I had glued a picture of P G Wodehouse to the back inside cover of my first Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary and there was this handwritten caption below it, ‘My favourite author’. The creator of Jeeves with his shiny bald with very sparse and almost invisible grey hair was a picture of writerly concentration in that black and white picture. He was at his writing desk close to a window that opened into a garden. I saw three glossy things in that picture, the writer’s head, the fore-ground paperweight idly sitting on some papers ready to be loaded with humorous writing and a typewriter.
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Wodehouse had his eyes and hands on the keys of the typewriter, may be as advised by the photographer, but it was a less humorous, glum posture for a writer who had mastered hilarious writing that offered everything from wry smiles to hearty guffaws to the reader. Maybe it was Wodehouse’s grave countenance and the typewriter’s alluring looks; I began shifting my focus from the writer to his writing tool, that shiny little typewriter with curvaceous metal edges.
Every time I looked at the picture the typewriter seemed to have grown a little more in its exquisiteness and eventually I had to add ‘and typewriter’ to that photo caption. Typewriter is a magic machine that brings your thoughts down to a paper. Like in the piano you just press keys down as the needle-like type bars go up and down and it’s a different kind of soul music, writing.
Usually, the typewriters in India are huge, clumsy chatterboxes, the kind that keeps unleashing the monosyllabic rants, ‘thud, thud’, or ‘tut, tut’ and there wasn’t any dearth of these sounds in an office, government or private, until late 90’s. They can be monsters if compared to the sleek ‘Wodehouse’ kind but they were among the revered tools of human expression in the bygone era.
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Typewriters may have been swept away in the flood of modern-day inventions and the ones left have just antic value but there are people who are still obsessed with them and Tom Hanks is one in the fold. Hanks is a collector of vintage typewriters who has 250 manual typewriters in his possession. I didn’t know this when I ordered a copy of his book online. Though not sure of his writing skills, I ordered the book for the sake of admiration I have for his acting skills from the ‘Cast Away’ days. Surprisingly Hanks’ book has stories which are somehow related to typewriters and there is this embossed image of an old typewriter accompanied by a pair of glass on the cover. Guessed what is the title of the book? ‘ Uncommon Type’. In this smart-phone era when a thumb will suffice to all your typing needs, it is so heartening to see a guy having an affair with old typewriters and writing stories about them too. Just my type.
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