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  Above view of the various parts of a typewriter
  Image via Dave King / Dorling Kindersley / Allens Typewriters Ltd. /
  Science Source
  [59]Money

The Elegant, and Not Quite Dying, Art of Typewriter Repair

  Typewriters, and the people who fix them, have been enjoying a quiet
  longevity.
  [60]Anna Merlan
  by [61]Anna Merlan
  May 26, 2020, 12:00pm
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  This article appears in VICE Magazine's [62]Means of Production issue.
  Conceived of pre-COVID-19 and constructed during it, it explores the
  organization and ownership of our world.

  The people who repair the world’s typewriters tend to have very long
  memories, but this wasn’t like anything he could recall. On a recent
  morning, Paul Schweitzer, 81, was trying to adjust to his new, lonely
  routine.

  “I’ve been sitting at home for the last couple weeks,” he told VICE in
  March. “I’m not ready for that. It feels like retirement.”

  For most of the past six decades, Schweitzer has gotten up each morning
  and traveled from his home in Long Island to his typewriter repair
  shop, Gramercy Typewriter Company, in Manhattan. The company was
  founded by Schweitzer’s father, Abraham, in 1932, and Schweitzer began
  working with his father in 1959, soon after he came out of the Navy,
  just as he’d always known he would do. As a child of 8 or 9, he was
  already learning the trade at his father’s elbow. “I’d help him clean
  typewriters and make ribbons and things. I was born into it.”

  And nothing much changed over the years, even as the six or seven pages
  of typewriter shops in the phone book Schweitzer recalls seeing from
  the 1950s to the 70s dwindled to nearly nothing, and the phone books
  themselves eventually disappeared. Typewriter repair used to be its own
  category in the Occupational Outlook Handbook, where the Bureau of
  Labor Statistics forecasts which jobs will rise and fall. “The long-run
  outlook is for steady employment,” the bureau promised [63]back in
  1949. These days, typewriter repair is reduced to miscellanea, slotted
  somewhere under [64]“office machine repairers,” their numbers
  imprecise; they all seem to be aware of each other. “We’re getting to
  be one of the only shops in the country,” Schweitzer said.

  In that time, he’s watched with slight surprise as typewriters began to
  make a modest, strangely poetic comeback. “There seems to be a
  resurgence in the typewriter business,” he said. “It’s mostly the
  younger people who still have their computers. They just want to write
  or do poetry or whatever they wanna do. They would prefer to do it on a
  typewriter. They want to be like Hemingway. They tell me there’s fewer
  distractions while they’re typing their thoughts, putting them on the
  paper.” Schweitzer watches them as they come into his shop. “They look
  around, try out a few different machines, see if they can get used to
  typing on a typewriter.”

  The shop is, in Gramercy Typewriter’s long history, a very recent
  innovation. Schweitzer was joined “quite a number of years ago” by his
  son Jay, who’d also always felt drawn to the family business. It was
  Jay who suggested a year and a half ago that they close their private
  repair shop in Manhattan’s famous Flatiron Building (the shop takes its
  name from its neighborhood). They moved into a storefront a few blocks
  away, where people can walk in, press the keys of an IBM Selectric,
  marvel at the Hermes 3000, the Royal portable, the Olympia portable.
  “All very, very nice machines,” Schweitzer said fondly. (He’s partial,
  if he has to choose, to the IBM Selectric or IBM Wheelwriter, both of
  which allow users to make corrections.)

  But the novel coronavirus pandemic has altered Schweitzer’s routine,
  like those of millions of other people, and since early March, he has
  been repairing typewriters in his son’s basement. “It’s put things to a
  halt as far as I’m concerned,” he said. “For all these years I would go
  to work every day,” five or six days a week. When we spoke, he’d been
  reluctantly staying home or going to his son’s house to work for the
  past three weeks, and he said the change had erased an elemental part
  of the business.

  “I’m not interacting with our customers, which I have done for so much
  of my life,” he said. “I’m not going out into the field. I’m not going
  from office to office, taking a bus and a subway and traveling all over
  the city. Obviously, I really miss that.”

  His retired friends, he said, envy his usual lifestyle. “I get up with
  a purpose every day. I can’t wait to get there. I have people waiting
  to have their machines serviced and repaired. Some people don’t
  understand how important that really is.” He has thought, with pain, of
  all the broken typewriters in offices all over the city, and their
  owners, waiting for his return.

  For Schweitzer, and for the people who repair typewriters, there’s not
  much to do but wait, fix the machines out in a basement somewhere, and
  try to remember that a few weeks or months in a long history isn’t much
  at all.

  “Time goes very fast,” Schweitzer said, before heading back to his 61st
  year of work. “And this will be over soon. I’ll be happy to get back to
  New York City and our store and to continue on.”

  Follow Anna Merlan on [65]Twitter.
  Tagged:[66]typewriters, [67]COVID-19, [68]the means of production issue

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