Zestful Blog Post #234
The typewriter in the accompanying photograph is a 1926
Underwood 4, so called because the keys are arranged in four rows instead of
three, which had been more common for typewriters manufactured in earlier
decades. My friend Jay Williams, about whom I’ve written in this blog before, sent
it to me as a gift last spring. He’s a typewriter buff, and spends some of his
time restoring old machines. He restored this one before sending it to me. In
spite of that, it certainly does still show its age and experience. He and I
have talked about old things being time machines. Environments can be time
machines too. When Jay talks about climbing a stone bell tower at his church to
participate in change-ringing, he describes the worn, smooth stone steps and
the cool roughness of the stone walls and the sound that one’s footsteps make
and he feels that that’s the closest he can get to real time travel.
When he sent me this machine, I called to thank him, and we
speculated on the machine’s history, and what it might’ve been like to be with this
machine in its early days. This Underwood is a heavy-duty business machine, and
they were costly, so this one most likely was used in an office, perhaps a newspaper
office. Because Jay is blind, we talked about the sounds and smells and feels
of when this machine was new: The newspaper office almost certainly would have
had more than one machine, and more than one machine going at a time. These
typewriters are wonderfully loud and authoritative, entirely mechanical marvels.
This one’s frame is cast iron. In that newspaper office there might have been
perfume to smell, cigars and cigarettes, their smoke and their butts and their
ashes, there would have been the smell of ink and paper, the squeak of chairs
moving back and forth, perhaps rolling on casters, the sound of the boss’s
voice, the copyboys’ voices, the reporters’ voices, telephones ringing,
telephones being answered, the scratch of pencil on paper as a phone number and
address and perhaps a name and other things were written down.
It might have been summer, the windows open, the blinds
catching a little on the windowframes in the breeze, the sound of engines and
rubber tires outside, perhaps the aroma of manure as well, if horses were still
pulling wagons. Footsteps, voices. The sidewalks would be possibly concrete,
the streets might still be cobbled, the floor in the newsroom would perhaps be
of heavy linoleum that was swept every night by the janitor and polished once a
week.
Steampunk? You bet.
Having something in the house that is this big and heavy (about
30 pounds) and old, and so well worn—it has its own presence. It’s a much
stronger presence than most things we have in our house, frankly. Why is that?
Maybe because every part of this machine is authentic. It was designed to do exactly
what it was supposed to do, without extraneous styling. The only decoration on
it is the manufacturer’s name. In the photograph you can see the
sideways-mounted bell. You can also see the new drawband Jay installed on the
mainspring. All the pieces still work, all the parts still do their job. There
is a tabulation function. There is a lever to select which half of the ribbon
you want to use, the upper half or the lower half. (Many typewriter ribbons
were made with the top half being black and the bottom half being red or vice
versa.) There is a lever to select the stencil function, which disengages the
ribbon, while the carriage moves normally. There is a shift key for uppercase
letters, and there is a shift lock key. There are margin controls and numbers and
special characters besides the alphabet.
There is a gravitas to this machine, is what I’m trying to
say, and the other thing I’m trying to say is that many things have a greater
presence then we might give them credit for. So much of our world is digital,
and so very fast, that spending time with objects on a personal level can be
enriching. You know? Something that was designed and made for function and
efficiency is to be honored, isn’t it?
I say, surround yourself first with empty space, then add
things to it that are well-designed, sincere, and useful or beautiful or both.
I’ll be performing Leroy Anderson’s “The Typewriter” on this
machine on October 29, 2017 with the South Shore Symphony Orchestra in Sun City
Center, Florida. With luck the performance will go well and I’ll want to share
the video. After that's safely over, I'll install the new ribbon Jay sent with the machine and do some writing on it.
What do you have
that is somehow more than the sum of its parts? Something that offers genuine experience
when you interact with it? To post, click below where it says, 'No Comments,'
or '2 Comments,' or whatever.
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