The Last Typewriter Shop
Historical fiction set in 1985 Cincinnati. Type along as Frank Ballard tends to the machines that shaped a century.
Every machine that comes through the door has a story. A journalist's Olivetti, a novelist's Royal, a law firm's Selectric. The computers are coming, and Frank knows it. This is about craft, and what happens when the world no longer needs it.
Part 1
Chapter 1: The Olivetti
A journalist brings in a war-torn machine.
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Frank Ballard had not locked the front door of his shop in thirty-one years, and he was not about to start now. The bell above the door still worked, a small brass thing his father had salvaged from a church rummage sale in 1954, and it rang on the morning of October seventh when Margaret Calloway walked in carrying an Olivetti Lettera 32 in a case held together with packing tape. She set it on the counter the way you might set down a sick cat. Gently, but with the understanding that gentleness alone would not fix the problem. Frank did not need to open the case to know what was wrong. The Lettera had a particular sound when something was off with the carriage return, a dull click where there should have been a clean snap, and he had heard it through the case the moment she put it down. Margaret wrote for the Enquirer. City desk. She had been carrying that Olivetti since her first assignment in 1971, a school board meeting in Norwood where nothing happened and she still managed to file four hundred words. The machine had been to three states, two countries, and one flood. The flood was the problem, or rather it had been the start of the problem. The platen had never quite recovered. It had a slight warp that made the left margin drift upward over the course of a page, so that by the bottom her lines had a gentle slope to them like a field seen from a distance. She had learned to compensate. You could always tell a Calloway story in the early editions because the typesetters had to correct the drift and sometimes they over-corrected. Frank opened the case and looked at the machine. The ribbon was shot. The typebars were gummed with ink and eraser dust. The F key stuck, which Margaret said she found ironic given the things she sometimes wanted to type about city council. He laughed at that. He always laughed at Margaret's jokes because they were good and because she was one of the last people who bothered to make them. He told her he could have it back by Thursday. She said she needed it by Wednesday because the mayor was holding a press conference about the new stadium proposal and she did not trust the loaner Royals they kept in the newsroom. They smelled like cigarettes and someone else's disappointment, she said. Frank said Wednesday would be fine. He watched her leave, the bell ringing behind her, and he pulled the Olivetti closer under the fluorescent light that buzzed above his workbench like a trapped wasp. The shop was narrow and deep, wedged between a dry cleaner and a place that sold vacuum bags. His father had opened it in 1953 when there were eleven typewriter repair shops in Cincinnati. Now there was one. Frank unscrewed the bottom plate and began to work. The carriage return spring had lost most of its tension, which was not surprising for a machine that had been used this hard for this long. He had a replacement spring in the third drawer of the green metal cabinet behind him. He knew this without looking because he knew everything in that cabinet the way a librarian knows the stacks. The spring was in a small paper envelope with Lettera 32 carriage spring written on it in his own handwriting from 1979. He replaced the spring. He cleaned the typebars with solvent and a toothbrush. He replaced the ribbon with a fresh one, universal black, from a box of twelve he had ordered from a supplier in Pennsylvania who was, as far as Frank knew, the last person in the state still manufacturing them. Outside, a truck rumbled past on Vine Street. The shop windows rattled in their frames. Frank worked with the careful, unhurried movements of a man who had done this ten thousand times and still found it worth doing right.
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Part 2
Chapter 2: The Royal Quiet Deluxe
A novelist's beloved machine arrives in pieces.
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The Royal came in on a Friday, carried by a man named Dennis Oakley who taught English composition at the University of Cincinnati and had been writing a novel for eleven years. Frank knew it was eleven years because Dennis told him every time he came in, which was about twice a year. The novel was about a family in Appalachia during the Depression and Dennis had written over a thousand pages and thrown away about eight hundred of them. The Royal Quiet Deluxe was a 1955 model, gray and cream, and it had the particular heft of machines from that era. They built them to last because the idea that a typewriter might become obsolete was as foreign as the idea that Ohio might run out of rain. Dennis set the machine down and Frank could see immediately that the problem was worse than usual. The space bar was not returning. You could press it and it would go down but it would not come back up, so you had to pull it back with your finger before typing the next word. Dennis said he had been doing this for three weeks and his right thumb had developed a blister. Frank asked why he had not brought it in sooner. Dennis said he was in the middle of a chapter about a coal mine collapse and he could not stop because the words were finally coming and he was afraid that if he stopped they would stop too. Frank understood this. He did not write but he understood the superstitions of people who did. He had repaired machines for writers who would only type on one specific model, who believed that changing ribbons during a chapter was bad luck, who kept their typewriters covered with specific cloths as though the machines might catch cold. The Royal had a problem with the space bar linkage. A small metal piece, no bigger than a paper clip, had bent out of alignment. This happened sometimes when a typist hit the space bar too hard, which Dennis certainly did. Dennis typed the way he talked, with great enthusiasm and force, as though each word was an argument he was winning. Frank bent the linkage back into shape with a pair of needle-nose pliers. It took about four minutes. He could have charged Dennis five dollars and sent him on his way, but he also noticed that the ribbon vibrator was sluggish and the margin release was sticking and the feet on the bottom were cracked so the machine wobbled on any surface that was not perfectly flat. So he told Dennis to come back Monday and Dennis said that was fine because he had to teach a class on Faulkner and he could not think about Faulkner and coal mines at the same time. After Dennis left, Frank sat with the Royal for a while. He lifted it and felt its weight. Nine and a half pounds, he guessed, though he had a scale somewhere if he wanted to be exact. He did not want to be exact. He wanted to hold it and feel the solidness of it, the certainty of its engineering. Every part had been designed to do one thing and it did that thing. There was no ambiguity in a typewriter. You pressed a key and a letter appeared on paper. The connection between intention and result was immediate and physical. Frank had read about the new computers in the newspaper. He had seen the advertisements. An Apple for the teacher, they said. He had seen the word processors that some of the law firms were buying, big beige machines with green screens that hummed in a way that was nothing like the sound a typewriter made. A typewriter sounded like work being done. A computer sounded like a refrigerator. He did not say these things to his customers because he did not want to seem like a man fighting the future. But he thought them. He thought them often, late in the day, when the shop was quiet and the light came in at a low angle through the front windows and caught the dust motes that floated above his workbench like small, purposeless planets.
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Part 3
Chapter 3: The Selectric
The law firm's workhorse needs one last tune-up.
Part 1 of 1
The IBM Selectric II arrived in the back of a delivery van on a Tuesday morning, sent over from Hendricks, Marsh and Lowell on Fourth Street. It came with a note typed on what Frank assumed was another Selectric. The note said the machine was skipping characters and could Mr. Ballard please take a look. They had six of these machines at the firm. This was the oldest one, purchased in 1973, and it had been used by at least a dozen different secretaries over the years. Frank could tell a lot about a machine's history from the wear patterns. This Selectric had heavy wear on the T, H, E, A, and N keys, which was normal for English, but also unusually heavy wear on the parentheses and the semicolon, which told him it had spent years producing legal documents full of numbered clauses and citations. The Selectric was a different animal than the Olivetti or the Royal. It did not use typebars. Instead, it had a type element, a small sphere about the size of a golf ball, covered in raised letters. When you pressed a key, the ball rotated and tilted to bring the correct letter to the front, then struck the ribbon against the paper. It was an ingenious piece of engineering and Frank respected it even though it was not, strictly speaking, the kind of machine his father had taught him to repair. His father had died in 1968 and had never worked on a Selectric. Frank had taught himself by ordering the service manual from IBM and reading it three times and then taking apart a broken one he bought at an estate sale. The skipping problem was usually caused by a worn or dirty cycle clutch. Frank opened the machine and confirmed this. The clutch was worn almost smooth in places. He had a replacement in stock because he kept three of everything for the Selectrics. The law firms were his steadiest customers. Not the best paying, they always negotiated, but the steadiest. While he worked, he thought about the note that had come with the machine. It was typed cleanly, professionally, without error. But at the bottom, someone had added in pen: They are talking about getting computers for the whole office. Just thought you should know. Signed with the initials P.K. He did not know who P.K. was. Probably one of the secretaries. Probably someone who had spent years learning to operate the Selectric at seventy or eighty words per minute, who knew every sound the machine made, who could tell by the feel of the keys whether the ribbon was getting low or the element needed cleaning. Someone who understood that this skill, this intimate knowledge of a particular machine, was about to become worthless. Frank finished the repair in two hours. He typed a test page, running through every character twice, checking the alignment and the impression. The type was clean and even. The ball spun and struck and spun again with the mechanical precision that had made IBM the standard for twenty years. He called the firm and told them it was ready. A courier picked it up that afternoon. Frank never saw that particular machine again. Six months later, Hendricks, Marsh and Lowell bought a fleet of IBM PCs with WordPerfect and donated their Selectrics to a Catholic school in Price Hill. Frank heard about it from one of the secretaries who stopped by his shop to tell him. She said it with the particular flatness of someone reporting a death that was not unexpected but was still, somehow, a shock. She was learning to use the new system, she said. It was fine. The spell check was useful. But she missed the sound.
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Part 4
Chapter 4: The Quiet Months
Business slows. Frank takes stock.
Part 1 of 1
By the spring of 1986, Frank was repairing about three machines a week where he used to repair three a day. The arithmetic was simple and he did not need a calculator or a computer to do it. His rent was four hundred dollars a month. His parts supplier had raised prices twice in the past year because the volume was down and the per-unit cost was up. The ribbon manufacturer in Pennsylvania had stopped returning his calls, and when Frank finally reached someone, a receptionist who sounded very young, she told him they were transitioning to printer ribbons for dot matrix machines. Transitioning. That was the word she used, as though the company were a caterpillar becoming a butterfly rather than a business abandoning its customers. He found another ribbon supplier, a man in Toronto who sold them by mail order. The ribbons were fine but the shipping took two weeks and cost almost as much as the ribbons themselves. Frank began spending his empty hours organizing the shop. He had always been organized but now he was meticulous. He labeled every drawer of the green metal cabinet with a hand-lettered card. He sorted his screwdrivers by size and type and hung them on a pegboard above the workbench. He cleaned the front windows, which he had not done in years, and was surprised by how much more light came in. The shop looked almost cheerful with clean windows. He could see the dry cleaner next door and the vacuum bag place on the other side and the street beyond with its parking meters and its sycamore trees that were just beginning to leaf out in the weak March sun. A woman came in one afternoon with a Smith Corona portable that her daughter had used in college. The daughter was out of college now and did not want it. The woman asked if it was worth anything. Frank looked at it. It was a Corsair, probably early 1970s, in working condition but nothing special. He told the woman he would give her fifteen dollars for it. She seemed disappointed. She said her daughter had typed her senior thesis on it, a hundred and twenty pages about the symbolism in the novels of Toni Morrison, and it seemed like it should be worth more than fifteen dollars. Frank said he understood but that was what it was worth. The woman left with the typewriter. She did not sell it. Frank was glad. He would have bought it and put it on the shelf with the other machines people had sold him, a slowly growing collection of orphans whose owners had moved on to something newer, faster, cleaner. He had fourteen machines on the shelf now. He did not intend to sell them. He was not sure what he intended to do with them. They were just there, the way certain objects accumulate in a life, not because you need them but because getting rid of them would feel like agreeing that they do not matter. His wife, Carol, asked him about the business over dinner. She worked at the public library on Eighth Street and had watched the card catalog get replaced by a computer terminal the previous year. She understood what was happening. She did not say you should close the shop, because she was not that kind of person. She said, what do you want to do? And Frank said he wanted to keep going. She nodded. That was enough for both of them. He kept going.
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Part 5
Chapter 5: The Last Machine
Frank makes peace with what's ending and what endures.
Part 1 of 1
The last typewriter Frank Ballard ever repaired professionally was a Hermes 3000, seafoam green, brought in by a woman in her seventies who said it had belonged to her late husband. He had been a minister and he had written all his sermons on it. Forty years of Sundays, she said. She did not need it repaired because she planned to use it. She needed it repaired because it was the only thing she had that still held the shape of his hands. The indentations on the keys where his fingers had rested. The slight oil stain on the space bar from the lotion he used for his arthritis. She wanted it to work because a machine that works is alive in a way that a machine sitting in a closet is not. Frank understood this completely. He replaced the ribbon and cleaned the type slugs and adjusted the line spacing mechanism, which had slipped. He oiled the carriage rails and tested every key. The Hermes 3000 was, in his opinion, the finest portable typewriter ever manufactured. The Swiss had made it with the same care they gave to watches. The action was smooth and light, the type was clean, and the machine had a particular smell when it was warm from use, a combination of oil and metal and ribbon ink that Frank associated with competence, with work done well and on time. He charged the woman thirty dollars, which was less than the repair was worth. She paid in cash, exact change, counted out from a small coin purse. She thanked him and asked if he would be here if she needed anything else. He said yes. He was not sure that was true. The lease was up in four months and his landlord had mentioned that a copy shop was interested in the space. A copy shop. Frank could appreciate the irony if he squinted at it from the right angle. He closed up that evening and walked home the way he always did, west on Vine to Liberty, then south to the narrow street where he and Carol had lived for twenty-six years. It was November and the air had the particular cold of Cincinnati in early winter, damp and gray, the kind of cold that settled into your coat and stayed. He passed the office supply store on the corner of Vine and Twelfth. The window display had three personal computers arranged on fake wood-grain desks. A sign said THE FUTURE IS HERE. Frank stopped and looked at them for a while. They were beige, like the shop machines at the law firms. They had keyboards, which he supposed was something. The keyboards were not mechanical, he could tell that from looking. They had a flimsy, plastic quality. But they were keyboards, and people would put their fingers on them and type words, and the words would appear on a screen instead of on paper but they would still be words. The instrument was changing but the motion was the same. Fingers reaching for letters. The thought forming in the mind, traveling down the arm, arriving at the tips of the fingers and pressing down. That would not go away. That would survive whatever came next. He put his hands in his pockets and kept walking. The streetlights came on above him, one by one, all the way down the block, the way they did every evening at this hour, automatic and reliable, each one doing exactly what it was built to do.
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Story Complete
You have finished The Last Typewriter Shop. The machines may be quiet now, but the words remain.
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