Typewriter still key to loyal aficionados
Film, live event rolled out to honor the classic writing machine
Walk the ninth-floor hallway of the historic Flood Building on Market Street and you may detect an office sound that has all but vanished, even from the Flood, which has not changed much since 1904. It is the frantic staccato of twin IBM Selectric II typewriters, their typeballs pressing letters into a page at 60 words per minute. The symphony comes from the offices of Minard Capital, which sends out 1,000 letters per year, individually typed, folded, sealed in wax and posted in the U.S. Mail. On Tuesday evening, Sept. 26, that same music will be created by an impromptu orchestra of manual and electric at California
Typewriter, a holdout of a repair shop in Berkeley. Bring your own machine, or the store will supply one for the Live! Type-In to advance “California Typewriter,” a feature-length documentary set largely in this store.
Released a year ago on the festival circuit, the film has found legs, and is opening Friday at Opera Plaza Cinema in San Francisco, the Shattuck in Berkeley, and the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael. The film is by Doug Nichol of San Anselmo, and the hero is repairman Ken Alexander of Richmond, stoic for 20 years in the service of the typewriter.
Douglas Philips, chief operating officer of Minard Capital, is among his admirers. Philips has six IBM Selectrics, the narrow early-’80s Personal model, in heavy rotation. Two are in use, two are on reserve in a glass display case and two are usually in the shop.
Philips’ scenes in the film, which include him crossing the Bay Bridge at rush hour with a typewriter strapped to the front of his scooter for an emergency repair, were, regrettably, left on the cutting room floor.
But there is still plenty of action, starting with a re-creation of the moment in 1966 when artists Ed Ruscha and Mason Williams impulsively threw a manual Royal out the window of a speeding Buick LeSabre on Interstate 15 in the Nevada desert. The wreckage stretched across 190 feet of asphalt and formed the plot of the book “Royal Road Test.”
“This is the rave of typewriting,” says Canadian poet Darren Wershler in describing the scene. “This is the moment when it stopped being one thing and started being something else.”
In comes Tom Hanks, actor and everyday typist, who claims 250 typewriters in his collection. Make that 249, because Hanks has donated a Smith Corona to be raffled off in support of the film. Sure to be entering is Martin Howard, shown in the film as an oddball obsessive from Toronto, on the hunt for a Sholes & Glidden made in Milwaukee in 1874.
That search, by the way, brings him to San Francisco, where Jim Rauen had the foresight to begin collecting typewriters 50 years ago and won’t sell any. Rauen is saving them for a typewriter museum.
“I would come and visit that museum,” Howard says. “The past is a luxurious pursuit, which I’ve been able to indulge.”
But museums and collectors won’t save the typewriter. Neither will the Boston Typewriter Orchestra, which performs in the film, or Jeremy Mayer, the San Francisco artist who build sculptures out of typewriter parts, or Millennials and hipsters who buy typewriters as conversation pieces.
People typing are the only hope for the typewriter. Chronicle columnist Herb Caen and his “Loyal Royal” are long gone, but author Herb Gold is still out there, high on Russian Hill, banging away at a Royal that looks like the one Ruscha threw out the window.
Gold just submitted a typewritten collection of poems, and he is at work on a lurid nonfiction account of his Hollywood years in the employment of Natalie Wood. Gold just has to wait for a few of the principals to die off.
“A starlet that she fixed me up with is still alive,” says Gold, who is 93. Given that he has been in the same rent-controlled apartment for 57 years and it has never been upgraded, it could be surmised that Gold is not one who leaps to embrace change.
But he is willing to give technology a try.
“I have a telephone,” he argues in his defense. He also tried an electric typewriter in the 1950s, but the noise made him nervous.
“I’d stop to think and the electric typewriter would go ‘hummmm, aren’t you going to do something?’ ” he says. “So I gave that up.”
He had another go at modernity with a computerized scriptwriting program. But he constantly worried that his work would vanish from the screen, a worry that was proved by the test of time, by the way.
So Gold hunts and pecks at his Royal, which is indestructible, though he has tried.
“For me, writing is an act of sculpture,” he says. “I get mad at the words I put on the page and I can rip the page out. I can kick it when I’m annoyed.”
For Philips, who is 53 but would like people to think he is 93 like Gold, there is a pragmatic business reason behind his use of the typewriter. He is courting investors to an annual conference. These are serious money people who get invitations every day. The one that comes in a typed envelope with six vintage stamps fixed on it is the one likely to be opened.
This low-tech subsidiary is called the Minard Guild, to distinguish it from Minard Capital, which is so high-tech that it has a contract with Apple to upgrade its entire system every two years. Philips can get somebody else to type his letters, but here he sits at one end of a conference table centering each address on the envelope and flaming up the wax to drip onto the seal.
“When he is not typing, he is waxing,” says Lisa Larkworthy, who sits at the other end of the conference table
When asked to explain his fixation, Philips fails in his attempt to truthfully articulate an answer, so he loads in a fresh sheet and types one out:
“The moment the key of my typewriter strikes the page, the embossing and ink has forever changed it — leaving a small mark, something of me,” it reads. “My typewriters, specifically my IBM Selectric II Personals, have allowed me to have a voice which has taken me a long time to find.”