Back to the Clack, Clack, Clack

An update on typewriter love and what comes next

Many months ago I wrote about my beloved Royal typewriter in a post on my Medium site The Writer Shed. The old portable is the same model Hemingway used at one time. I wrote about how I loved manuals despite their clunky ways, and I mentioned that I was “considering buying a Smith Corona Skyriter.”

Not long after that statement, I did just that. And here I am now, revisiting my typewriter love.

It’s a sleek little beauty. Blue gray. Made in England. 1960-62. The keys and the carriage work nicely. The ribbon return needs some love and care, but it’s workable. Recently I’ve been using it most mornings to write a “5MinutePoem.” It’s a pleasure to tap away on it every day, to think creatively, and to clack along in the early hours from inside my shed.

Am I romanticizing? Probably. And what’s wrong with that?

The novelist Ann Patchett famously wrote in her essay “How to Practice” in The New Yorker in 2021: “I saw myself as the kind of woman who dated men with manual typewriters.”

That says something.

Author Brian Doyle in his essay “The Typewriter in the Basement” published in The Sun in 2015 revealed why he became a writer. “Because of the staggered, staccato music of my dad’s old typewriter in the basement,” he wrote.

And that says something, too.

And there’s Tom Hanks who is quite open about his love, maybe obsession, with the manual typewriter. He’s been on a kind of typewriter crusade in recent years. His book of short stories is entitled Uncommon Type.

Of course it is.

I could go on and on.

But I wonder, when I am dead, what in the world will my wife, my kids, everyone close to me want with these heavy, old, and unwieldy typewriters? They’ll likely give them away or sell them on eBay. But for now, I hang on to them, use them as often as I can, enjoying the “staccato music.”

In my Medium essay, I questioned what keeping things like this might mean.

“I wonder . . . if we hang onto such things simply to keep our distance from death . . . when we are officially gone, if we haven’t already passed our possessions along to those we love, what remains will likely be offered to the Salvation Army, Goodwill, or sold at a garage sale. The dead need nothing. But if we give away any of it now, it moves us closer to the end. Can we handle that thought as we continue to live?”

I am not giving away my manuals any time soon. And I don’t plan to die in the coming days. But if I do, before you give this old Skyriter to some typewriter-crazed budding writer or place it on the heap at the end of the driveway, think about the joy it gave those who pecked away on its oyster-white keys, x-ed out mistakes, and stained their hands when changing its black-ink ribbon. Decades of typewriter love.

The same could be said about one’s beloved golf clubs, or the dozens of now mature plants on our property that my wife has nurtured over the years, or the vinyl records stacked on basement shelves. We love what we love, and we honor those things by living our lives with each of them so very close. And when we are gone, may those left behind consider the legacies of what we have loved right alongside our own.

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David W. Berner is the author of several books of award-winning fiction and memoir. His latest, Daylight Saving Time: The power of growing older is available now. His novella, American Moon will be published by Regal House Publishing in 2026.