Monday, August 18, 2014

Return to the Typewriter
1.
My return to the typewriter began suddenly, with a feverish compulsion to acquire not just one but a handful, beginning with the machines I used in college—a Hermes 3000 and a Royal desktop.  But I didn’t stop there.  I developed a pornographic interest in early typewriters with glass keys, and purchased a  1940’s era Smith Corona Sterling portable and a Royal Arrow.  The touch of a fingertip on that Sterling’s black keys gave me a sensual thrill.  A few weeks later, a West German Olympia SM3 portable arrived from an eBay seller, and I left it on my desk—to write on, I thought—but I spent much more time simply staring at it, running my hand over its graceful metal curves, tracing the chrome trim with my finger, and remembering when, a very long time ago, a car could give me the same kind of thrill.   My wife, observing all of this, suggested I mention this typewriter business to my therapist.  She wasn’t joking.
A few weeks later I did. 
“This is probably silly, but Karen said I should mention that I recently developed this sort of typewriter obsession,” I told the therapist.  “I’ve bought a bunch of them over the past few months, and she thinks it’s a weird kind of nostalgic thing.”
 In my case, nostalgia is an affliction, a warning sign that I’m looking backwards for something that I can find right that is right in front me and I just refuse to see it.  But I didn’t think the typewriter obsession was this kind of pathological nostalgia, and I told the therapist that, and he smiled and nodded in agreement.
“How many typewriters do you have at the moment?” he said.
“I think I have seven,” I said.  “Or maybe eight.”
“Don’t you think that’s enough?” he said. 
“Oh yes,” I said.  “I don’t  think I’ll be buying any more.”
But a few weeks later I did.  I spent way too much money on a replacement for the first Hermes 3000—another Hermes but  in “mint” condition (and it was)—a move that seemed necessary because I had attempted to “fix” the carriage return on the first one and disassembled a part I could never put back together again.  It was a situation that reminded me of the time I tried to adjust the valves on my 1970 Fiat—the last of the machines in my life I felt I could actually fix—and had to call a tow truck to have the car taken to the repair shop.  In 2014, there is no one to call in Boise to fix a broken typewriter.
But one day I did fix the Olympia, a success story that later prompted me to tackle the Hermes, and it was a heady experience that made my love the typewriter all the more.  The Olympia SM3, a portable built in the 1950s, exudes German engineering.  If you turn it over and look at the gleaming guts of the machine you see an orderly regiment of springs commanding a row of shiny type bars, all rigidly waiting for orders from the typist.  There are stainless steel screws everywhere.  Looking at the inside of the Olympia, I simultaneously felt intimidated and that anything was possible. 

The carriage was jamming on the typewriter case, and after a half hour of following the logic of connected rollers, springs, and screws, I found the screw that would slightly elevate the carriage and it has worked well ever since.  Fixing the Olympia gave me a giddy feeling, and it wasn’t just a sense of accomplishment but the feeling that in some small I had recovered something I had lost:  a machine that I could actually understand.