No Country For Old Typewriters

Author Cormac McCarthy, author of "The Road" and "No Country For Old Men", among others, has clacked away at his Olivetti portable for more than 50 years. He estimates he has typed about five million words on the machine, and now it's showing its age. He has bought a new typewriter for about US$31.00 (including shipping), and has decided to put his old one up for auction. It is estimated that the old one would fetch between US$15,000 and US$20,000, a princely sum for a typewriter. Compare that amount, and the amount his new typewriter cost him, to the US$500 to US$1,000 a new laptop would cost. An excerpt from The New York Times article:

“It has never been serviced or cleaned other than blowing out the dust with a service station hose. ... I have typed on this typewriter every book I have written including three not published. Including all drafts and correspondence I would put this at about five million words over a period of 50 years.”

Speaking from his home in Santa Fe, Mr. McCarthy said he mistakenly thought that the typewriter was bought in 1958; it was actually a few years later. He had a Royal previously, but before he went off to Europe in the early 1960s, he said, “I tried to find the smallest, lightest typewriter I could find.”

Mr. McCarthy is known for being taciturn, particularly about his writing. He came to realize that not only his working method but even his tools are puzzling to a younger generation.

He remembers one summer when some graduate students were visiting the Santa Fe Institute. “I was in my office clacking away,” he said. “One student peered in and said: ‘Excuse me. What is that?’ ”

“I don’t have some method of working,” he said, adding that he often works on different projects simultaneously. A few years ago, when he was in Ireland, “I worked all day on four different projects,” he said. “I worked two hours on each. I got a lot done, but that’s not usual.”

Glenn Horowitz, a rare-book dealer who is handling the auction for Mr. McCarthy, said: “When I grasped that some of the most complex, almost otherworldly fiction of the postwar era was composed on such a simple, functional, frail-looking machine, it conferred a sort of talismanic quality to Cormac’s typewriter. It’s as if Mount Rushmore was carved with a Swiss Army knife.”

Think about it, people. You don't need anything fancy to get your words out. Mr. McCarthy still writes on his typewriter. Before typewriters were invented, people used pens, pencils,...quills, on paper. A computer, of course, does have its advantages, but for a determined writer, "the words will out", as they say.