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"It's completely different from a laptop," Zach Schonfeld, a Brooklyn-based culture writer for Newsweek who inherited his Olympia manual typewriter from his grandfather, says. "You have to think before every word, because you can't backspace."Jackie Shuman, who works in music supervision in Los Angeles, echoes this sentiment. "I tend to think about what I want to write BEFORE I use a typewriter. In an email I just type as a I go and whatever mundane crap about my day comes out."Perhaps because of the premeditation involved with composing on a typewriter, those who write poetry tend to favor them. Charlie Ambler, a VICE contributor who occasionally writes poetry on a typewriter in his spare time, tells me, "It just produces text on a page, finished, immediately, it makes noise, and it's more physical than something like TextEdit." For Ambler, part of the novelty also lies within the typewriter's ability to immediately produce work on an array of materials. "I was drunk one time," he says, "and was like, 'These poems are so shitty,' so I started typing them on toilet paper."Despite their passion, typewriter fans are a tiny minority—computers are so much better at doing so many different things, and most people regard typewriters as quaint at best and an affectation at worst. But companies like Olivetti and Brother soldier on, manufacturing typewriters for both home and office use, and there remains a small but dedicated community who collect them. Antique typewriters routinely go for upwards of $1,000 on eBay, and Tom Hanks is such a fan of them that he developed an iPad app called Hanx Writer that replicates the look and feel of three vintage typewriters from his personal collection. In an interview with NPR about the app, he said, "Typing on an actual typewriter on paper is only a softer version of chiseling words into stone." As long as a computer can't replicate that feeling, typewriters may always have a home in the world.Drew Millard is on Twitter.