To begin at the end: the giveaway typewriter reached its forever home in Washington State a few days ago.
The recipient, Keri Pauli, messaged: It's here, and it's safe, and it's so so amazing!
Thank you!!!
Love among the Lilacs — the giveaway typewriter reached its forever home in eastern Washington state.
Keri added,
I'm attaching the photos I took right away, and also the first thing I wrote on the machine, which is a poem about her. :)
She is beauty,
in her ruby chassis
with her vintage aura
and alabaster keys.
She is wisdom,
words spooling from furious
finger dances, dragon
roaring as the muse awakens.
Shipping
From the poetic to the prosaic, shipping a typewriter is an undertaking.
I used two boxes, new from FedEx—17" x 17" x 7" and 20" x 20" x 12"—and double-boxed the typewriter, with mostly sturdy paper padding, but also some packing peanuts to make up the difference. I’ve heard they can go flat, and I didn’t want to rely on them solely. I filled the space inside the typewriter case with bubble wrap.
17” x 17” x 7”
20” x 20” x 12”
Other supplies included: Post-It Notes for instructions on how to release the machine from the case and how to unlock the carriage. Lavish amounts of plastic wrap for securing the carriage, and also the outside of the typewriter case once closed. And a bone folder for making sure the packing tape securely adheres to the box.
Packing supplies: Post-It Notes, cling film, heavy-duty packing tape, a bone folder.
Typewriter paper from the closing of Cambridge Typewriter. Olivetti notecard from Mockingbird Paperie, Ithaca, NY
Ready to go! Thankful that all the effort to pack it saw it arrive safely.
After a Memorial Day vacation in Connecticut, the typewriter finally trundled off across the country …
A Wealth of Comments
On my birthday, I typed up all the entry names, cut up the names into even strips, and carefully mixed all the snips of paper. I was rather nervous pulling the winner, wanting the typewriter to find a good home. Who would it be?
But giving away instead of receiving felt like a lavish gift.
Another gift was all your many comments. I asked why you wanted the giveaway typewriter, and the answers were beautifully expressed.
I was struck by the like-mindedness of so many readers around the world, wondering if a typewriter could be a solution to distraction, to scattered attention. Also, many of you voiced concern over the proliferation of AI in the classroom—kids taking a shortcut past the effort and friction that make up actual writing. Could a typewriter in the classroom be a help there, many of you wondered?
A tool, the typewriter, but also a joy. Brian Feeny summed it up perfectly:
Every typewriter is unique, and has it's own style. Typewriters are a work of art and technology, just beautiful to look at and even more a joy to use.
An elusive artifact, evoking memories of loved ones past, of machines let go, lost, or stolen in distressing circumstances.
The hope of future projects, writing novels, poetry, making collages, zines, or journaling.
Words, public and private, away from the datastream, tangible.
For writing postcards and letters. For connecting people with themselves and with others, with the past, or as an anchor for hanging on to the present, a hope for the future.
Also, red! Vibrant, a showstopper.
For use in the classroom. On a street corner, writing poetry. Poets in the Pacific Northwest, London, Manchester, Belfast. Entries came in from all across the US and UK, from the mountains of Spain, the land of the castles of Romania, from a writer in Belgium, and from coast to coast in Canada.
But it was to the Pacific Northwest that the typewriter went.
Keri Pauli, the winner, wrote:
“Hello from Washington State, not the lovely, green, Seattle side, the dry, umber central portion.
Here we are without the culture and commerce of the western state, and here I am, carving a place in the desert for my words to spawn, for my stories to live and to wander out into the wider universe.
I would love the typewriter because just looking at it inspires me. I can imagine the stories spooling from the platten, shaping themselves into neat, pica lines. I can hear the staccato clatter of pristine keys, marching forward, demanding the plot continue until the ultimate crescendo of happily ever after. The bell rings. The story is afoot.”
One More Typewriter
When I picked up my last repairs from Tom Furrier at Cambridge Typewriter at the end of April, he showed me a pristine machine, an Olympia SM3, bought at his shop years before but recently returned.
Its owner worked for an educational foundation and wanted Tom to find a new home for it—“Get this into the hands of someone working with young people.”
I marveled that even in the act of Tom closing up his shop, the flow was still flowing, machines not just out, but flowing back in.
So, weeks later, during the Paper Blogging typewriter giveaway, when I read one particular comment of an educator in Nova Scotia concerned with AI in her classroom, I remembered the Olympia SM3. Had Tom found a home for it yet?
“It’s yours,” Tom replied right away.
A flurry of messages back and forth, and it looks like I’ll be taking a trip to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to deliver the SM3 at some point this summer. The educator is already dreaming up uses for it in her classes for reluctant learners.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about radical generosity.
It was how Tom Furrier ran Cambridge Typewriter.
It is a life-giving and positive alternative to manipulation and exploitation. To overpricing, to rampant accumulation.
Three Reads: All Flourishing is Mutual
Years ago, on an early morning winter walk with naturalist John Muir Laws—marveling at his vim and vigor at that time of day, and his relentless curiosity—I asked Laws what was the source of his generosity. What motivated him? On his site, there are hundreds of free resources.
“The Gift, by Lewis Hyde,” he immediately answered. “Read it. It’s a weird book, but it’s behind everything I do.”
The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World.
I have several copies, found at book sales, to pass on to others.
(In The Gifts of Reading, Robert MacFarlane sings the praises of gifting books. This slim volume was a source of life for me at the outset of the pandemic, and I reread it periodically. There are five titles Macfarlane routinely keeps for giving away to others. )
And this spring, I enjoyed Robin Wall Kimmerer's recent book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World.
All flourishing is mutual, Kimmerer asserts. The scarcity mindset, which causes us to elbow others aside, is a flawed way of thinking.
In a gift economy, wealth is understood as having enough to share, and the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away. In fact, status is determined not by how much one accumulates, but by how much one gives away. The currency in a gift economy is relationship, which is expressed as gratitude, as interdependence and the ongoing cycles of reciprociy. A gift economy nurtures the community bonds that enhance mutual well-being; the economic unit is ‘we’ rather than ‘I,’ as all flourishing is mutual.
—The Serviceberry, p. 33
Thank You
Thank you to everyone who entered the typewriter giveaway, for all your rich and thoughtful comments, and for the appreciation and encouragement to continue writing here.
That was a gift to receive.