.jpg)
With a new year, you’ve turned the page on a previous chapter. Where this story goes next is all up to you.
Once you have determined the changes you plan to make this year, there is power in writing it down, in the declaration itself. What starts out as simple words on a page can spark something big.
Celebrating the anything-is-possible blank page that each new year offers to each of us, is Vintage Write.
It was Remington, the same company with its deep roots in the firearm industry, that created the first successful commercial typewriter back in 1873. The company’s earliest model, the Sholes and Glidden, launched the QWERTY keyboard design we all type and text on to this day.
Another early improvement included doubling the functionality by adding the shift key, allowing for both capital and lowercase letters. Writer Mark Twain was an early fan of Remington typewriters and his typed letters were featured in the company’s advertising.
During the Second World War, Remington was asked to oversee the production of weapons for U.S. troops. But it wasn’t only their gunnery that was drafted. The Remington Rand Model Seventeen typewriter dates back to 1939 and it became the principal workhorse for U.S. government offices during wartime.
Back on the home front, Remington typewriters were also quite busy. Agatha Christie, touted as the best-selling author of all time, was busy pounding it out on her own Remington in England during WWII. During the six long years of conflict, the author published an amazing 13 mysteries. All that while, also acquiring a detailed knowledge of poisons while working as a pharmacy assistant at a hospital in London.
Between 1943 and 1947, some 125 million low-priced paperbacks or Armed Service Editions were shipped to the frontlines. These books boosted morale during the war. They also created a generation of readers, a hobby that continued into the peacetime that followed.
But these days, with the proliferation of screens big and little: on our walls, in our pockets, even in our cars, the percentage of the population that reads book in print continues to decline. In fact, there’s a bridal shower game, What’s in Your Purse?, where attendees accumulate points based on a list of items they happen to be carrying around in their bag. It turns out that having an actual book on your person garners just five points less than a handgun. Something about that just doesn’t seem right.
So rather than scrolling through the lives of others and filling our brains with ideas that are not our own, how about we turn the tables?
It’s your turn. Roll in a blank piece of paper, crisp and white. Vintage Write celebrates the story inside each of us.