PHILADELPHIA — How busy can a typewriter shop be in 2024, when software codes write themselves, when the siren song of artificial intelligence beckons to help us come up with better emails and statements, not to mention (gulp) news ?
Pretty busy, as it turns out, if that store is Philly Typewriter.
And the millennials, hunched over desk lamps, small tools and cleaning cloths in hand, aren’t the only ones entranced by the click-clack-clack of these old machines. Poets, artists, writers and even high school students put words to paper and find pleasure in the sounds of fingers on keys, the Brrring! of the return wheel.
“Typewriters never really went away,” says Bill Rhoda, co-owner and chief mechanic at Philly Typewriter. Police stations, courts, those who register birth and death certificates, title companies — many of them still use typewriters, Rhoda said. “We went away, the mechanics. The typewriters are still there.”
Rhoda, 35, had a background in higher education but felt burned out when he found an old typewriter at his mother’s home. However, there was no ribbon attached, so he looked online and found Bryan Kravitz, who specializes in IBM Selectric repairs. Rhoda wanted to learn it too. Kravitz enjoyed teaching him.
“I just put my head down and learned how to do it,” Rhoda said, and he teamed up with Kravitz to open Philly Typewriter in 2017.
Their neighbors in South Philadelphia were a little stunned when the foundation stones were opened, Rhoda said. People thought it would be a pop-up, but what started as a plastic table and a red umbrella has become more than a store.
It’s a community where like-minded people come to learn, read, write, make art, and find others who are just their type. And it’s not the only community built around these old machines.
Ryan Anderson works on a typewriter at Philly Typewriter. The shop offers restorations, sales and repairs, but also offers classes for the public to learn typewriter repairs and hosts community events
‘An enchantment and a romance’ with typewriters
In Midland, Pennsylvania, Fred Durbin’s students at Lincoln Park Performing Arts Charter School write like many of the 20th century’s greatest minds: on typewriters.
Guided by “The Typewriter Revolution,” a book by Richard Polt that Durbin described as “walking a line between writing and philosophy,” students use typewriters from Durbin’s personal collection.
But first Durbin, who is also a novelist, had to teach the students about typewriters: how to store them, how to transport them (“They’re portable, but not portable,” he said) from one classroom to another , how to load paper into the rollers and use the keys.
Ravenna Rodgers, a student in Fred Durbin’s class at Lincoln Park Performing Arts Charter School in Midland, Pennsylvania, looks at her typed story.
“We use them to connect with younger people who are so lost on their screens, who are used to seeing everything right away,” he said. His approach is to get students to think of themselves as artists, “using our senses and focusing on one thing at a time.” A typewriter, he said, demands full attention, unlike a computer where other tabs tempt the easily distracted.
“I emphasize that it’s okay for a rough draft to be rough. It makes them think more with their heads than their fingers. You have to think more carefully.
“At first there was a spell and a romance,” Durbin said. “But it was also a challenge. They are not used to working this way at all and there was a certain resistance that we had to overcome.”
According to him, that resistance has disappeared. About two dozen students, mostly juniors and seniors, will work on typed projects and meet with authors this semester (Polt will talk to the class via Zoom later this month). And some have even picked out their own typewriters from thrift stores and flea markets.
Fred Durbin adjusts a sticky key during his class at Lincoln Park Performing Arts Charter School. Durbin teaches his creative writing students to slow down and think more about their work by using typewriters.
Tom Hanks and Taylor Swift: Just their type
Philly Typewriter grew quickly, Rhoda said, thanks to its South Philadelphia community, where independent shops and restaurants spread to world-famous destinations like the Italian Market (where Rocky Balboa went running) and Pat’s and Geno’s, touristy cheesesteak shops.
A few celebrities helped, one directly and one indirectly, he added: Actor and typewriter enthusiast Tom Hanks donated a rare typewriter to the store in 2023. And then there’s “the Taylor Swift effect,” Rhoda added, referring to the pop megastar’s typewriter. reference to her album’s title song, “Tortured Poets Department.”
The shop repairs, services and sells primarily manual typewriters, returning them to “as close to factory new as possible,” Rhoda said. There is a typewriter “graveyard” in the basement of unrepairable machines used for parts; cabinets filled with components and manuals; even machines and schematics to make difficult or impossible to find parts on site.
Bill Rhoda is behind the counter at Philly Typewriter. Signs behind him read: “Use a typewriter for better mental health” and “These will never be made again.”
But it’s the community that Philly Typewriter has built that has helped it gain customers and fans across the country and around the world.
The shop offers maintenance and repair classes to the public (including Philadelphia school students). The store hosts poetry nights, open mics, comedy shows and other events. It even provides typewriters to public places such as bookstores, libraries and coffee shops to bring the machines back into the collective consciousness.
“I work with the most amazing people in the world,” said Rhoda, referring not only to his colleagues at Philly Typewriter, but also to the clients, authors, writers and artists he has met through the Remingtons, Olympias, Smith Coronas and Underwoods. he touches every day.
“They are all brilliant, but also friendly,” he said. “And the things they wrote on typewriters are friendly. Typewriters themselves are friendly works.’
Philly Typewriter’s basement serves as a parts warehouse, a “graveyard” for typewriters that are beyond repair, and a place where they can make some of the smaller parts they need to restore vintage typewriters.
Letters to the President; warnings about censorship
Sheryl Oring, who lived in Berlin in the years after the fall of the Soviet bloc, says typewriters make her a better writer — even if she spends time copying down what other people think.
Oring split her time between Philadelphia and Greensboro, North Carolina, and first fell for typewriters when she kept seeing them as newly free East Germans began clearing out their old possessions. Inspired by the discarded typewriters and ubiquitous building materials she saw around Berlin, she created “Writer’s Block,” an art installation featuring rebar-caged writing utensils on Bebelplatz, where the Nazis burned stacks of books in 1933.
It was a warning against censorship, a warning that has also been spread to other cities, including New York and Boston. She is now working with the National Coalition Against Censorship to add the installation to libraries across the US
Sheryl Oring’s “I Wish to Say” is a way for the audience to dictate a postcard to the U.S. President. Oring types the messages verbatim on a manual typewriter while she is here in Philadelphia at a performance in February.
But ‘Writer’s Block’ is not Oring’s only typewriter-related work.
Since 2004, Oring has invited voters to write letters to presidential candidates. Dressed as a 1960s secretary, she takes dictated advice and appeals to the person who will hold the highest office in the land.
This year, she set up herself and a vintage typewriter outside the Free Library of Philadelphia on Election Day, listening to voters in a crucial battleground.
Using a typewriter “makes me think more clearly about what I want to say before I can put it on paper,” says Oring, who has typed more than 4,300 postcards as part of “I Wish To Say,” the originals of which are sent to the White House.
“There’s the sound, which is really beautiful,” she said. “The feel of the keys. I think of it as a sensual object that touches all these different senses. That doesn’t feel the same on a computer.”
She believes typewriters still have a place in our increasingly digital, AI-infused world.
“You know who wrote the letter, you know the background,” she said. “The connections we have with the human aspect (of creativity) are becoming more and more distant, but when you type, in the little mistakes you see the evidence of a human being. I don’t see that as a negative; I see it as the beauty of the human touch.”
There is also an aspect of pleasure, and typing a letter can bring joy not only to the writer, but also to the recipient, she said.
Sheryl Oring created ‘Writer’s Block’ in 1999 in Berlin, Germany, at Bebelplatz, the site of the Nazi book burning of 1933. The artist collected hundreds of typewriters from across Europe and ‘caged’ them to promote free speech and the dangers of to emphasize censorship.
A woman she spoke to in Philadelphia recalled her mother’s promise to give her a typewriter after she completed a typing course. “She still has that typewritten note from her mother,” Oring said. ‘It’s a way to preserve our personal history. You don’t save emails. You don’t keep text messages.’
Phaedra Trethan isn’t sure where her old Smith Corona is, but it was on her mind the entire time she reported and wrote this story. Maybe in her mother’s attic? Reach her at [email protected], at Bluesky @byphaedra or at Threads @by_phaedra.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Clack to the future: Why typewriters are making a comeback
