Culturally, we are obsessed with firsts, being able to pinpoint the date that a thing came into being. But what about lasts? Are there ever really lasts?

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The sudden popularity of vintage manual typewriters among the stylish has become a cliché. The design-hate tumblr FYNCT, for example, despises the compulsory, ubiquitous typewriter. As a fad, they seem pretty harmless to me. But are there larger consequences to typewriter nostalgia?

Typewriters as interior décor are generally not for use (have you bought a ribbon lately?). They are positioned as nonfunctional, charming tokens of a previous era. But they are simultaneously avatars of the homemade revival. At any time, the typewriter owner could be typing a personal letter, hearing that refreshing ding on the carriage return, and cycling over to the post office.

Historians are not immune to nostalgia; in fact, we can be complicit in it. My instinctual reaction to seeing typewriters everywhere has been delight. As a historian who cares about objects, I'm pleased by this new appreciation for typewriter aesthetics, and I'm hoping it will mean a decline in keychopping. Keychopping is the arguably pernicious practice of removing a typewriter's keys to make jewelry or to decorate olde-tyme projects. To typewriter enthusiasts and collectors, keychoppers are the enemy, destroying the integrity of typewriters and rendering them useless scrap. Typewriters are also extremely fiddly to put back together once taken apart. But we cannot save every made thing, and there are beautiful and weird art projects made of typewriter pieces, worthy of sacrificing typewriters for.