The last manual typewriter, after 150 years of commercial production, was manufactured in the UK in 2012. Yet like all design classics, it refuses to lie down and die. There is a roaring trade in old models on eBay, and dealers such as the Typewriter Man in the UK and Mytypewriter.com in the US sell them to hipsters and steampunks, among whom they are cult objects. The latter store, awash with Hermes, Remingtons and Underwoods, even has a list of famous writers and the machines they used – from John Ashbery to P.G. Wodehouse – so that you can buy a model to match your literary tastes.
They’re also, in various institutions, still in use. American prisons, though banning their inmates from owning computers, will nonetheless allow them to have typewriters – an American firm, the Swintec Corporation, producing clear-topped models so that nothing can be stashed inside. In 2013, it was revealed the Kremlin had made a substantial investment in manual models to circumvent cyber-spying; a year later, a German politician, Patrick Sensburg, said the government there was considering following suit. As with hard copies of books and films, there seems to be an acknowledgement that, despite all the inconveniences, the old ways of doing things still have their advantages.
The machines can be things of great beauty. The actor Tom Hanks, who’s collected them since his twenties, described them as ‘brilliant combinations of art and engineering… every time you type something on a typewriter, it is a one-of-a-kind work of art’. There are few items which so well evoke the recent past, or summon up a decade so vividly. The 1930s Underwood, black and indestructible-looking, redolent of hard-bitten, chain-smoking American journalists; the 1950s Imperial Good Companion, a chunky metallic blue with an almost joyful look about it; or the Smith Corona ‘Silent’, pumice-stone grey with austere green keys, like a military artefact. Then come the 1960s, with the duck-egg-coloured Smith Corona Corsair and its cosily aerodynamic, slightly uptilting base, making you think of new beginnings, of Beatles records or Joe Orton.
Tom Hanks, who’s collected typewriters since his twenties, described them as ‘brilliant combinations of art and engineering’
Some well-known authors go on using them. Cormac McCarthy auctioned off his Olivetti Lettera 32 in 2009 for $254,000 (£208,000), replacing it with an identical model for peanuts. Danielle Steele was still writing on a 1946 Olympia in 2015 (nicknamed ‘Ollie’), declaring: ‘I love it. I can’t write on anything else, and wouldn’t try’, and that the thought of a word-processor swallowing up three chapters of her book was ‘horrifying’. If few professional writers would go back to them – really, why would you bother? – you can still see why the trade in them survives: apart from anything else they make marvellous centrepieces in a room.
Numerous films have featured them – a key supporting character, something almost impossible to imagine the story without. The Olivetti Lettera 22 in The Talented Mr Ripley with its jaunty tartan-lined case, on which the central character clatters out his forgeries, keys hacking away like hatchets. The Groma Kolibri (one of the smallest typewriters ever made) the East German hero stashes away from the Stasi in The Lives of Others and on which he writes his fatal exposés for the West. Or the machine with the wonky letter – a 1942 Corona (the brand the young Hemingway favoured) – giving away the murderer in 1985’s Jagged Edge.
Other seminal scenes spring to mind too: Jack Nicholson bashing away madly (literally) on an electric model in The Shining’s Overlook Hotel; or Ben Kingsley, hunched in his spectacles behind a keyboard, noisily shoring up the names on Schindler’s List. In none of these films would a Lenovo desktop or Dell Inspiron quite cut it. The object’s sound – its percussive, machine gun quality – was part of the appeal, something recognised by composer Leroy Anderson in his 1950s song ‘The Typewriter’ (now the intro music for Radio 4’s News Quiz) in which its frantically rattling keys and bell are the star-instrument.
When in the 1990s I first thought of journalism as a job, having a typewriter was half of the attraction. It had a kind of poker-game mystique about it: late nights, overspilling ashtrays, clacking keys, the scrunched-up paper ripped with a shriek from the roller. Lugging a typewriter around with you, setting it up in houses where you were staying, gave you a total identity, like a musician carrying a cello. Most people couldn’t type – even some journalists typed two-fingered – and most personal writing was still done in ink-pen on paper. The ability to touch-type put you in a skilled minority, and the scatter of the keys, the thunk of the carriage, the zip of the line space bar: these were the sound of creativity or the industrial noise of hard work.
Reports in 2014 that the Times was considering installing special speakers through which the old sound would be reproduced to energise its computer-bound staff made perfect sense. Atmospheres, like people, can disappear overnight, never to be seen again. All our lives changed when the chorus of these machines was replaced by the sterile, finicky – almost monastic – sound of the computer keyboard. It was a kind of sonic Perrier water, to remind us that the cocktail party (or long boozy lunch break) was over. That their decline coincided with the rise of the we-see-you open-plan office-space, and was followed soon afterwards by the smoking ban, meant that the late 1990s and early 2000s marked the end of a known, more convivial (if decadent) world. Back in the old days, the business of journalism – or office life generally – could be that bit more riotous. Gossip, banter, insults and indiscretions were drowned out in the staccato frenzy of a room full of these objects sounding off in full flow.
But the arrival of computers changed much more than that. For a while, owning a laptop put you in a minority, but then suddenly everyone had them. Passing a branch of Starbucks in Madrid in 2005, I saw what looked like the entire room tapping away on them. Now not only could nearly everyone type but – worse still – everyone would henceforth consider themselves a writer too. This, said Milan Kundera in his Book of Laughter and Forgetting, would be one of the bleakest moments in human history, the moment when the world would become a cacophony of competing voices, with no one left listening at all.
In the wake of the Matt Hancock WhatsApp debacle, one can see why governments would be nostalgic for the days of paper communications – so much harder than a USB, as many have pointed out, to stash away and filch without getting caught. Perhaps, like Russia and Germany, Westminster is waking up to this too. A close friend, recently selling his vintage Olivetti Lettera 22 online, was intrigued to see it bought from a government address. Maybe the corridors of power will soon be resounding once again to that familiar woodpecker-fusillade and percussive ding.
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