Photo: Unsplash
They're tactile, sound great, come in cool shades of green and Tom Hanks loves them. Yes, the typewriter is making a comeback.
Elliot Brown from Clackers Clinic restores old typewriters so they can start a new life.
Hanks' lifelong obsession with the writing machines has fuelled interest in them, he told RNZ's Nights.
"There's a video he's got on YouTube about how to change the ribbon on a typewriter, and he does it on a boxy, 1966 Hermes 3000.
"He's got 250 machines and he's been collecting them since I think he was 13."
Brown became interested in collecting and fixing them as an offshoot of his handyman business, he said.
"A lady who wanted me to get rid of what I now know is an Optima typewriter and a Hermes Baby.
"And this was about a year and a half ago, and I presumed to ask her if I could take it home instead of throw it in the bin.
"And she said, 'Now, why the hell would you want to do that. you know you can't get ribbons for these things anymore?'"
Curiosity got the better of him, he said.
"I went home, found out that Tom Hanks had revived interest in typewriters such that people actually make ribbons these days."
He's now amassed a 200-typewriter collection.
He loves them because they do one job, and do it well, he said.
"Like a chef's knife, compared to a Swiss army knife, a computer's like a Swiss army knife. It does a whole bunch of things, okay, but the typewriter does one thing, and that's type, so it's a cure for writer's block.
"It sort of takes the writer into a world where they forget about everything other than what they're writing."
Tom Hank's fave, the Hermes 3000 Photo: G.&G. Sommeregger/Creative Commons
This lack of distraction makes them attractive to writers, he said.
"They're brilliant for first drafts. Everybody assumes that you can't correct things as you go on a typewriter, but that stops being a problem as soon as you actually sit down and start typing.
"It's just not something you think of because you're too busy doing your first draft, which you'd be busy overthinking on say Microsoft Word."
The '50s and '60s was the heyday for typewriter design and quality, he said.
"Before then you get antiques, which look amazing. And after the '60s you get Olympias, which function very well, but a lot of them were made in East Germany, and they have that sort of square, Soviet, grey look about them.
"Whereas in the 60s and 50s, they weren't afraid to put to put seafoam green over every thing."
He recently sold an old Remington to a client in Christchurch who thanked him by letter, he said.
"A Remington Letter Writer, which is a curvaceous machine from the late '50s. I sent that down to Christchurch earlier this year and got a letter back recently from the guy who received it, saying that he'd just finished the first draft of his 500-page novel, and he said he couldn't have done it without the typewriter.
"And I thought, yeah, that's why I'm doing it."
So, what are the most coveted models?
"Democratically speaking, it would be the Hermes 3000 that's the one that everybody wants, just because it's compact and the typing is perfect, and it looks awesome, and it's seafoam green, and it's made in Switzerland and … Tom Hanks.
"Having said that the Olivetti Lettera 32 is probably the highest seller in New Zealand. You get the most money from those."
