The typewriter men of their respective cities
I sent typewriter-mad Lindsay the link to the New York Times obit for "Martin K. Tytell, Typewriter Wizard." Best obit I read last week.
When he retired in 2000, Mr. Tytell had practiced his recently vanishing craft for 70 years. For most of that time, he rented, repaired, rebuilt, reconfigured and restored typewriters in a second-floor shop at 116 Fulton Street in Lower Manhattan, where a sign advertised "Psychoanalysis for Your Typewriter."
There, at the Tytell Typewriter Company, he often worked seven days a week wearing a white lab coat and a bow tie, catering to customers like the writers Dorothy Parker and Richard Condon, the newsmen David Brinkley and Harrison Salisbury, and the political opponents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai E. Stevenson. Letters addressed only to "Mr. Typewriter, New York" arrived there, too.
Mr. Tytell worked on typewriters that could reproduce dozens of different alphabets appropriate for as many as 145 different languages and dialects — including Farsi and Serbo-Croatian, Thai and Korean, Coptic and Sanskrit, and ancient and modern Greek. He often said that he kept 2 million typefaces in stock.
She responded with a story on Steve Kazmierski, the typewriter wizard of Chicago, who tells New City Chicago that he doesn't know how to type. "I never met a typewriter man that knew how to type," he says. But even if he has a site, he says typing on computers is worse.
Computers I hate. Oh yeah, 'cause you get in trouble with the computers. That's why everyone has much problems. The computers. Don't you know the problems we are having? With the teenagers. They get in and they deal with narcotics and they buy narcotics. They steal the banks from the people. They cheat people. On computers! That's why I don't trust computers … Computers do nothing. People have to do it.
Computers are nothing. People have to do it.
