The Typewriter -- Part Of What We Are
- Movie star Tom Hanks is the proud owner of some 150 vintage typewriters. "They fascinate me," he said. "I have one with me at all times. It's the proper way to communicate. I write letters."
- A small museum in Bessemer, Alabama, has a typewriter which it claims once belonged to Adolf Hitler. Some historians doubt the dictator ever typed in his life.
- Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini typed his only novel, a bodice-ripper called The Cardinal's Mistress.
- Ernest Hemingway typed his novels standing at a typewriter placed at chest level on a bookshelf. Other upstanding authors of note included Virginia Woolf, Tom Wolfe and Vladimir Nabokov.
- Jack Kerouac typed his most famous novel, On The Road, on a long roll of paper so he wouldn't have to break his train of thought. After a fortnight he'd produced one single-spaced paragraph 35 metres long.
- Cormac McCarthy typed all his work from 1963 to 2009 on his favourite Olivetti. The machine later raised €200,000 at auction for charity.
- Bond creator Ian Fleming owned a customised gold-plated typewriter which fetched €70,000 at auction in 1995.
- The typewriter as a plot device was in Conan Doyle's 1891 A Case Of Identity, where Sherlock Holmes remarks: "It is a curious thing that a typewriter has really quite as much individuality as a man's handwriting."
- Perhaps the most chilling typewriter moment in cinema history occurs in Kubrick's The Shining when we discover that Jack Nicholson's madman has spent his winter typing the single line: "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."
Irish Independent
