A Qwerty quartet
I’m not really a typewriter collector (not like my friend George Mamonluk, whose noodles I patronize to help build up his stable of vintage typewriters and fountain pens), but I realized this past week that I can’t resist a classic when I see one, even when I can barely squeeze it into the budget or, just as critically, into my man-cave.
Surely space and money aren’t foremost on the minds of such fanatics as the 4,677 members of Antique Typewriter Collectors FB Group — not to mention Tom Hanks, who is to typewriters what Jay Leno is to cars. In fact, Tom — who has hundreds of the machines, including his dad’s Underwood — recently wrote a collection of short stories, published under the title Uncommon Type (Alfred Knopf, 2017, 405 pp.) in which a typewriter appears in every story, and he provided the foreword to the collector’s must-have, Typewriters: Iconic Machines from the Golden Age of Mechanical Writing (Chronicle Books, 2017, 208 pp.)
I’m not quite there yet; I just have four typewriters hanging around — but what a Qwerty quartet they make. I haven’t really used one for everyday writing since the late 1980s, when I began the draft of my first novel, Killing Time in a Warm Place, on an Olympia Traveller that I’d carried with me to grad school in the US. I began using computers around 1992 and never looked back. But I’ve never lost my fascination for these mechanical wonders, and even observed their sad demise in my July 11, 2011 column, “Requiem for the Typewriter,” in which I noted the shutdown of the last typewriter producer in the world, Godrej and Boyce, in India.
My oldest one is a black Corona 3 from 1922, and in many ways it’s also the most amazing, as it’s a portable whose carriage folds over its keyboard, and opens up like a clamshell. I remember spotting that Corona on the counter of an antiques mall in San Francisco; it had just arrived and hadn’t even been put on the shelves. When the manager flipped out the folding carriage, I was bewitched (here insert the Ping! of the carriage), paid the asking price, and hand-carried it home.
I also have another shiny black Royal “O” portable, which a check of the Royal typewriter database online shows was produced in 1937. I can’t recall where or from whom I bought this very handsome model, but it was one of two fine old machines that I brought back from the US, one of which I gave to my friend, the poet Isabel Banzon Mooney. When the UP Faculty Center burned down in April 2016, I thought mine had gone up in smoke in my office across Isabel’s as well — until, just a couple of weeks ago, I looked under my bed, and there it was!
The third of the lot is a pristine white Olympia Traveller de Luxe, a classic of the ’80s and a clone of the one I’d brought with me to the US (a gift from my mentor Gerry Sicat), which had rusted away. I loved that portable so much that I always hankered for its replacement. I found this one on eBay, and had it shipped all the way from London; surprisingly, it arrived at my doorstep without a scratch, at minimal cost.
As you might have guessed, I’m leading up to a thesis here, which is that these machines were meant to roost with me — particularly my most recent find, an Olivetti Valentine, a favorite of collectors and an icon of 20th century pop art. Designed by Ettore Sottsass and Perry King, this orange-red typewriter (released on Feb. 14, 1969, thus the name) looks like a narrow plastic wastebasket with a handle — until you flick two rubber clasps and pull out the portable within.
It’s well worth Googling to see the whole machine and case and to get the full story. Cynthia Trope of the Cooper Hewitt Museum explains its appeal thus: “Sottsass chose to use a bold Pop red plastic housing to show that the Valentine was intended more to appeal to writing for recreation rather than work. He said his design was ‘for use in any place except in an office, so as not to remind anyone of the monotonous working hours, but rather to keep amateur poets company on quiet Sundays in the country or to provide a highly colored object on a table in a studio apartment. An anti-machine machine, built around the commonest mass-produced mechanism, the works inside any typewriter, it may also seem to be an unpretentious toy.’”
My friend and fellow Apple fanboy Leo Venezuela had told me about this unpretentious toy a few months ago, and it was burning a hole in my head (as it would in my pocket). I was this close to ordering one from Sweden, when one magically popped up late one night in a local online sales forum. So this late-sleeping bird caught the worm. “You’re lucky,” said the lady who handed it to me the next day. “I had 20 callers after you.” (Note to self: now sell a few old books and pens.)
If there are 20 people in this country who know what an Olivetti Valentine is, then I’m in trouble. That sounds like serious competition — but didn’t I say I wasn’t a serious collector, yet?
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Email me at jose@dalisay.ph. and visit my blog at www.penmanila.ph.
