Ye Type-wrytinge machine thingy...

The world supply of uber-cool esoteric geekery just went down a little.

Martin Tytell has died.

Most people won't know who he was, and that's quite understandable. He was a typewriter repairman in New York City. Mr. Tytell was the embodiment of the truism that should be tattooed on the inside of every aspiring writer's eyelids, namely that people are generally a lot more interesting than one might think at first glance.

He fixed typewriters for roughly 70 years, but did a great deal more than that. He also specialized in converting American typewriters to handle foreign scripts. As you might imagine, this skill was much in demand once WWII broke out. One of the really great stories I read about him from an Atlantic article on him:

He spent much of his time assigned to the Army's Morale Services Division, at 165 Broadway, which dealt in information and propaganda. There he received his hardest job of the war -- a rush request to convert typewriters to twenty-one different languages of Asia and the South Pacific. Many of the languages he had never heard of before. The War Department wanted to provide airmen, in case they were shot down, with survival kits that included messages on silk in the languages of people they were likely to meet on the ground. Morale Services found native speakers and scholars to help with the languages. Martin obtained the type and did the soldering and the keyboards. The implications of the work and its difficulty brought him to near collapse, but he completed it with only one mistake: on the Burmese typewriter he put a letter on upside down. Years later, after he had discovered his error, he told the language professor he had worked with that he would fix that letter on the professor's Burmese typewriter. The professor said not to bother; in the intervening years, as a result of typewriters copied from Martin's original, that upside-down letter had been accepted in Burma as proper typewriter style.

I learned about him from that article when I read it 11 years ago, but I'd forgotten everything except the Burmese typewriter story. I saw his obituary when I read "The Economist" today, and was thrilled to dig the article out again.

Though I not at how I was reminded. But 94 years isn't bad...

You can read the NYT obituary here, the Economist obituary here, and the Atlantic article here. The Atlantic article is truly fascinating.

It's funny, because I've never really had to use a manual typewriter; my family had one that my parents let me play with when I was six or seven, but by the time I had anything to type, we had a Macintosh. I imagine that typewriter would be considered an antique, now... I don't remember the manufacturer, but I still remember the smell of the ink-ribbon. For some reason, I find that scent, along with the smell of library stacks, to be inexpressibly soothing.

Typewriters will be just antiques to my children, and the people who made and repaired them will move on or pass away, like the plumassiers, and the buggy-whip manufacturers. (Naked Lunch will make even less sense to the kids.) It has always been so, from the day that the sledge-makers had to confront that new round wheely thing to the Pentium II gathering dust in my garage. And you'll pry the modern word processor from my cold, dead fingers, but there's always something romantic in looking back at a lost art; a nostalgia for its arcane rituals and trappings. Part of that stopping to take stock, when one of its High Priests passes on.

Ave atque vale, Mr. Tytell.