Who’s still buying these things? All the best answers are mostly conjecture. Newell, which owns the brand, doesn’t break down earnings enough to tell, and the company didn’t respond to a request for comment. It’s a little less clear how Liquid Paper is doing. (Correction tapes were flat, while correction pens are fading.) From 2015 to 2016 to 2017, Bic, which makes Wite-Out and Tipp-Ex, reported that correction products increased in share from 5 to 6 to 9 percent of the global stationery market. According to the NPD Group, which tracks marketing data, sales of correction fluid grew 1 percent from 2017 to 2018, though they fell 7 percent the year before. Somehow, more than a decade on, it has kept its ground. As early as 2005, The New York Times pondered the product’s fate with trepidation. Yet correction fluid remains remarkably resilient. The paper industry has had it especially bad. stationery and office-supply market is essentially flat, projected to go from $86.4 billion in 2015 to $87.5 billion by 2018. According to a report by the analysis firm Technavio, the U.S. In fact, the office-supply industry as a whole is slumping. Handwritten documents in ink are also more easily corrected with Wite-Out than rewritten.īut today, even printer sales are down, casualties of an era when more and more writing is executed on-screen and never printed or written out at all. In the pre-laser-printer era, it was often easier to correct a document from a dot-matrix printer by hand than to reprint it. Of course, correction fluids are useful for things other than typewriting. It’s difficult for anyone raised in the age of computers to grasp how useful correction fluids must have been when typewriters were a dominant technology in offices and classrooms.

A year later, George Kloosterhouse and Edwin Johanknecht, searching for a product that wouldn’t show up when a document was photocopied, developed Wite-Out. In 1965, Tipp-Ex began producing its own fluid in Germany. There were other products that achieved the same goal, such as strips of sticky paper that covered up errors, but Liquid Paper quickly eclipsed them-so much so that it soon drew imitators. (This creative streak would help Mike in his career as an artist-first as a member of the Monkees, and later as a producer of films including Repo Man.) In 1958, she patented Liquid Paper. So she began experimenting with ways to cover up errors, enlisting her son Mike to help her. The problem was that she wasn’t a good typist, and kept making mistakes. Liquid Paper dates back to the 1950s, when Bette Nesmith Graham, a struggling divorced mother, took on typing jobs to make money. One sign of the cultural impact of the Wite-Out brand is that, like Kleenex, it has become a generic term. But correction fluids are not only surviving-they appear to be thriving, with Wite-Out sales climbing nearly 10 percent in 2017, according to the most recent public numbers. Even paper is disappearing from the modern office, as more and more functions are digitized. But typewriters have disappeared from the modern office, relegated to attics and museums. They were designed to help workers correct errors they made on typewriters without having to retype documents from the start. The sticky, white fluid and its chief rival, Liquid Paper, are peculiar anachronisms, throwbacks to the era of big hair, big cars, and big office stationery budgets.

And given how little I write in the other 11 months of the year, that means there are a lot of errors, which in turn spur a new connection with another old friend: Wite-Out. But the end of the year brings out a slew of opportunities for penmanship: adding notes to holiday cards to old friends, addressing them, and then doing the same with thank-you notes after Christmas.

Like many Americans above grammar-school age, I seldom write by hand anymore, outside of barely legible grocery lists. Christmastime is when the pens in my house get their biggest workout of the year.

Bic white out