Yesterday I drove to an estate sale in southeastern Minnesota and purchased a 1933 Klein-Adler 2 typewriter.  I am not even sure how many typewriters I now have in my possession.  This year of our lord 2020 has turned into “the year Ryan started collecting old typewriters”.  I blame the pandemic.  Why not?

It started innocently enough.  I had a lot of pandemic downtime on my hands and when I have idle time I tend to write.  I write almost every day.  I type, I scrawl, I scribble.  Pens, computers, typewriters, I use them all.  I seem to have a non-stop need to be saying things and when there isn’t anybody there to say them to, I write them down. 

I’m writing this blog post on a computer; modern laptop with modern software on the modern internet.  Nothing particularly unusual there, right?  I have learned, however, that I don’t like modern computers for certain types of writing.  I can’t write a poem on a computer, for example.  I’ve tried.  I can only seem to do that with a pen on paper.  More insidiously, modern computers contain within themselves too many distractions and temptations for me.  The temptation to hop online and look something up and then spend the next three hours on social media or reading Wikipedia articles or stupid viral listicles instead of writing is ever present.  Even if you avoid these grosser temptations and actually do some writing, the ways in which modern computers enable real-time editing, spell-checking, auto-complete, word suggestions, and grammar correction change the nature of the writing process.  On a modern computer you can just kinda spew out whatever is on the top of your head, revise it as you go so that it has just enough polish to be dangerous, and click publish to share your work with the world.

It’s powerful, but I find that it leads to a shallower, less thoughtful and deliberate, writing process.  I have revised this post extensively as I have written it, second guessing myself, wiping out whole sentences with a click.  Last week I read the new Obama book, “A Promised Land”, and he expressed how I feel about word processing fairly well when he explained his decision to write his book in longhand on yellow legal pads by saying, “I still like writing things out in longhand, finding that a computer gives even my roughest drafts too smooth a gloss and lends half-baked thoughts the mask of tidiness”.

The “mask of tidiness” covering “half-baked thoughts” may be fine for a blog post, a tweet, or some other ephemeral bit of word salad, but when I really want to Write this is not what I’m looking for.  I’m looking for a process that will force me to really be present for what I’m doing.  I have yet to discover any better way to do this than to use a typewriter. 

This is something I have known for a very long time.  I bought my first typewriter (a lovely 1950’s Remington Quiet-Riter https://www.antikeychop.com/remington-quiet-riter-typewriter) in fifth grade when I was convinced that I wanted to grow up to be H. G. Wells and decided to write my first of many unpublished/uncompleted novels “The Second Men In The Moon”.  My parents gifted me a more modern, electrified, machine in middle school, a Smith-Corona SL500 (https://typewriterdatabase.com/Smith+Corona.SL+500.86.bmys) and I used it through high school as I wrote such unreadable classics as “The Palace of Conservative Haircuts”.  I didn’t even know about word processors until I was introduced to the Macintosh during my sophomore year in high school in a creative writing class.  I had only used computers for programming and video games, I never thought about computers as being useful for writing. 

After high school I attended CDI Computer Academy and embarked on a career in software development that would span the public explosion of the internet, the invention of smart phones, and all of the other high tech innovations of the last 25+ years.  In that first year at CDI, I had a class in which I learned typing and another in which I learned to use the old DOS word processor WordPerfect.  I moved on from typewriters, viewing them as obsolete.  I don’t even know what became of my Smith-Corona SL500.  Probably a Goodwill donation or a trade in at a pawn shop for a few bucks.

This changed about eight or nine years ago when I encountered a little electric typewriter at a thrift shop that was just, well, COOL.  It was an Olivetti Lettera 36 (https://www.massmadesoul.com/olivetti-lettera-36).  I knew nothing about Olivetti, I knew nothing about their history of iconic industrial design, heck I knew almost nothing about typewriters, but the thing was just so damn COOOOOOOL and it was, like, ten bucks or something, so I brought it home.  I found out pretty quickly that I missed typewriters.  After years and years of writing on computers, the typewriter felt so radically different that it made me think differently as I wrote.  A word processor and a typewriter both end up giving you words at the end of the day but the process is just so different, it was like playing an acoustic guitar instead of an electric guitar: the thing written would be shaped by the tool used to write it.

The typewriter certainly seemed to promote more creative writing and I fairly quickly put the little Olivetti to use in my recording studio as part of my songwriting process.  When I write songs it’s usually something like this.  I get a melody and maybe one or two lines in my head.  I start listening to that part of the song and wait for my brain to fill in the rest.  Then I go grab something to preserve whatever little song seed I’m jamming on.  I will sing into a tape recorder or voice recorder app if I have to, or I will scribble down some lyrics on a sheet of paper.  Later on I will get in front of a keyboard or pick up a guitar and work out the song.  I will expand and revise the lyrics and write down the chords once I discover what they are.  The resulting song sheets are messy with lines crossed out, chords written in the margins, and sometimes whole verses and choruses in the wrong order or in totally different notebooks from each other.  Fun, but not easy to work off of when you want to, oh, say, record the song.

Now, I could put all of that mess into the computer, and I usually did, but I would always find myself wanting a printed paper copy to scribble notes on, reference, and play along with.  I forget my own chords and lyrics, especially when a song is still new to me.  I just needed one hard copy that didn’t look like the ravings of a lunatic.  The problem was that ink jet printers SUCK almost as much as my handwriting.  Seemingly every damn time I would try to print up a hard copy, the ink would be unreliable, nozzles dirty, whatever.  If you don’t print with an ink jet every day they are basically useless.  I didn’t have a laser printer with the nice dry non-shitty toner.  So, instead of working on my song I would wrestle with the printer for 20 minutes cleaning nozzles and then give up and go eat a bag of Doritos and be sad.

The typewriter solved this.  I could just turn it on, grab a sheet of paper, and type up my song.  Woot!  I was so happy with this minor miracle of convenience that I started eyeballing other typewriters at other thrift stores but I was faithful to my little Olivetti until one day when it died on me and I couldn’t make it work anymore.  Crapsticks.

I wound up with a rather unexpected next typewriter, an Underwood #5 (http://www.thisisdrivel.com/typewriters/UnderwoodNo5/UnderwoodNo5.html), a machine that was probably the most common typewriter in the world prior to the mid-1920’s.  You cannot get much further from a Lettera 36 than an Underwood #5.  The thing weighs about the same as a Toyota Camry and has an equivalent amount of sex appeal.  It brings to mind adjectives such as “workmanlike”, “sturdy” and “reliable”.  Ain’t nobody slinging an Underwood #5 in their carry-on for a bit of late night writing during a weekend jaunt.

But it was functional and charming in it’s own way and I lugged the damn thing home.  After a while I partially disassembled it with the idea of turning it into a USB Typewriter (https://www.usbtypewriter.com) but I never completed the conversion.  The fact that it wasn’t working, however, did lead me to snag another machine at yet another thrift store. 

This next typewriter was another electric from the 70’s, a Smith-Corona “Corona Seventy” (https://typewriterdatabase.com/1970-smith-corona-clipper-seventy-deluxe.3324.typewriter).  Like the Lettera 36 before it, the Seventy had a kinda cool design, was portable, and was a lot of fun to pound away on.  Also like the Seventy before it, it started experiencing minor malfunctions of the aging electric components.  This whole “old electric typewriter” thing was proving to be fairly unreliable, so, I looked for something old and cool but mechanical, no electricity.  I figured that would be less trouble.  Eventually I found a 1965 Royal Aristocrat (https://typewriterdatabase.com/1965-royal-aristocrat.13819.typewriter) and pretty much fell in love.  The Royal looked good, typed well enough, and was always reliable when I needed it.  It was portable and did everything I asked of it.  For a few years it was “my typewriter”.  But then 2020 happened.

This year I started doing so much writing that the limitations of the Aristocrat started nagging at me, just as the irritations of trying to write on a modern computer did.  I fought with the Royal a bit more than I would have liked and started combing online auction sites, online thrift stores, Craigslist listings, and online estate sales with an eye towards finding The Perfect Typewriter.  Things went, um…  a little off the rails.

First I did research.  I watch the documentary California Typewriter.  I read blogs.  I searched for “best typewriter for writers”.  I found many opinions and much interesting information.  I started to notice that usually when the appearance of a typewriter caught my eye it was an Olivetti.  They had style.  I also noticed that most people seemed to agree that the three most “writerly” typewriters of all time were the Olympia SM-7, the Hermes 3000, and the Olivetti Lettera 32.  The internet was full of loving posts by diehard aficionados singing the praises of the three machines.  I also learned that many typewriters are essentially Lettera 32 machines with different bodies, including what is probably the most eye-catching typewriter of them all, the Olivetti Valentine.

There was a pandemic on.  I was in a bad mood.  I was scared, figured that if I got COVID, with my history of chronic lung issues, I was a goner.  So, I splurged and picked up a Valentine.  It was not a thrift store special.  This thing cost a couple hundred bucks but when I saw it and used it for the first time I was bitten by the typewriter bug HARD.  We’re talking WELTS.  The resulting infection caused me to experiment with all sorts of typewriters.  All year I’ve been haunting estate sales and auctions, grabbing any unloved and unwanted Olympia, Olivetti, Smith-Corona, Adler, Remington, Silver-Reed, or Underwood that happened to strike my fancy.  I’ve learning basic typewriter restoration skills and bestowed a few machines on others who were typewriter-curious.  I have a pretty solid little collection at this point.  Art deco machines from the 30’s and 40’s, East German behemoths and Swiss beauties from the 50’s, compact and swift Italian and Japanese machines from the 60’s and 70’s, I’ve got a machine for every mood and every whim.  It’s a fun little collection and not exactly a bank breaker, since so many people consider the typewriter to be quite obsolete.

I’ve found that if I keep my eyes open, there are excellent, high quality, solid, beautifully engineered machines available all over the place for around the price of a couple stops by Super World Buffet (yes, I measure monetary expenditures in Chinese buffet visits, don’t judge me) and usually they just need paper, a ribbon, and maybe a little light lubrication and cleaning. 

It’s fun to have a new hobby and each time I take one of these little machines out for a bout of writing, I find myself inspired in a way I rarely am with a computer.  What will I type with today?  I don’t know, but I’m sure it will be a rewarding experience.

Edit: I went with the 1958 Smith-Corona Silent-Super.