Keyboards That Shift to the Past : Typewriter Collector Has All Kinds, but Don’t Take Away His Computer
If you find something seductive about pounding on keys that answer back with a loud clackety-clack, then you’re Darryl Rehr’s type.
Rehr lives in a West Los Angeles bungalow filled with 75 typewriters that range from the first (a wooden-levered machine built in 1874) to the funniest-looking (a turn-of-the-century letter-dialer that tediously punches out one character at a time).
But although he is head of the international Early Typewriter Collectors Assn., don’t expect to hear him moaning over the demise of the typewriter.
And whatever you do, don’t expect to see him hunched over one when he sits down to write about typewriters for his group’s quarterly magazine or for the collectors’ book he is finishing.
“A computer is so much better,” said the Typewriter King.
It helps, of course, that the Macintosh on Rehr’s desk is programmed with printing fonts that duplicate antique typefaces of old Royals and Underwoods and the Sholes & Glidden Type-writer. Letters look authentic, right down to dirt-clogged E’s and Ws.
The first successful typewriter was patented in 1868 by Milwaukee machinists Christopher Latham Sholes and Carlos Glidden and marketed six years later by the Remington firearms company.
By 1900 a variety of designs were in use. Most employed Sholes’ QWERTY keyboard, which separated the most commonly used letters to keep them from becoming jammed. But one-letter-at-a-time pointer models were also popular, selling for as little as $5--or $6 in “all states and territories west of the Mississippi River,” as makers of the Edland typewriter advertised.
Typing machines recorded their own history for the next 100 years. The portable came along first, followed by electric models in the 1920s, automatic Selectrics in the 1960s and electronic word-processors in the 1970s.
The typewriter era officially ended a year ago when the 113-year-old Smith Corona Corp. filed for bankruptcy. That sent the nostalgic rushing to their computer terminals to write eulogies to the machine that influenced so many lives.
Not Rehr, though.
“The things that have replaced them are much better. Time marches on,” the 45-year-old television producer said with a grin. Anyway, “if they weren’t becoming obsolete, what would we collect?”
But give a tug to Rehr’s own carriage return and he gets nostalgic too.
“On a gut level, there’s something about the tactile sensation you get from a typewriter that you don’t from a computer,” he acknowledged. “It takes you back to the first time Dad put you in the corner and let you go whackety-clickety with the thing.
“On an intellectual level, can you think of a better way of time travel than sitting at an old typewriter, wondering who sat there before you? It’s not just the specific words that came out of this machine, but what kind of person bought it 90 or 100 years ago.”
In Rehr’s view, the typewriter deserves to be ranked “right up there with the telegraph and telephone. It didn’t change the way we lived as much as the way we work. It brought office paperwork up to speed with what was being done down on the factory floor.”
Rehr began collecting typewriters 12 years ago. During college he had purchased a 1911 Royal No. 5 for $15 at a flea market and used it for term papers. When it broke, he spent $18 on a 1908 Remington No. 10.
“When you have those sitting on your desk for years, you get curious about them,” he said. “When you sit in front of them, you are doing exactly what some other guy did 100 years ago.”
These days Rehr finds himself playing detective in more ways than one when he sets out to find an obscure Edison, Victor Index, Caligraph or Saturn machine. He already knows about its ancestry. So he tries to trace its heritage.
When he purchased an ornate 1896 Ford typewriter from a Rhode Island resident three months ago, Rehr also wrangled a photograph of its original owner, a pattern maker named George Downs, who was born in 1856. The old picture is displayed next to the Ford in Rehr’s living room.
Most of Rehr’s typewriters are kept in his study, down a hallway whose walls are lined with about 500 old typewriter ribbon tins.
His collection includes an 1899 Chicago typewriter that printed letters by striking the paper against the type cylinder; the first electric portable, a 1953 Smith Corona; a tiny 1895 Blickensderfer; and a 1960 Olivetti that was used in college by Rehr’s wife, Kier Linn.
The Early Typewriter Collectors Assn. was launched in 1987 by the late Dan Post, an Arcadia typewriter fan. It currently lists about 250 members, two-thirds of whom live in the United States. The group can be reached at P.O. Box 641824, Los Angeles 90064.
About two dozen Los Angeles-area residents are active typewriter collectors. Most, like Woodland Hills advertising copywriter Steve Sperber, would rather polish them than pound out letters on them.
“When it comes to work, I use a Mac,” Sperber said.
