TypeTown #19: "One has to be ambitious to start writing."
🇮🇳 Ruskin Bond, James Caan, Sylvia Plath, Tyler Shields, and Shirley Jones...
Hello, hello — and a third hello to all our new readers this week (thanks, Substack).
We start with a journey across the Arabian Sea and high into the hills of northern India.
Travel far enough and you’ll reach the small town of Landour (pop: 3,500), home of author Ruskin Bond — a man with almost 70 years of publishing under his belt and still going strong at the age of 88.
“If four or five days go by, and I haven’t written anything, I feel incomplete.”
Bond’s career started with The Room on the Roof, a 1956 novel that was published when he was 21.
More remarkable still, he’d written it five years earlier aged just 16.
“One has to be ambitious to start writing.”
Since then, he’s written more than 500 short stories, essays and novels. Fifty of his published works are books for children and his sales are well into seven figures.
Little wonder The Hindustan Times calls him an “Indian institution”.
And it all started when he discovered an old Remington typewriter in his stepfather’s car showroom.
Bond liberated it and started working in his home’s barsati (rooftop space).
“I was visited by crows and mynas and bats and cats, but they didn’t stop me from pounding out little stories and articles on that typewriter and sending them off to magazines throughout the country.”
He upgraded to an Olympia in 1964. As recently as 2018, he was still using it to complete his tax returns.
An extraordinary man and an extraordinary body of work.
READ» ‘In India, you don’t run out of stories’: Ruskin Bond as he celebrates 88th birthday - The Week
READ» Life’s simple pleasures - Deccan Herald
READ» A writer at work - Mumbai Mirror
Battle Royal
RIP to James Caan, who died on Wednesday aged 82.
Most of the tributes revolve around his role in The Godfather, but his spectacular use of a Royal typewriter in Misery can’t go without mention.
Watch the full scene here (warning: NSFW and not suitable for kids).
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A history-making machine
In just 30 years, Sylvia Plath managed to create a literary legacy still revered today.
The US-born poet and novelist married fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1956. Her suicide, in 1963, meant she never knew the true impact of her work. She received a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1982.
In 2018, the green Hermes 3000 on which she wrote The Bell Jar sold at auction for £32,500. The machine was the last of the four Plath owned, having previously worked on a Royal, a Smith-Corona, and an Olivetti Lettera.
READ» Did you know… Sylvia Plath’s Typewriters! - Sylvia Plath Info Blog
READ» Sylvia Plath - Poetry Foundation
A million-to-one shot
How’s your dedication these days?
Australian Les Stewart can probably teach us all a thing or two. Whether we’d want to learn, of course, is a different matter.
In 1982 he decided he wanted to be in the Guinness Book of Records.
Typewriter in hand, he dedicated 16 years to bashing out every number from one to one million — written as words, in full.
The cost of this little exercise in insanity? Seven typewriters, 1,000 ink ribbons and almost 20,000 pages.
TypeTown will leave you to decide whether it was worth it.
READ» Coast man types into record books - The Courier Mail
Worth pausing the platen
📬 They're Not Dead. Typewriters Live on in Today's World - Newsweek
📬 I still miss my typewriter - Washington Post
📬 Typewriter artist James hosting exhibition in Finchingfield - Braintree & Witham Times
📬 Philadelphia typewriter shop helps preserve, restore the art - 6ABC
And finally… typewriters in the wild
In this short film from The Henry Ford’s Innovation Nation…
In this typically arresting work from US photographer Tyler Shields…
And in this image of a young Shirley Jones…
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Until next time
(Friday 29th July - holidays will keep us away on Friday 22nd…)
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TypeTown is a fortnightly celebration of the typewriter’s place in modern (and not so modern) culture.