It’s hard to remember now, but in the Good Old Days – the decade through my teenage years, which is everybody’s definition of Good Old Days – the typewriter was just about the most interesting piece of technology in people’s homes.
Whether manual or electric, the clickety-clack information machine was the product of a century of refinement in design and construction, full of interlocked components, funky escapements and parts angled in weird ways to avoid hitting each other. Nothing in my childhood had the same mix of mechanical ingenuity and common practicality.
But mechanical ingenuity couldn’t save typewriters when word processing arrived. Yet recently a weird thing started happening: Typewriters are cool again.
There are books and magazines and media platforms devoted to collecting, using, repairing and studying them. And now there’s New England Typewriter, a store that just opened in Merrimack to sell and service devices which from a pragmatist’s point of view became irrelevant when Ronald Reagan was president.
“It’s the typewriter revolution,” said store owner Matt Snyder of the growing interest in this old tech.
The store has all sorts of typewriters for sale, plus the expertise and cannibalized parts to do repairs. There are typewriters that write in Cyrillic or Arabic script, one that types in italic, and pre-World War I models which show how the technology evolved. That includes an early “invisible” typewriter where the paper was hidden from sight as you typed because they hadn’t figured out how to do it better, and one with a weird stylus mechanism instead of keys.
What’s the appeal, you ask?
“For some, there’s nostalgia,” said Snyder. That’s certainly the draw for me: When I saw an electric Smith-Corona identical to one I used for years, I was transported back to the days when I was sure I would become the next great American novelist. (Spoiler alert: I didn’t.)
But nostalgia is only part of it, he said.
“The younger generation is getting into it. It’s the tactile nature of it. You put a child in front of a typewriter and they hit a couple keys and see that by hitting a button it prints something directly on a page. You don’t need a screen, a printer, don’t need an app. They’re flabbergasted.”
Aspects that were seen as drawbacks when the online world arrived have become advantages, he said.
“They kind of like the idea of cutting off from the internet, doing their own thing. It’s personal to them, you don’t have to worry about being uploaded to a cloud, shared by everybody. It’s just yours.”
Snyder was a chemist working in the pharmaceutical industry when he and wife, Natasha, moved north for her graduate school. They have lived in Nashua for a dozen years.
Snyder is 40, so he just missed the era of the typewriter. He became enamored of them, he says, by watching a mini-series about John Adams, which showed the author typing on a Royal KLM typewriter. “I was so enamored that I decided, then and there, I wanted a typewriter like it.”
When Synder decided to leave pharmaceuticals, that enthusiasm eventually led him to Cambridge Typewriter Company in Arlington, Mass., where he worked for four years. Synder had a chance to buy the business when the owner retired but eventually opened his own, with a much shorter commute.
He opened in October in a strip mall on Daniel Webster Highway. He says business is good so far, with people coming from out of state and in one case from Belgium, of all places.
“About half of customers are under the age of 30,” he said. “Some people come in because they have an heirloom that they want to fix up. … But a lot are people coming in because it’s their first time interacting with a typewriter.”
I think there’s a parallel with vinyl records and film cameras, other outdated technologies that have returned to favor. To an extent, I think it’s a reaction to what the digital world is doing to our minds and our society, to an extent it’s the appeal of analog technology that we can actually see operating, to an extent it’s retro enthusiasm for stuff you see in old movie clips.
Whatever the reason, I can only approve. Maybe it’s not too late to become the great American novelist.
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