TYPE WRITER
IN PRAISE OF THE MANUAL TYPEWRITER.
Tom Hanks has developed a passionate i f somewhat eccentric love for typewriters. He reveals it while playing a prominent part in a documentary, California Typewriter, directed by Doug Nichol. The film deals in charming detail with a little Berkeley store, also called California Typewriter, one of the few remaining places on this continent where typewriters can be repaired or, if necessary, rebuilt. It’s a place where collectors come to talk about their machines, objects they cherish with the attention other collectors lavish on Renaissance drawings or rare books.
For much of the world, the typewriter is a forgotten device, replaced years ago by the computer. To Hanks a typewriter is an object of great beauty and utility. He uses one when writing stories, and his current book of 17 tales, Uncommon Type: Some Stories ( Knopf ), is a monument to the appliance on which it was written. Each story contains some reference to a typewriter, either incidental or significant. The stories are separated by Kevin Twomey’s lovely photographs of ancient typewriters.
When Hanks appeared on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs last year, he said that if isolated he would like to have with him a Hermes 3000 manual and a lot of paper. He’s now so well- acquainted with the 250 vintage gadgets in his collection that he can recognize them by the sound they make, like a sensitive bird-watcher.
As he’s explained, “Remingtons from the 1930s go THICK. THICK. Midcentury Royals sound like a voice repeating the word CHALK. CHALK. CHALK. CHALK. The Smith Corona Skyriter and the design masterpieces by Olivetti go FITT. FITT. FITT. like bullets from James Bond’s silenced Walther PPK.” He finds it “reassuring, comforting, dazzling in that here is a very specific apparatus that is meant to do one thing, and does it perfectly.”
The stories i n Uncommon Type, a debut book for Hanks as an author, reveal an interesting sensibility. I liked one titled The Past Is Important to Us, in which the central figure, J. J. Cox, goes back in time through Chronometric Adventures. For a high price, the folks at Chronometric will redistribute your personal molecules and transmit them down the Time-Space continuum for 22 hours, then bring you back and stick you together again. You can go to Cleveland in 1927 and see Babe Ruth hit a home run. J. J. goes to 1939 and sees the New York World’s Fair. He falls in love with a woman he meets there but fails to take care of his molecules.
Doug Nichol made his film because, he says, his typewriter talked to him. He bought a broken- down classic Underwood 5 on eBay, “as an object of art in my office.” But he realized after a while that it was calling to him: “Fix me up!” He had it fixed and became a believer. He’s spent three years interviewing typewriter connoisseurs like Hanks, the historian David McCullough and the late Sam Shepard, the playwright and actor.
Some of the people in the film give the impression that devotion to their much- loved gadget is a moral duty. Certainly that’s true of the Permillion family who run California Typewriter in Berkeley. After three decades in the business they now find it, for obvious reasons, a struggle. But their devoted craftsmanship in bringing old typewriters back to life is a stirring spectacle as well as a romantic fantasy.
Nichol lets his film run 103 minutes, about 20 too long; some audiences will find the repetitions tiresome. But he finds a lot to say on his subject. We meet an artist , Jeremy Mayer, who makes mammoth surrealistic sculptures from old typewriters. Residents of Silicon Valley are among his patrons. People in the film do their best to make music from differently tuned typewriters. One group glories in the name Boston Typewriter Orchestra. Nichol went to India, to show us that in Mumbai the typewriter is still at work in the hands of storefront typists ready to put anyone’s letters or contracts on paper.
The hi s t ori an David McCullough, a favourite author of Hanks, the winner of Pulitzer prizes for both of his biographies of American presidents, Harry Truman and John Adams, shows up in California Typewriter as a grouchy 84- year- old who thinks the world was really better before unnecessary inventions like computers came into being.
McCullough has written an impressive shelf of distinguished books, always on his typewriter. People tell him he could work faster if he acquired a computer. But, he says, he doesn’t want to work faster. In fact, he’d like to go a little slower.
That, of course, would require another change in equipment. Perhaps he’s in the market for an ink pot, a quill pen and a pile of papyrus.