Magic Funk

One of my funky Olympias, from 1956. A box of chocolates! I’ll share a type sample soon. This post tumbled out of me on my laptop using iA Writer, the best non-analog writing tool I have found. So I’ll share it in its original, digital form. (I am not sponsored by iA Writer, but happily would be. A most excellent humane writing program!)

My typewriters all feel different.

This is expected across the entire range of typewriters I own, which include WWI machines cast in iron and brightly-colored plastic 70s whoozits that seem made for children. There seem to be as many typewriters as breeds of dogs--for similarly, they evolved to meet the diverse demands of users of all sorts and types and price points over nearly a century. I would not expect them to feel them same to type on any more than I would a Great Dane to act and bark like a Lhapsa Apso.

But that is not what I am referring to. I mean even among my typewriters that were manufactured by Olympia, the West German company known for exacting standards. The Mercedes Benz of typewriters: the best engineered, constructed to the tightest tolerances. I have opened an obsessive little sideline in trying to acquire examples of all of their models and periods, and have acquired eight machines so far--some of them engineered and built within months of each other, using the same designs*. They are about as alike as a brace of typewriters, could be, family resemblance-wise. And still, each one feels utterly different than the other.

Of course there will be variations among eight used typewriters. Different use patterns, different levels of wear, different environs of storage, temperature, humidity of the basement or attics where they invariably lived out their last decades before an estate sale moved them to a goodwill location or Facebook Marketplace, and thence to me.

But know that they are all clean. "Clean." Meaning: that in the few years I have practiced typewriter restoration, I have discovered that the majority of that work really is cleaning the machine, and I have learned to do that work. Especially at this level of quality, they usually work pretty well still. Relatively few of them are "broken," exactly. Their action might have been stopped by a few simple mechanical failings that come from perishable parts being used up, broken draw bands and hard platens and the sort. But unless they have undergone some acute calamity--unless they have been dropped, or mangled in a fit of pique, or melted or somehow cooked--the majority of them are really just dirty.

And they are spectacularly dirty, some of them, when they come to me. Not just from the moth and dust that corrupts with age: with the human detritus of being touched, intimately, billions of times by unknown hands. Hands that were usually also conveying cigarettes to their owner's mouths.

So cleaning typewriters is therefore a dizzyingly specific and arcane art. What solvents do you use? What applicators, what pressure, what length of time do you leave it on? Whole web pages are dedicated to archiving substances and techniques that have been tried, refined, and sometimes abandoned with remorse. A few are enshrined as almost-always going to work: Soft Scrub, Scrubbing Bubbles, P'Blaster, odorless denatured alcohol. Never WD-40 under any circumstances, as it is not a lubricant but a moisture displacer and will mess up the highly-engineered (not delicate) works of a typewriter over time as sure as eggs is eggs. And almost never, contrary to popular opinion, actual oil.

I am a student of these pages, and have scrubbed and soaked and buffed and polished and squirted and daubed and wiped. So I think it is safe to say that all my typewriters are "clean." They are cleaner now than they would have been when I first started the hobby: I am better now at cleaning them. They would probably be cleaner three years hence.

But they do not feel different because they are "dirty" exactly. But this is where it gets interesting: clean of what? Free of what?

What remains after you have cleaned?

What do you hope never to clean away?

What can't you ever clean away?

When you are restoring a typewriter to fighting trim, you’re not just negotiating with time, or age: you're negotiating with the specific instances of each of those. And "time" means people. First there are the skilled manufacturers, who assembled it decades ago. Second, there is the original owner, or their children, and how they acquired it, cared for it, stored it. And third, there is possibly a well-meaning repair person, amateur or pro, who it may have encountered along the way who has also worked to restore it, refurbish it, fix it, repaint it. 

Clearing away any trace of any of the second or third-order people's impact seems to be, for some who do this typewriter thing, the point. Trying to get it back to the garden. To the perfect, pre-lapsarian state of how it was when it rolled off the assembly line and was packed carefully in a wooden box or with specially-shaped spacers to keep it from shifting in transit. To the time before it had borne any of the insults of the real world.

This quest for restoration, redemption, atonement, can have extreme qualities--because the fact is, most of never got to use a machine of this vintage in that state. We wish desperately to have the experience. And so, we feel like it could always be "cleaner." There is always some slightly better state of appearance or function that seems right around the corner--and sometimes, in my experience, one can squander the good machine one has in the quest to make it perfect. Others have described this as the "berserk mode" stage of restoration: a mania to scrub and scrub, fiddle and adjust, until before you know it you have gone right over the edge and rubbed the original finish away that you were trying to expose, or broken something new in your zeal to test your clever repair.

So typewriter repair is a mindfulness practice, of sorts, in that you always need to keep a sense of what IS happening due to your ministrations, so you don't destroy what you already have in the name of seeking what you think might be possible. A zen practice, maybe. Definitely a daily wrestling with the constraints of reality, with the limits of your skill, with the fact that if you break this part you can't get a replacement at the Home Depot. The limit is part of the quest for making it as good as it can be.

And the limit is part of why, I think, the machines all feel different--despite being as carefully cleaned as I can make them, despite having a common design and manufacturing genealogy and for the most part being extremely well-preserved. Because the limit of each machine's quest for perfection is related to its "funk."

  I learn that the word "funk" predates its musical use by a few centuries: in the early 17th century it looks like it came from "fumus," Latin of "smoke", and "funkier," French for "to blow smoke on." So it is an olfactory experience, before it is the "soul" experience it came to convey later. It describes the presence of deep, rich, pungent odors that persist even if you try to eliminate or hide them. (I wonder if "umami" captures something of it, in another sense world.) Its connotes tobacco, sweat, the earthier odors, the more human odors: the essences that escape us, sometimes, despite ourselves--and that most certainly inheres in the processes that lead to our most human art, and perhaps in the tools and instruments we use to create that art. And that is why, I think, the word made the jump to describe the human earthiness of music that seems elemental, overwhelming in its use of rhythm and syncopation to transport us beyond logical and rational realms to something both farther away and closer by.

Some of my Olympia typewriters are funky, I mean to say.

Sometimes the funk is in an actual smell. One has an almost tangible smell of smoke and dissipation, compounded by my memory of purchasing it from someone in a home where it seems like a good deal of dissipation took place. But the others carry a sense deeper than the smell of the ink on their ribbon. A phantom whiff of their origins. Their provenance not from only a factory in Wilhelmshaven, West Germany, but from homes and offices I have never visited but can imagine.

I actually know who the owners of three of my machines were. One was sold me by the original owner's daughter, and she has emailed me photos and tales of the late owner's use of it in journalism and poetry. Another came in a case with initials and a last name on the bottom in permanent marker; triangulating on the location of the repair shop badge also affixed, I identified the person whom I am quite sure was the original owner in the local obituaries. And a third came with a social security number painstakingly engraved into the frame, in the manner that you marked things of great value in the 50s, when identity theft wasn't a thing but typewriter theft definitely was. And I again used the Internet to confirm my suspicion that the machine lived local to me, which I suspected because it showed up in the local thrift store. I traced the owner to an out-of-state retirement, and then also to an obituary.

All three of these folks are gone, now. Their machines live on with me. And in a way, so do they. It might seem ghoulish, I realize as I type it: this Google-searching for a machine's history. What am I looking for? I know now I am looking for a sense of permanence, of a human through-line, to distinguish these beautiful technologies from the disposable (and so much more expensive) computer gewgaws of our time. I cannot imagine anyone finding the MacBook Pro I am hammering these thoughts out upon somehow more precious if they could divine that I was its user for four years. But when I type on my typewriters, I sit exactly where these other people sat as they worked out their own words, letters, recipes, remembrances, and taxes. Touch the same keys, turn the same platen, zip the same lever across to find the next line.

Somehow everyone who sits in front of a laptop is just another node in the great information web that threatens to engulf us all. But someone sitting in front of a typewriter...is a person.

These funky machines are redolent of humanity, in every sense. I don't want to clean my machines more, really. I want the humanity that pervades them to mingle with my own, and those of the folks who might work out their words on them next after they have passed through my own hands. As Frederic S. Durbin notes:

We humans go through many computers in our lives, but in their lives, typewriters go through many of us. In that way, they’re like violins, like ancestral swords. So I use mine with honor and treat them with respect. I try to leave them in better condition than I met them. I am not their first user, nor will I be their last.

*1951, 1954, 1956, 1961, 1963, 1965, 1970, 1977. All but one in their most popular "SM" midsize portable design, the "Schreibmaschine Mittelgroß," or "mid-size typewriter."