The Royal #10



The Royal #10 Typewriter

 Ed and Lynn, a pair of good friends who are just back from a Hawaiian trip, made me a gift of an old Royal #10 Typewriter yesterday. It’s a solid old machine, minted in 1933 and weighing in at a good 25 pounds of solid metal, rubber, and glass. It’s a beautiful machine for an era when it took just under 20 hours to fly from coast to coast, construction of the Golden Gate Bridge had just began, and Europe began its slide into World War II. It also was the year Dashiell Hammett wrote The Thin Man, Agatha Christie wrote The Hound of Death, James Hilton wrote Lost Horizon, and Ellery Queen wrote the American Gun Mystery.


The old Royal has weathered the nearly ninety years it’s been existence with a kind of grace that can’t be ascribed to modern consumer products. The iPod I purchased less than a year ago is scratched shows evidence of every grain of grit it’s encountered. The Royal has a few sticky keys and needs a good cleaning as well as a new ribbon, but it’s no worse for nearly reaching its 100th birthday.



I think we had the same typing teacher...

 There’s something about a machine that’s been around as long as my Royal. It has a kind of gravitas, a force of personality that transforms everything it comes in contact with. It even changes the atmosphere, perfuming it with the scent of old machine oil and ink and putting me in mind of my seat in the back of typing class at high school. Apparently, this is an experience that takes me back to the Great Depression. While writing this piece I found a photograph of young men taking typing lessons and if you look at the fellow in the back row, closest to the camera, he's using a Royal #10. This machine takes you back to a more physical time, a time when it took more effort to do anything than it does now. Even typing your name requires reacquainting yourself with the right wrist position and getting a feel for keys that have to be struck with a little force. It has a sound, and I’m not talking about the hushed warble of plastic computer keys. The Royal hammers your thoughts into the paper, indelibly with mistakes embedded in the end result. It clatters and sounds like it ought to eject a hot casing at the end of each line of text. An old typewriter is noir. It embodies all the hard edges and tough truths, mistakes that can only be covered over and periods that will punch right through a manuscript.

The Royal is the latest step in my assembly of a good, old fashioned detective-style office. It goes well with my old, tube-type radio, wing back chairs, and reproduction Craftsman Style desk. Once I make some hard decisions about furnishings, I’ll be painting and putting up wainscoting and eventually getting a single-light door with my name painted on the glass and a brass mail slot. All I need is a brick wall view and neon light seeping in through the blinds and I’m an alcohol addiction and a partner short of turning into Mike Hammer or Sam Spade. I’ll have to resist taking clients and focus on my writing. As Hemingway once said, "There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."

Vanishing Words

Dear Reader,


I hope you will forgive my doing a rare blogging double-dip today. Generally I tend to space my posts out (it placates my inner laggard) but today the ideas wouldn't be satisfied with sitting in quietly the queue. Compartmentalization seemed the best course of action. Why not get as much mileage out of this productive spree as possible? So there are my excuses and justifications, take them as you will.

What I'm writing about is an episode of the radio program Radio Lab. Some of you may be familiar with the highly produced show out of New York's WNYC. The hosts excel at inducing mental lapses in me. If I tune in I soon find myself staring into the middle distance, totally engrossed in the tale that's pouring out of my headphones. Such is was the case with the recent piece entitled Vanishing Words.

I recommend you listen to this piece since my synopsis can't do it justice. The crux is this: Agatha Christie wrote a great deal of fiction during her long career and recently a scientist has started to analyze the substance of her writing. He has gotten what he believes may be a glimpse into things that the author herself may not have realized about herself. The words Christie used to compose her mysteries may indicate the author was developing Alzheimer's disease. As I said, I recommend you listen to the program, it's very thought provoking.

It's fascinating to think that in everything you write there is a hidden piece of yourself. Behind the biases, prejudices, and habits we all possess, behind our individual style and education, behind our regional tendencies, there are the fingerprints of our mind. There may be a day when biographers add another data source to their toolkit: forensic analysis of documents. A hundred years from now someone might be combing through published works, attempting to divine whether a particular author had a particular mental condition or the exact moment when their mental capacity to write began to decline.

A strange sadness accompanies that thought. In the past few days I've been ruminating on empty spaces and shadows and this idea of missing words creates a lonely trinity. It seems every time you walk through an empty room you leave some phantom of yourself behind. A pale shade of who you were lingers in every hallway you walked, every empty elevator you rode, and ever deserted parking lot you crossed. Our youth sits in disused classrooms and boarded up hotspots, listening to silent music and waiting.