What's Becoming Obsolete?

Pity the poor maligned typewriter. It was once the axis of a writer’s life. Hemingway packed up his portable Royal in its well-worn leather case and dragged it to Cuba because he couldn’t writewithout it. In the 1960s, school children practiced speed typing on sturdy Underwoods and adults pushed down shiny black keys whenever they wrote an important letter.

Today typewriters collect dust on thrift shop shelves alongside rotary phones, cassette tapes and Rolodexes. These once ubiquitous objects join the ranks of dozens of outdated items and rituals, from the boom box to airport goodbyes, that journalist and social commentator Anna Jane Grossman has amassed. Grossman’s new book is Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By. She joins us talk about her compendium of once essential, now archaic staples of American life.

(Photo by Ricardo Mendonça Ferreira via Flickr/Creative Commons)