Inside San Francisco Library's Typewriter Room

The New York Times steps in amid the clatter.

From the article...

When I stumbled across a Web site mention of it a few months ago, I immediately envisioned an enclave where Mark Twain would feel at home. You know, dark-paneled walls, period carpeting, maybe a large, stuffed bird in the corner. 

And of course a boxy, aggressively unergonomic typewriter, with a surfeit of levers, spools, guides, knobs, releases, gauges, clamps and keys. 

Naturally, the Typewriter Room is nothing like that. It’s a cubicle-size room with glass walls that expose it to the rest of the library. It has a utilitarian, built-in desk. And while a small sign advises that the space is “designed for a maximum of two people to use comfortably,” that’s an optimistic assessment given the room’s single wooden chair. 

The Typewriter Room’s typewriter is similarly bereft of romance. It is electronic, a TA Adler-Royal Satellite 40, with the beige plastic contouring of a fax machine from 1987 and a 700-character memory that allows you to go back and correct typos you made three sentences earlier. And yet despite its utter lack of charming Luddite clunkiness, it’s just ancient enough to deliver a completely different experience than one has when typing on today’s increasingly vestigial computer keyboards.

The metallic clatter the Satellite 40’s daisy wheel makes when it strikes the platen definitely seems too loud for a library, and even too loud for a high-tech informational retrieval center, but it sure is satisfying. If your thoughts come slowly but steadily, the Satellite 40 lends a sense of craftsmanship to your work, as if you’re building arguments as sturdy and elegant as a redwood deck. If inspiration strikes and your thoughts come more quickly, the Satellite 40 explodes with the sound of your mental fireworks.