The Morning News has Michael Erard's homage to his Olympia manual typewriter.
Under the cover are two spools that, at one point, successfully reeled a strip of ink-soaked fabric back and forth between them. The automatic back-and-forth mechanism lost a spring, however, when I was poking around in it during college, so every five pages I had to pop the hood and manually re-reel the ribbon from the left spool to the right or the right to the left, which I mention not only because it’s technically quaint (and it is—you actually had to get ink on your hands) but because it was a humbling change from the momentum of typing, as if I were changing the sparkplugs on my hotrod every three miles.Posted by johndanseven at March 15, 2006 03:23 PM