My neighborhood has a wealth of record stores. There’s one around the corner on 40th, and a half dozen more within walking distance.
They’re not just stores that happen to carry vinyl records in addition to some other music-related items like CDs or instruments. They specialize in records, mostly the LP albums that were the in-thing when I was coming of age. (The previous generation did more with the 45s that had one song on each side.)
I used to have a lot of records, but I got rid of them when I was moving cross country back in early 2008. I’d ditched my record player years earlier. I was fond of them, but they were heavy and took up space and I no longer listened to them.
I probably should have held onto them a little bit longer, though since I wasn’t a purist or a collector, I didn’t take extra care of them. I doubt any of them were especially valuable. And I probably wouldn’t want to set up an old-fashioned Hi-Fi system to listen to them anyway.
But people are back into records these days, enough of them to support a lot of indie record shops.
Typewriters are also making a comeback. The New York Times had a lovely piece a week or so ago on a man who took over a typewriter repair business from a man who started it in Bremerton, Washington, in 1947. The middle-aged guy who took it over – after spending a lot of time with the previous owner learning how to work on typewriters – did it more or less on a gut feeling that it was a good choice for his life.
But there’s a lot of work for people who know how to fix typewriters, both the manual and electric kind. Some people are into typewriters in the digital age.
I learned to type in high school back when there was a course called “typing” that was mostly aimed at people who wanted to do secretarial work. We learned on electric ones with no letters on the keyboard – memorizing the keyboard layout was part of the skill.
My parents had manual typewriters at home, and once I learned to type I wrote all my papers for school on them. I took one with me to college, but they took it back when they started a newspaper.
In those pre-computer days I lusted for an IBM correcting Selectric, but I never could come up with enough money. By the time I was making enough money to pay for something like that, the personal computer was a thing and I got that instead.
Cameras, too. Film cameras, not just digital ones, and not just fancy ones, but ones intended for the kind of snapshot at which the mobile phone camera has become king. At our coffee shop the baristas take Polaroids of patrons’ dogs and post them in the shop. Continue reading “Old School”…