the Mark Pike • In re Typewriters

In re Typewriters

Stories about typewriters seem to be popping up all over the place this December. I thought I’d collect them here.

Cormac McCarthy, author extraordinaire, put his Olivetti Lettera 32 up for auction at Christie’s to benefit charity. It sold for over $250,000 after he had knocked out more than 5 million words on it over 50 years. His friend bought him a replacement typewriter for less than $20. In the letter of authenticity, McCarthy typed that the machine “has never been serviced or cleaned other than blowing out the dust with a service station hose…”
Robert Caro, biographer extraordinaire, recently wrote his own quick bio for Esquire. Caro wrote, “Every time one of my books comes out, profiles mention that I write on a typewriter that hasn’t been manufactured in twenty-five years. And people send me their old Smith-Corona 210’s for free. I used to have seventeen spares to cannibalize the parts. I’m down to eleven.”
In Tampa, Florida, a writer chronicled the demise of the county library’s last working typewriter. “[T]he downtown library’s last typewriter sits alone behind a locked door, shrouded with a paper sign, which in big, bold letters reads: OUT OF ORDER. Typed on a computer.”

After reading all these articles, I ran across this great typewriter illustration by Robert Samuel Hanson, whose work in Monocle is fantastic.