Todd Nelson, The Story of “My” Typewriter

On the same afternoon that Pat and Jim gave me an old black Royal typewriter—the cherished model of childhood memories—I discovered a book called The Story of My Typewriter down at the Compass Rose bookstore. It told the saga of a twenty-six-year-old portable Olympus typewriter and its meaning to the author, Paul Auster, accompanied by oil portraits of the machine in all its moods by Sam Messer. I now have that too, shelved next to my new typewriter, and a host of collateral thoughts. I’m having a reunion of sorts. 

“Battered and obsolete,” writes Auster of his Olympus, “a relic from an age that is quickly passing from memory, the damn thing has never given out on me. Even as I recall the nine thousand four hundred days we have spent together, it is sitting in front of me now, stuttering forth its old familiar music.” I love that music, as does John, the bookstore owner.

There’s more to a manual writing machine, to those of us who have not native to laptops and word processors, than just typing by candlelight. A typewriter, particularly the Royal, is an emblem of my earliest consciousness of writing. Its staccato printing, diminutive bell, hefty carriage, muscular black metal shoulders, ratcheting paper roller, and keys in rows more like a church organ than my laptop, give it gravity. It has several octaves, compared with the flat display and sterile clatter of molded plastic laptop keys. It’s designed for immobility—fealty. It is a fortress of printing. 

The Royal was the machine on which I learned to type—not “asdf;lkj” nor “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party,” but percussive composition. Before there was syntax, there was the way writing should sound—the sound my journalist father made when he typed: thunder. And Pat had just given me the machine at the heart of my memory: Polly’s Royal. 

Polly was Pauline Leach Hooper, as etched on her typewriter’s hood. “It was probably her ‘learning’ machine,” Pat added, “as she would have been in high school during the late 1920s to early 30s. Born in 1917, her maiden name was Leach and she married a traveling Pentecostal evangelist, Melvin Hooper, from Bucks Harbor in Machias.” What a provenance.

Before he moved to Maine, John was a journalist too, owner of The Goose Creek Gazette in Goose Creek, South Carolina. He understands page layout when “page” and “layout” are not mere metaphors or vestiges of former newspaper technology. Even 500 years after Gutenberg’s revolution in moveable type, when I visited my dad’s newsroom as a kid, and got to scrounge lead type from the smelting bins, or watch the linotype operators in the composing room make golden syntax out of base metal, there hadn’t been as much evolution in publishing as in these last few decades. 

How much percussion did it take to get a story into the next print edition? I remember a weekend when we lived in London when dad first typed his story on the Royal in his study. To file it, dictating over the phone to the Reuters teletype operators. But he was having difficulty being understood by the cockney pro typers due to his accent. So he drove his paper to the office in the city center. He dropped off a hard copy to be retyped, then wired to Boston, where it would be typed once more for copy-editing and layout: three percussion performances to get the written word from half a world away into a daily newspaper. The laborious provenance of a print journalism article. 

Now, from anywhere in the world, I press “send,” a single key on my laptop—but it doesn’t sound the same. I like the clatter of memory and meaning, pounding the old metal keys with fresh purpose. Writing on this Royal flows at a speed slower than thought. There is no turning back, deleting, seamlessly cutting and pasting. Typewriting a story shows where you came from, not just this moment’s avatar of a digital file. 

Eighth notes at seventy-six beats per minute is about all I can manage on the Royal—the tempo of a moderate Sousa march, at best—since I’m out of practice. Writing this way involves physical tension, pressure, and calisthenics to reach all the tiered keys and organize the story of my typewriter, like Auster, on my new-old typewriter. But it has the beloved sounds of the “old familiar music.”

Castine Patriot, September 21, 2023; Weekly Packet, November 3, 2023.