Why I collect typewriters: 140 & counting

Though Republicans during the 2000 presidential campaign mocked him for doing so, Al Gore never claimed he'd single-handedly invented the internet. And for good reason: He hadn't. 

My case, however, is quite otherwise, for in a dank garden apartment on the northwest side of Chicago, circa 1958, I, at age five, did invent it. I don't mean that I bothered with the actual construction-wiring chips to gizmos, etc.; the easy part-but that, in a flash, I conceived of it.

Not the entire internet, of course – I'm hardly on the hook for that – but the internet at its core:  a typewriter affixed to a TV-like screen upon which the words one typed would appear and which one could easily rethink and revise. By the late 1950s, a TV was newly affordable for families like mine, and the typewriter that prompted my vision was one my mother had acquired during her secretarial days, before she'd settled into making a home and rearing me. 

Massive, imperious, inscrutable, it sat shrouded beneath its dust cover atop a black metal typing table in our apartment's one hallway. Only rarely did I see it laid bare, gleaming black as anthracite, but these occasions were sufficient for it to enter and unsettle my sleep. In anxious, recurrent dreams, I would feel its presence, sense its sway – benign or malign, I knew not – and wonder at it, fear it. In those dreams, it would shake as if stammering to speak its truth-or mine. I never saw my mother use it, though she must've apprised me of its purpose. Or perhaps in the grim though triumphalist films of the era that endlessly played on TV, I had seen a general's staff furiously typing the commands that would reduce the Third Reich to rubble. 

Something was amiss with my mother's health in those years, though, as to precisely what the matter was, I was in the dark. But there were times when my mother had difficulty bending over or when she couldn't lift an object as light as a casserole dish or when I was entrusted to the care of a relative. 

One evening, when I was taken to see her in the hospital, the nurses allowed me to stay past visiting hours – a measure of just how ill she was, as sometime later I learned that doctors feared she might not survive the night. But eventually she had the requisite surgery and recovered, fully. My recollection of these events, some sixty-plus years out, has become fuzzier than once it was. And there is no longer anyone I can consult to clarify it. Both my parents are gone, as are other family members who might've shined a light. 

But over the decades that typewriter has remained a puzzling, nagging, even disturbing presence. But why? And why ever do I still think about it? At the very least, my anxious boyhood response has proved ironic given that I professed college English for forty years and have had many an occasion to employ a typewriter, for uses both personal and professional ó and without qualm or incident. Was that typewriter a kind of metonymic figure – a sign or a stand-in for my mother? Were the dreams expressing inchoate concerns I had about her health? Were they a kind of premonition about the word-centric career and life I would pursue or that would pursue me – or more to the point, about the difficulties inherent in the act of writing itself? Maybe those dreams were warning me to choose another kind of life. Or maybe they were a mysterious means by which a child projected his emerging aptitudes and predilections upon a machine that, via an act of ventriloquism, urged that he commit himself fully to the kinds of work and habits of mind the machine made possible. If so, I must acknowledge I have not consistently or adequately answered that call ó for the simple reason that writing is a vexing, onerous pursuit, requiring the strictest discipline when a beer and a ballgame often seem far more congenial. 

A Remington or a Royal – which of these two storied machines was my mother's? I seem to remember that the brand name began with "R," which helps in ruling out rival candidates but not in deciding between the two. And while now I'm well acquainted with the features distinctive to each, my memory of the machine isn't sufficient in its detail for me to identify which it was. The size, the color, the bank of lettered keys, and the silver nest of typefaces are all I can recall. 

And yet seven years after her death, still seeking to know better the woman who bore me, I felt drawn to discover the manufacturer of the model that had been hers (typing had been her means of support before marriage, that typewriter had been important to her). Neither of my mother's sisters knew – nor did my father. 

All I could think to do was to procure various models of the machines that approximated my memory, hoping one would jog it, would strike the chord of recognition. Now fifteen years after her death, I've had to let go thinking I'll ever know. But in the eight years I've been collecting these kindred machines, I've become a serious devotee. 

I've filled my house with them. I clean them, beribbon 

hem, repair them and keep them in typing trim. I engage an assortment of them daily – composing letters and postcards mostly, a correspondence that has become, I think it fair to say, voluminous, averaging two or three dispatches per day. In ways that for me have never been true of computers ó despite all the labor I expended on them during my career – typing upon a manual typewriter has become something devotional, a discipline and a practice, just as through studious routine yoga or musical or athletic training can become a practice.  Something about the physicality required to press the keys, something about building and sustaining a rhythm in synch with the machine – not just by means of one's fingers but in one's thinking. 

I might even go so far as to say that in attempting to retrieve a typewriter and recover its multiple, often conflicting, meanings from my family's past, I went looking for my mother and found myself – a self embedded in histories personal, familial, and cultural that I find more accessible, more satisfying to summon and explore working the metal keys of a Remington or Royal than the cheap plastic keyboard of an iMac or Dell. I feel more connected to friends and family through correspondence typed upon a manual typewriter –  actual, perdurable print pressed into the page, conveyed through the mail, and touched by the hands of the recipient – than I ever have through the ghostly, ephemeral mediums of email and text.

Just as I once foresaw that harbinger of the internet, the personal computer, I've now nearly entirely forsworn it. Not out of any Luddite rage or ideological allegiance or virtue-signaling or desire to poke my thumb in the eye of the founders and CEOs of Google, Meta, Microsoft or Apple, though they richly deserve it, but because typing upon a computer, despite its convenience and efficiencies, its enticing, lulling ease, is entirely devoid of joy. 

Its acoustics and touch and overall aesthetics are a thin simulacrum of the typewriter's – and it is one of the most conspicuous symbols of throwaway culture, given that a computer lasts, what, a decade at best? The typewriters that occupy nearly every surface of every room in my home, even those of more recent vintage, are typically 60-70 years old and functioning perfectly. And the several oldest among them, still typing, still issuing the crisp report of a typeface smacking a platen, date back to the beginning of the twentieth century. 

Maybe for some of us, for Iím hardly alone in admiring these machines, the cavalier destruction of the planet and the wanton squandering of its resources, the vile and corrosive Trumpifying of our politics, and corporate capitalism's obsolescing of the old by releasing unceasing cheap and gaudy iterations of the new ó all these confer upon these machines of a bygone era a groundedness and grandeur worthy of our attention and, yes, our affection. 

And so I have begun to revere them as I do some ideas, settings, and people – like dear friends, family, and intimates whose company and conversation one seeks out in the hushed spaces of a rank and rancorous culture.