About 10 years ago, the The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library commemorated the 150th year of The Gettysburg Address by soliciting essays on the Address from persons with different perspectives, including presidents, poets, and sailors aboard the USS Lincoln. To keep the endeavor in the spirit of what they were honoring, they asked that all the essays be limited to 272 words — the length of Lincoln's comments — as well as be written in their own hands, as Lincoln's was.
As the pen feels more foreign in the human hand every year, the exhibit (redundantly titled "272 Words: The Power of Words") made some exceptions, including some elderly persons who might not have written more than their name with a pen in decades. One of these exceptions was President Carter, but
being President Carter, he didn't type his comments on a computer, but on a typewriter.
