California Typewriter

Sunday, August 215t, 1966.

A perfect day for an execution.

Approximately 122 miles southwest of Las Vegas,

a 1963 Buick LeSabre, license plate FUP744,

is hammering along US highway 91, Interstate 15.

- Ed was driving my car, a '63 Buick.

Pat Blackwell was in the backseat with all his camera stuff.

I had a typewriter with me and it was Ed's typewriter.

One of the feet was broken off of it and I said,

man, I don't have any place to put my feet.

So I said, I'll buy you another typewriter, Ed,

let's throw this thing out the window.

And he said, toss it.

- At 5:07 PM, the passenger window rolls down.

- We saw a flat place up ahead and I said,

okay, get her up to 90 miles an hour and

at the right moment, I just tossed it.

The wreckage stretches along

189 feet of asphalt and Nevada desert.

- Either me or Ed said, you know we should go back

and photograph that.

If there was ever an investigation of this,

was it an accident or was it a murder?

It was too directly bound to its own anguish

to be anything other than a cry of negation,

carrying within itself, the seeds of its own destruction.

- Ed Ruscha and Mason Williams' Royal Road Test

is still one of my favorite books.

It looks like a technical manual,

it's a little yellow, spiral bound notebook.

The kind of thing that you might have received

as an instruction manual with any Royal typewriter.

Scene of strewn wreckage.

Figure in foreground points to impact area,

there is no real explanation of it,

you're just kind of confronted with the bald facts of it

and these really stark black and white photos.

The kind of thing that you might see if someone

was investigating a crime scene.

Carriage assembly.

- Then you're left trying to make sense out of it.

When I found that book,

it was kind of a definitive moment for me.

I looked at it and I thought, yeah,

this is the grave of typewriting,

this is the moment when it stopped being one thing

and started being something else.

- Here we are now, Lot 84, Cormac McCarthy's

Olivetti manual typewriter,

on which he has typed all but one of all of his novels,

including three not yet published.

And I can open up.

It is on the left at $45,000, $48,000, $50,000.

$60,000, 70,000.

$80,000.

$85,000.

$90,000

$95,000.

$120,000, you came all this way.

$170,000.

$180,000.

$190,000.

$200,000.

Wanna say $210,000?

$210,000.

$210,000.

Last chance, at end selling, $210,000.

Congratulations, sir, Paddle 623.

- We've become a throwaway society.

Obsolete,

depends on your point of view, I guess.

We'll take care of it for you, have it fixed

in no time at all, sir.

I've been repairing typewriters

here in Berkeley for 38 years.

You name it, I've probably worked on it.

The first six or seven years I was in this business

I ate, drank, slept Smith Corona typewriters.

The Standards, the Sterlings, the Clippers, the Silents,

the Super Silents, the Galaxies, the Classic 125,

the Skywriters.

I like 'em because they've got a cool, nice touch on 'em.

I think that Smith-Corona is like a good version

of a Chevy, it holds up.

It's not a Benz like maybe an Olympia might be,

but it's a good Chevy.

Quiet.

Dependable.

California Typewriters is a small, family-run business.

It's just the owner Herb, his daughters, and me.

You have to push up on here.

- Herb bought the typewriter shop back in the early 80$.

Just about the time that personal computer

came on the scene.

He's an ex-IBM guy.

He knows the IBM Selectric and the ball machine,

but he's probably the best Selectric guy I know.

I mean, I've worked on a few, but I can't come close

to his skills on a Selectric.

Herb's got a dream that people

are gonna come back to typewriters.

- My dad believes that there are various people

all over the place totally excited about typewriters.

I think he thinks it's somewhat of a wave of the future.

That more people are gonna come back to them,

just for different reasons.

He's hopeful, for sure.

And he's willing to spend his last dime.

- I probably have 250 plus typewriters in my collection

and I would say that 90% of them

are in perfect working order.

I've tried to foster a community of typewriting people

and it hasn't quite worked.

I've given typewriters to folks,

because I have a lot of spares.

And if somebody says,

jeez, I'd like to have a typewriter to write letters.

It's on their desk within 48 hours,

with a note from me explaining the typewriter to them.

I go to their houses later on

and they have it up on a shelf somewhere

like it's an object of art.

And I say, get that bad boy down, put it on your desk.

Have it right there

so you can always type something to somebody.

I type almost every day.

There's usually a memo that I'm sending to somebody

or a question or a thank you

I hate getting email thank yous from folks.

Hey, we had a great time last night.

Or, hey, I really appreciated it.

So, really, you appreciated it so much that you

took seven seconds to send me an email.

Now if they take 70 seconds to type me out something

on a piece of paper and send it to me,

well, I'll keep that forever.

Otherwise I'll just delete that email.

Look, there's always gonna be great watches that are made,

you'll have to pay a premium for them.

The truth is, no good typewriters

are ever gonna be made again.

No matter how much of a premium

you're gonna want to pay for 'em.

There is no factory, there is no businessman in the world

who's going to open up a factory and says,

we

are going to make

the finest typewriter that will last absolutely forever

and anybody who is willing to pay the $17,000

for a Hanks Typewriter.

Well, they're gonna pass it down to their gen...

No, that's not gonna...

They might do that with a watch.

You might do that, there'll always be a new iPad

that's coming down the pike,

there's always gonna be good cars and things like that,

but no one is ever going to make the great typewriter

ever, ever, ever again.

Boo hoo.

- When I was a kid I didn't really think about the future.

We were constantly building things.

We built go carts, we built balsa wood gliders,

we built a five-story tree house.

And it was the house

that the neighborhood kids came to play.

My parents didn't care what we did,

they didn't worry about noise and we could build things

in my father's workshop.

It was a tremendous childhood.

My name is Martin Howard.

I've been collecting 19th century typewriters,

from the 18805 and 18905 for 22 years now.

I didn't want to collect Swiss music boxes

or microscopes, or telescopes,

I wanted to collect something that was sort of off the radar

in that regard.

The quality of how things were built

at that time is spectacular.

Cast and machine made part5 beautifully painted.

It's the wild west of typewriters.

My collection I call the Martin Howard collection.

They're all typewriters of nonstandard design.

During the 18805 and 18905,

there were many different styles of typewriters,

but there were two main classes of typewriters.

One was the keyboard typewriter and the other,

what we call are now index typewriters.

I really love typewriters that are the genesis

of an idea, the very beginning form.

Even if it was a failure down the road

and died out of the evolutionary tree,

that's okay, I like the beginning of any idea.

One of the things I love finding in my typewriters

when I'm working on them is a dried spider,