In an old hangar at the Santa Monica Airport, Louise Anne Marler, a graphic designer who specializes in pop art-style imagery of vintage manual typewriters, is showing off her next subject - a Bing No. 2 compact portable.

This relic of 1920s German ingenuity was a gift from her father.

"He has a cellar and a barn full of these things," says Marler, recalling how her dad's collection would spill over into different rooms of the house and become part of the d cor as she was growing up. But that was before the word processor and personal computer brought an end to the typewriter.

In fact, of all the machines destined for the history books the manual typewriter should probably top the list. But like vinyl records

Call it a push back against technology.

"The typewriter does one thing and it does it well: It types," says filmmaker Gary Nicholson, who documents the trend in "The Typewriter (in the 21st Century)." It opens in select theaters and film festivals starting in September, including a screening at 4 p.m. Sept. 1 at Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center, 681 Venice Blvd., Venice - beyondbaroque.org.

The film, directed by Christopher Lockett, explores the trend from the viewpoint of typewriter repairmen, high-end collectors, teachers, journalists and students.

"A lot of people think it's just the hipsters using typewriters but what I found is it's a lot of tech people," Nicholson says. "We feature one programmer who talks about how the power went off one day while he was in the middle of writing code, trying to figure out a function, so he just started typing up code on his typewriter."

The film also showcases bloggers who type their posts the old-fashioned way, scan the page into the computer and upload it to their blog, authors who

Santa Monica-based graphic artist Louise Marier with her German Bing No. 2 typewriter. Marier turns old mechanical typewriters into art. (David Crane/Staff Photographer)

Read the original here:
Keys to Success: Fascination with typewriters becomes the write stuff for creative venture