We went to the Alabama book festival yesterday and wandered around with the heady smell of intellectualism in our noses for three hours until Sam started trying to break antiques. The festival was housed in Old Alabama Town, a sort of miniature Ye Olde Williamsburg. I’ve avoided the place before, because I feared it would be all Gone With the Wind veneration of the old South. (Hey, I can be forgiven. I live in a city that simultaneously advertises itself as the Cradle of the Confederacy and the Birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement. The First White House of the Confederacy sits cattycorner to and within a block of The Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where pastor Martin Luther King, Jr. organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott.)
Anyway, Old Alabama Town turns out to just be an overpriced historic village. But we got in free with the book fair, and besides shooting adorable photos of my kids, I snuck behind the barrier in the recreated printing shop where the historic typewriters all suspiciously have the number 1 on them. (This leads me to wonder about their actual age. I thought all typewriters left off the 1 to make room for the striking keys until relatively late in the game. Maybe it was just many. Maybe it was just mine. (I learned to type and wrote for several years on an antique Remington Rand.)
The pictures are awesome, and they certainly look authentic as hell. It was kind of cool that Sam was as enchanted by the printing presses and typewriters as we were. (My pictures here are mostly of the typewriters and typing area. I couldn’t sneak over to get a good angle on the printing presses.)
Enjoy!
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Jessie Powell is the Jester Queen. She likes to tell you about her dog, her kids, her fiction, and her blog, but not necessarily in that order. |
Nice juxtaposition: ‘I live in a city that simultaneously advertises itself as the Cradle of the Confederacy and the Birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement’! 😉
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I loved the slideshow! I so remember the Remington Rand. I remember writing ” Lucille Crawfield ” on the old beast. I was in the PPL tour bus just after having heard her name on the airport intercom ( the bus picked the band up at the airport ) and Mike Reilly, our bass player, came back to have a look at what the pecking was about. Yes, I toured with the bugger! I did a terrible version of a ventriloquist while open and shutting the lid on the Rand as if the typewriter were answering his inquiries. It was pretty funny.
The South is such a juxtaposition of conflicting stuff, isn’t it? One of the reasons I can’t get enough of it.
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Love that “vile weed” sign. Too funny! And I had no idea about old typewriters and the 1 key.
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