For other people it's very tactile, right? They like the sound, they like the mechanical process. “Some people, it's just they like the look and the aesthetic of them, they don't even care if they really work. “There's a lot of different reasons why people collect typewriters,” says MacLennon, an assistant professor of political science who is originally from New Brunswick, Canada. Vintage typewriters line the shelves in his office. On the campus of Park University in Parkville, Missouri, Jack MacLennan is known as the typewriter guy. KCUR 89.3 Checking under the hood of his Alpine blue Smith Corona Silent-Super, assistant professor of political science Jack MacLennan works in his office at Park University. (In his autobiography, Twain famously misremembered the first book he typed out as 1876's " The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.") In 1882 he composed the first manuscript written on a typewriter, " Life on the Mississippi," with a Remington No.
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Twain managed to overcome the quirks of typing words on a page. After a year or two I found that it was degrading my character." “It had as many immoralities as the machine of today has virtues.
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"That early machine was full of caprices, full of defects - devilish ones,” Twain wrote in 1904. He reportedly liked the machine at first, but developed a fraught relationship with his "newfangled typing machine." Mark Twain, Missouri’s most cantankerous storyteller, bought his first typewriter in 1873. The first commercially successful typewriter was patented in 1868 by inventor Christopher Latham Sholes, who designed the QWERTY keyboard that, with a few adaptations, is still in use. The name comes from the first six letters in the top-left corner of the keyboard.īut the first typewriters were awkward. Smith typewriter hiding beneath a dust cover at Reclaimed by Michele, a vintage shop in Lawrence, Kansas.
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KCUR 89.3 Although she prefers to collect portable models from the 1950s, Alison Dishinger will sometimes take home machines to save them from crafters who remove keys to make jewelry. “To have a 70-year-old machine show up and be in fine working order is just a thrill.” “The thing that I love the most is finding a functional machine in the wild, like this one,” Dishinger says. This one, Dishinger says, just needs a good cleaning. She prefers midcentury portables, but she’ll pick up just about any typewriter she thinks she can repair. She regularly attended national typewriter gatherings before the COVID-19 pandemic shut them down. “And most of the stuff I'm seeing on it is is typical of the type of its age, so I'm going to go ahead and roll some paper into it and see how it types.”ĭishinger owns more than 100 typewriters, and is very involved in the typewriter community. “I basically just do an overall inspection of how clean it is, if it's missing any parts,” Dishinger says. The keys clack as she tests each one to see if any of them stick. For Dishinger, it’s an unusual find because the machine was made in Canada. The one she finds turns out to be a gunmetal gray Royal Companion, built in 1953. Usually they're on the floor, they're underneath something.”
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“And we'll always have our eye out for that box, that square box. “So this is part of what typewriter enthusiasts do,” Dishinger says. As she carefully picks her way through the antique wardrobes, desks, and stacks of plates that cover nearly every surface, she's keeping an eye out for something in particular.
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Among the old furniture and knickknacks that crowd the aisles of Reclaimed by Michele, a vintage shop in North Lawrence, Kansas, Alison Dishinger is on the hunt.