My type: a love note for the typewriter

The last manual typewriter, after 150 years of commercial production, was manufactured in the UK in 2012. Yet like all design classics, it refuses to lie down and die. There is a roaring trade in old models on eBay, and dealers such as the Typewriter Man in the UK and Mytypewriter.com in the US sell them to hipsters and steampunks, among whom they are cult objects. The latter store, awash with Hermes, Remingtons and Underwoods, even has a list of famous writers and the machines they used – from John Ashbery to P.G. Wodehouse – so that you can buy a model to match your literary tastes. 

They’re also, in various institutions, still in use. American prisons, though banning their inmates from owning computers, will nonetheless allow them to have typewriters – an American firm, the Swintec Corporation, producing clear-topped models so that nothing can be stashed inside. In 2013, it was revealed the Kremlin had made a substantial investment in manual models to circumvent cyber-spying; a year later, a