TypeTown #1: The biggest Underwood ... ever?
🐘 Elephants, Ali, hotels, and virtual reality
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Welcome to TypeTown, a new fortnightly newsletter celebrating the typewriter’s place in modern (and not so modern) culture.
As this is issue #1, let’s try to set the tone early.
👁 Here’s Jenny, a 3.5-ton elephant, standing on a giant Underwood. I don’t know how she worked the paper feed.
So, what is TypeTown?
At this stage, it’s part daft idea, part intriguing experiment.
I’m not aiming to offer technical or repair insights (I don’t have any!). Instead, I’d like to keep this fun and focus on how typewriters have shaped our culture — either through the quirky, the profound, or the downright silly (thanks, Jenny).
Each issue, I’ll trawl the internet for lost or hidden gems.
In time, I aim to create and publish original interviews.
Listings for type-ins and any other events are also welcome. Send them in, please!
Anyway, enough chit-chat. Let’s get started.
20 bucks for a multi-million dollar career
Danielle Steel -- a true writing machine
Famed author Danielle Steel has written 170 novels, which feels like a ridiculous output for anyone.
Add in the fact she’s written each of them on her Olympia and… well… the mind boggles.
Here she is talking to the Harvard Business Review:
“I’m just very low-tech. I do everything wrong on a computer; I get it all jammed up. The keys are too close together: They don’t clomp, clomp, clomp when I’m writing, and it’s so easy to hit the wrong button and erase something. It would give me heart failure. Also, I’m just used to the typewriter. When I was relatively poor, at the beginning of my career, I bought it for $20 at a junk shop. It’s a very fancy German machine: an Olympia, beautifully made, with a heavy, well-spaced keyboard. I’ve written all my books on it, and I just love it. I type the first draft once, and then it is a sea of hand notes, asterisks, arrows. My editor is very patient.”
A sporting icon, made great by typewriters
This 1966 image is considered a sporting classic. In one corner, Muhammad Ali raises his fists in victory. In the other, Cleveland Williams lays floored after a second-round knockout in Houston, Texas.
Ali’s legend was written on the typewriter, his status built with the clack-clack-ping of journalists in the 60s and 70s.
How many typewriters can you see around the edge of the ring? I stopped counting at 30…
A typewriter hotel?
In the Italian town of Ivrea, a crumbling hotel looks weirdly familiar.
Perhaps because it was originally designed for Olivetti employees. Here’s the New York Times:
The Hotel La Serra, outside the main center, was built in the 1970s and betrays the influence of postmodernism. Composed of an irregular series of stacked, graduated floors, it is meant to look like a typewriter, but from the inside, the rooms feel like the tightly constructed cabin of a ship…
Worth pausing the platen
📬 Why Robert Caro now has only ten typewriters — The New Yorker
📬 How Paul Auster writes doorstopper novels without touching a computer — Forward
📬 Trent Dalton asks strangers about love for his new book 'Love Stories' — ABC Radio National
📬 Charles Bukowski on sickness — Advice to Writers
📬 Letting rip with an old Remington — The Iceland Symphony Orchestra
New here?
TypeTown is a fortnightly celebration of the typewriter’s place in modern (and not so modern) culture. Subscribe for free.
And finally… typewriters in the wild
In computer games…
In some guy’s basement…
And in this magnificent TV advert. “Some day all typewriters will work like the IBM Selectric… but why wait?”
Until next time
William Gibson wrote Neuromancer in 1984 on a 1932 typewriter! (The novel describes a future that is about to happen.)
A typewriter cannot be hacked, the typewritten pages don't vanish even if the machine breaks down, and it works even during blackouts (coming to your neighborhood soon)!
While it's a pain to make corrections for typos, this feature is good for developing, improving, and maintaining attention, accuracy, and motor skills! Self-restraint and discipline are essential!
I'm pretty sure Steel uses ghostwriters, so she doesn't count. :)