Notes from a Public Typewriter
Jun 15, 2019 14:12:52 GMT
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Post by Carl LaFong on Jun 15, 2019 14:12:52 GMT
A heart-warming experiment.
Fears, apologies, jokes, philosophies – a bookshop’s vintage typewriter inspires visitors to write.
The first typewriter Michael Gustafson fell in love with was a 1930s Smith Corona. As a child he saw it on his grandfather’s writing desk and later, when he was a struggling writer, his grandmother gave it to him. “Click-clacking” on the old typewriter “stirred something” in him: not only did he feel connected to his late grandfather, but the machine “made writing fun again”.
In spring 2013, he and his wife, Hilary, left their jobs in New York City and opened the Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Ann Arbor has a proud tradition of independent bookshops: it once had more per capita than any other US city. The original Borders was opened there by Tom and Louis Borders in 1971. But it closed in 2011, amid doom-laden newspaper headlines predicting the death of the high-street bookshop.
Friends told them they were crazy: “How can you survive if Borders couldn’t?” But although they admitted to being “terrified”, the Gustafsons were not deterred. This was personal: “Opening a community-minded independent bookstore was a dream we’d shared since we bonded over books on our first date.”
Literati’s logo is a typewriter and his grandfather’s Smith Corona is proudly displayed by the store’s cash register. On the lower level of the shop, they set up a light blue Olivetti Lettera 32, inserted a clean sheet of white paper and left it there, “the world’s smallest publishing house, waiting for an author”. Gustafson admits that they did wonder whether people would even know how to use it. But at the end of the first day he saw the words “Thank you for being here”. It was as if “the typewriter itself was thanking me”.
Since then, Literati’s public typewriter has become part of the shop’s identity. People have used it to propose, to admit fears, to apologise, to joke and to philosophise. Some of the best notes are put up on a wall behind the typewriter and used on the shop’s social media account. The artist Oliver Uberti (the book’s designer) has even painstakingly copied some on to the shop’s brick walls using the exact font of the old Smith Corona, “smudgy e’s, q’s, and all”.
The anonymous notes collected in this short but beautifully designed book offer ample evidence of the success of this “public typewriter experiment”. They range from the banal (“I don’t know what to say”) and the amusing (“misspelling is a suign of genius”), to the poignant: “I spent 22 years telling her to do great things. Now that she has gone to do them I am sad.” Some verge on the profound: “Life, like this typewriter, has no backspace. Type strongly and don’t look back.”
This is a delightfully quirky, heart-warming celebration of the “messy, smudgy, imperfect beauty” of a past analogue era of ink, paper and mechanical keys. As a succinct note puts it: “i love it when you talk typewriter to me”.
• Notes from a Public Typewriter by Michael Gustafson & Oliver Uberti is published by Scribe (RRP £9.99).
Fears, apologies, jokes, philosophies – a bookshop’s vintage typewriter inspires visitors to write.
The first typewriter Michael Gustafson fell in love with was a 1930s Smith Corona. As a child he saw it on his grandfather’s writing desk and later, when he was a struggling writer, his grandmother gave it to him. “Click-clacking” on the old typewriter “stirred something” in him: not only did he feel connected to his late grandfather, but the machine “made writing fun again”.
In spring 2013, he and his wife, Hilary, left their jobs in New York City and opened the Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Ann Arbor has a proud tradition of independent bookshops: it once had more per capita than any other US city. The original Borders was opened there by Tom and Louis Borders in 1971. But it closed in 2011, amid doom-laden newspaper headlines predicting the death of the high-street bookshop.
Friends told them they were crazy: “How can you survive if Borders couldn’t?” But although they admitted to being “terrified”, the Gustafsons were not deterred. This was personal: “Opening a community-minded independent bookstore was a dream we’d shared since we bonded over books on our first date.”
Literati’s logo is a typewriter and his grandfather’s Smith Corona is proudly displayed by the store’s cash register. On the lower level of the shop, they set up a light blue Olivetti Lettera 32, inserted a clean sheet of white paper and left it there, “the world’s smallest publishing house, waiting for an author”. Gustafson admits that they did wonder whether people would even know how to use it. But at the end of the first day he saw the words “Thank you for being here”. It was as if “the typewriter itself was thanking me”.
Since then, Literati’s public typewriter has become part of the shop’s identity. People have used it to propose, to admit fears, to apologise, to joke and to philosophise. Some of the best notes are put up on a wall behind the typewriter and used on the shop’s social media account. The artist Oliver Uberti (the book’s designer) has even painstakingly copied some on to the shop’s brick walls using the exact font of the old Smith Corona, “smudgy e’s, q’s, and all”.
The anonymous notes collected in this short but beautifully designed book offer ample evidence of the success of this “public typewriter experiment”. They range from the banal (“I don’t know what to say”) and the amusing (“misspelling is a suign of genius”), to the poignant: “I spent 22 years telling her to do great things. Now that she has gone to do them I am sad.” Some verge on the profound: “Life, like this typewriter, has no backspace. Type strongly and don’t look back.”
This is a delightfully quirky, heart-warming celebration of the “messy, smudgy, imperfect beauty” of a past analogue era of ink, paper and mechanical keys. As a succinct note puts it: “i love it when you talk typewriter to me”.
• Notes from a Public Typewriter by Michael Gustafson & Oliver Uberti is published by Scribe (RRP £9.99).
