There’s no going back. Period. The chosen word has been pressed into permanence, etched in eternity. So, go with it, or go get another piece of paper.
When using the venerable typewriter, there’s no safety net, no backspace/delete get-out-of-mistakes-free button. You have to commit to the word, therefore think before you write. (Twitter users take note.) It’s a visceral connection when fingers press out prose on a hefty manual machine, commanding its assemblage of springs and levers to perform a magical haiku — or merely fill out a multipage document that might otherwise jam your printer. You can hear the words happen: the rapid hail-on-a-tin-roof rhythm when thoughts flow fast, or the slow plop of a drippy sink if you’re stuck in the mental mud.
Surely, most users of today’s tech-forward microprocessors will never go back to their predecessors. But for some — from Luddites to a surprising number of people under 35 — all computers and no typewriters makes writing a dull job, and they prefer the feel, the look, the nostalgia of the classic machines.
“Pressing the keys down takes so much more effort, but that effort says something about the effort of the creative process, the weight of what you’re writing,” says Kali Pollard, 24, an English major at UC Berkeley who had wanted a typewriter since childhood and finally received an old Olympia last Christmas. “I just love using it,” she says. “I’ll type a lot of poems and cut them out and make little poetry zines. There’s also kind of a free association that happens when you’re typing. It’s different than doing it on a keyboard, or even writing by hand.
“There’s no backspace, so what you do is what you get. Either you accept your typos, or scrap it and start over.”
For the past few years, typewriters have made a triumphant return, driving prices of classic models up into the hundreds of dollars.
“It’s a novelty to people who’ve grown up with computer keyboards,” says John Sansone, owner of Los Altos Business Machines, one of the Bay Area’s remaining shops that repairs and sells classic typewriters, along with newfangled printers and fax machines. His dad opened the place in the 1960s. It has the pleasant odor of ink and solvents and oils.
“Probably 80 percent I sell are to people under 35, and they have the money,” Sansone says, pointing to his window display of a shiny, wine-colored 1938 Corona Sterling, selling for $525, and a rare 1896 Bar-Lock with an ornate upright faceplate, priced at $800.
“People like the sound of the real bell instead of a computer sound,” he says. “They like pushing the carriage return, rolling in the paper. Especially teenage girls — they’re real big into it. They like the old ones with the glass keys. They write short stories or poetry.”
To be sure, all manner of creative uses have emerged, says Carmen Permillion, who has worked at California Typewriter on San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley for 30 years. “Artists love them, street performers use them, people use them at weddings for guests to type little comments,” she says. “We even have an occasional ‘type-in’ here at the store where people bring their own typewriters and just sit here and jam and talk about typewriters.”
At Berkeley Typewriter on University Avenue, owner Joe Banuelos repairs machines and sells vintage models ranging from $250 to $600. He thinks it’s funny when he has to teach younger people how to use them. “A lot of people come from the Silicon Valley, and they’ve never seen one, don’t know how to use it, ask how to delete and do this and that.”
Possibly the most famous collector of typewriters in modern times is actor Tom Hanks. In 2013 he wrote — probably typed — a love letter to his beloved writing instruments in a New York Times op-ed. “I use a manual typewriter — and the United States Postal Service — almost every day,” he wrote. “My snail-mail letters and thank-you notes, office memos and to-do lists, and rough — and I mean very rough — drafts of story pages are messy things, but the creating of them satisfies me like few other daily tasks.”
A couple of months ago, Hanks stopped in at the Los Altos shop with his son, Truman, a Stanford student. “They came in to get his son’s typewriter fixed, but he ended up buying a couple for himself, two Smith Coronas, one from the ’40s and one from the ’60s,” Sansone says.
At Vintiq, a hip vintage-goods store in Alameda, Raf Janssens displays a couple of antique typewriters in the showroom but sells many more to online collectors searching for certain models. He taught himself to repair the machines, not only for the currently booming business, but because he loves them.
“I compare it to vinyl records or 35 mm cameras,” he says. “You see this movement — the more progress we make in electronics and digital devices, the more desire there is to go back to something that keeps it physical.”
Janssens thinks, however, we may have hit the peak of the typewriter craze. “Now the big thing is Polaroids.”
Contact Angela Hill at ahill@bayareanewsgroup.com, or follow her at Twitter @GiveEmHill.
