No country for old typewriters

Rhode Island-born author, Cormac McCarthy, creator of such American classics as All the Pretty Horses, Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men, suffered a bereavement recently when his trusty typewriter died.

This surely must have come as no surprise to the Pulitzer Prize-winning McCarthy, who had been using the battered old Olivetti Lettera 32 since 1963 – and even then it wasn’t new! The thrifty writer had picked it up in a pawnshop in Knoxville, Tennessee for the princely sum of $50.

Eschewing the modern comforts of the word processor and the computer, McCarthy continued to use his beloved typewriter meaning that, even in its deceased condition, the instrument responsible for such classics as The Border Trilogy was worth a mint. McCarthy estimates that the Olivetti had clocked up approximately five million words, no mean feat for a typewriter whose maintenance had consisted of “blowing out the dust with a service station hose.”

While most defunct machines would be immediately consigned to the dustbin, it was clear that the value of McCarthy’s Olivetti would far exceed its scrap value. Auction group Christie’s was employed to sell it at a specialist auction, the proceeds to be donated to the Santa Fe Institute, described as a “non-profit interdisciplinary scientific research organization.”

Given its illustrious provenance, experts predicted that it would attract bids of up to $20,000 and were pleasantly surprised when it eventually sold for a mind-boggling $254,500.

The loss of his typewriter left a gap that needed to be filled as fast as possible. There was speculation that McCarthy might relent and join the digital age with a MacBook Pro or a similar state-of-the-art computer, but old habits die hard and his friend John Miller from the Santa Fe Institute, obligingly paid $11 dollars for another second-hand Olivetti.

New post on at Thursday, 7 January, 2010, 6:43 am and is archived in Culture, Lifestyle, People. Subscribe to answers with RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.