Very cute Nathan. I'm sure that it helps to have a robust machine when budding typists are around. 

I can offer one of these... He's written something like half a novel since September!

Is this entirely wise? I was thinking of the Health & Safety issues, your health not theirs. Allowing children to use typewriters can lead to serious life long addiction and with worrying side effects, especially if left unsupervised when they could be writing poetry and short stories like I was from the age of ten. This could develop in later life to being paperback writers like Agatha Christie or even worse, perish the thought, a jounalist, maybe a hack for for a daily rag or weekend supplement. Now, you wouldn't want that would you? Toy manufacturers in the past are responsible for some of the things we have to read today. For girls there was the Lilliput Princess typewriter when they should have been playing with Cindy dolls and riding Raleigh Pink Witch bicycles with lipstick holders on the handlebars. Cindy was supposed to be a role model but even she had the Cindy typewriter. These were real typewriters masquerading as toys. Worse of all was Corgi who made model cars for boys. They produced the Corgi Commander, the typewriter for boys in black and orange livery and it came with full instructions for home and use in the field.  Imagine the pitched battles of the seventies with toy cap guns and the sound of the typewriter issuing messages for the troops. The pen is mightier than the sword and giving a child  a loaded typewriter is like giving them a machine gun, who knows what they might create. Today is ours but tomorrow belongs to them and hopefully they will continue to use typewriters rather than have them stuffed and mounted in museums.

Hi ztyper, so you are one of the early starters yourself! Very impressive.

ztyper wrote:

When I read your post retro, I almost didn't catch that you were joking!

Ah yes, you will have to excuse my weird sense of humour. What I meant was that when you put paper in a typewriter, what you type on it is only limited by your imagination. At school I wrote a school play which had been an English project and rather embarassingly had it performed as the school play that year. I have also written the odd short story but the worse thing I ever did was a book of Poetry in aid of a charity. It went far beyond being dreadful and hopefully everyone who bought a copy put it straight in the bin where it belonged without reading it.

I wish you every success with your L C Smith, I was allocated one made in the 1920's at school which was really one of the old machines which were kept in case one of the modern ones went wrong. My daughter who is 15 is an artist and dress designer, so she uses a sewing machine and just cannot understand why I still use a typewriter. Thankfully, she doesn't collect sewing machines.