I like everything about typewriters. I like that to me they're little time
pieces, little pieces of history. You've got an old machine and you can't help
but wonder how many people have typed on it, you know, what they've typed on, how
many families have have had that in their house.
The shop was originally in Cambridge. It was started in 1968 by my next-door
neighbor. It was a family business and I came to work there in 1980. By then they
were into typewriter repairs and sales. Just after I started working there was
when big changes were coming to the typewriter industry and computers were
just starting to show up. The original owner actually was one of my best friends
and my mentor, a very important person in my life anyway, retired in 1990 and we
moved the shop from Cambridge to Arlington. Eventually I got into antique typewriters
and found that people were collecting them and younger people were starting to
use them and that's I saw very quickly that that was the direction they're
going.
Well I'm thinking that I'll probably want to do that. The clientele has changed
dramatically. Probably half of my business comes from people under 30 years old now.
Nice one I'm done. Okay, then I'll see you in a minute. Okay. Call first. Thank you.
Okay I will. The most fun of this job absolutely the most fun is when a mom
or a dad bring in like their 14 year old daughter or whatever and she's going to
pick out her first typewriter and you know she's got like a smile this wide
you know she sees all the typewriters and and picks up this beautiful machine
and just you know the look on their faces when they're walking out of here
with that. It's just you can't even put a price on it's just it makes my day.
Absolutely makes my day. If you want to find out the exact date. It's really
gotten busier over the last seven or eight years. Before then it was very
questionable. It was even a period back you know late 90s right around 2000 where
I really thought I was going out of business and then this whole typewriter
resurgence kind of I could see it starting to happen. Half of my day I
spend downtown doing service calls. Enough companies still have typewriters
you know using for you know forms on beloved labels and that's probably the
biggest source of income is from you know companies using typewriters. A lot of
people still have selectrics or you know office machines they use at home too. A
lot of people run businesses out of their homes so I get a lot of machines
that way and that's probably my biggest source of income here but the other the
flip side of it is people using the older manual typewriters which is very
quickly catching up to that and it's almost an even type thing right now.
If you're used to typing on a computer and you go to type on a typewriter now
you're just typing you know there's no distractions and you've got something
else it's a hundred years old and it's going to last another hundred years and
it's what a lot of the young people are just finding out that this is
experience you know of touch and feel and you know and hearing and that you
just don't get on a computer and I love all of that and the bell and everything
and it's a great experience and it's a great way to write.
you
