinking of creating a blog, but I couldn't come up with a name. But when I opened the case of that $5 machine, and took a look, the words Royal Safari, Made in USA were there on the carriage staring me in the face. 

I am embarrassed to admit it, but immediately the Beach Boys popped into my head. I could practically hear them singing: 

Let's go typing now

Everybody's learning how 

Come on and safari with me!

"Typing Safari!! That's it!" I said to my wife. She liked the idea too, and so the name stuck. . . regardless of which typewriter I ultimately use most to write for it.

Now that I've told you how I came up with the title of the blog, you may be wondering what it is all about. In the description of the blog at the top of the page, it says: A typecast/blog about (and just as often not about)the Typosphere and coming to you from southwestern New Mexico

I reckon some of that warrants some defining, so here goes. Let's start with the word typecast. HandWiki defines it in this way:

A typecast (blogging) (a.k.a. typecasting or typecasting blog) is a form of blogging by media type and publishing in the format of a blog but differentiated by the predominant use of and focus on text created with a typewriter and then scanned rather than text entered directly into a computer.

In other words, a typecast usually is blog post filled with text, or rather images of text, in the following form:

(Click Image to Enlarge)

Yes, that's right - whole blog pages full of images of typewritten words with the content very often dealing with the world of typewriters and typewriting. For some people, this can prove a bit tiresome, topically speaking, and challenging in terms of the physical act of reading. For the author, especially the impatient one, it can also prove very tiresome to produce, particularly the scanning bit.

Still, there is something different, even special, about text presented in this way. For one thing, you gain peripheral information that you would not normally be privy to. For example, in the except above, you can see that I typed on the backside of a sheet of paper I had already used, suggesting that I am environmentally minded or cheap. . . or just out of paper. You can also see that my manual typewriter skills are not quite yet up to snuff, which is fair enough for someone who has not touched a manual typewriter key in decades.

At any rate, I am not going to be doing that. I will scan and post bits of typewritten text when and where the physical text is essential to the post or when it is that text that inspired me to write a particular post or, I suppose, when I just happen to feel like it. Otherwise, if I were to force myself to go the typewrite and scan route for every post, I would most likely get tired in short order and just give up the whole project. Plus, it would seem a bit silly to use that format just to write a post about, for example, the best type of binoculars for birding. I suppose you could thus call this blog an occasional or quasi Typecast.

The other term in the description for us to tackle is Typosphere, which Richard Polt in his book The Typewriter Revolution describes as "a place in the digital world, but not of it - a zone between the typewriter and the computer." A yet beefier description can be found on the Welcome to the Typosphere blog site, where it is summed up as: 

A term for bloggers who collect, use, and otherwise obsess over typewriters and other "obsolete" technologies, including, but not limited to, handwriting, pens and ink, paper mail and mail art, knitting and fibre arts, film photography, chip-less combustion engines, and related ephemera. Though typically reclusive, members of the typosphere can sometimes be found lurking around the fringes of rummage sales, swap meets, flea markets, and church fundraisers, hoping to find the one make, model, or color typewriter that will finally complete their collection and bring them true happiness and satisfaction. None have managed this feat yet.

Well, I'm not really a collector, so I don't do too much "lurking" (though I always have an eye out of a pre-1960 Smith-Corona Skyriter), and as for fibre arts? Well, I did weave a short cloth or two back in the day, but that was more due to my interest in gadgetry rather than any interest in. . . wool. That all said, I don't fall cleanly into that definition of Typosphere, but I do share some, if not many, common some traits and interests as other Typospherians (what some folks call NPR type people hobbies), and thus I feel comfortable calling myself a Typospherian. 

This might lead you to wonder what the topic area of my typecast/blog will be. Naturally, as I was inspired to do this in the first place be my reborn interest in typewriters and typewriting (a later post will go into that story), it is natural that typewriters and typewriting will be topic areas I will frequently touch upon or be inspired by. In a sense, it will be a record of my exploration of what is a new world for me - a new world that has actually been around as a quasi-movement of sorts for a decade and yet is actually inspired by something quite old. 

Still, I don't want to get stuck in that narrow one-topic channel. If I do, I'll eventually run out of things to say, and this typecast, like many other typecasts and blogs, will die under its own restrictive weight. So, no, I will include pretty much anything that is of interest to me, and that includes a lot of things, such as taichi, camping, travel, Native American flutes, and so on. Hopefully it will all fit together well. If not. . .well, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. 

That all said, let's get on with it. I hope you will find things of interest as you make your way through this world I am uploading here, as it is not much fun to make such an effort only to get bored in the end. Let's see how I do. Give me, say, a decade or so. Heh heh.