Re: putting cork on a platen.  I would be very interested to know if anyone manages this.  From looking at production platens, I know that the cork was glued on in a long spiral strip.  It was probably sanded to the exact diameter afterwards in a lathe.  Cork doesn't grip the paper as well as rubber, but it doesn't deteriorate in the same way either.  Wartime apart, it was always offered as an alternative to rubber, but maybe only 5% of typewriters were so fitted because of the poor paper feed.

beak wrote:

  My method is crash it all out triple-spaced, and then sit with a pen and read and correct, perhaps massively.  Then retype.  That's usually all it takes for me to get the thoughts down coherently.

Double-spacing, while trying to scribble notes with a pen on a waffley paper that has no backing, so I don't actually scribble on the platen as I'm backing up two lines to change a phrase before I forget what I wanted to write....    Of course, then I really go over it later, after it's off the typewriter.
 

On writing on typewriters:

Yes to everything everybody has said, ever ... well, almost ever.  I am not a writer but i love to write and I too over-edit in one operation when using a computer.  There is a writer's tool which costs several hundred dollars, don't see why the user does not just go out and buy a typewriter already but I suppose there are some advantages to this method, which does not allow you to edit as you go nor do anything else except write; I read a review of this device by a young writer born into the world of computers and he felt it necessary to explain to his readers that the machine produced something called a "draft", though he was not sure he preferred this to "writing", which to him meant the combined writing and editing operation.

Writing indeed clarifies the thinking, moreover it is a form of thinking with an external aid, and add-on eprom which you can burn as you go and reprocess later; it's not just the committing thoughts to paper (or e-ink) but to language, which forces a certain clarification of the necessary but inchoate and inarticulate proto-thoughts of the unconscious: language was the greatest aid in igniting human thought and writing was like unto it taking it to another power of ten, though sometimes I have to admit that thoughts can get through the physical gateway into the external ROM a lot faster via a computer keyboard: but heck, I like typewriters anyway.

I'd hate to admit that 80 typewriters were a step in the wrong direction... What could be wrong with 80 typewriters? 

Hi, Noah!   Yeah, it's easy to get hooked, isn't it?  I don't know how many of us here are writers, but judging from this thread, I'm beginning to suspect more than a few. 

CoronaGirl wrote:

Hi, Noah!   Yeah, it's easy to get hooked, isn't it?  I don't know how many of us here are writers, but judging from this thread, I'm beginning to suspect more than a few. 

Yes, very easy! Thank you for the warm welcome!

-Noah