Typecaster: An interview with Tom Furrier of Cambridge Typewriter
Tom Furrier has been repairing typewriters since 1980, when he went to work for Cambridge Typewriter. Ten years later, he took over the business when its owner retired, and moved the shop from its original home in Cambridge to a new location in Arlington. He also runs a type-written blog, Life in a Typewriter Shop.
When you first started, did you have an interest in typewriters?
Nope. I was actually a forestry major out of college and after a couple years I was just looking to get into something different. The old boss’s son and I were good friends, and he just asked me out of the blue one day if I was interested in coming to work for his dad fixing typewriters. I had always been interested in working with my hands, so I said yeah, I’ll give it a shot. I wasn’t really expecting much, and it was just one of those lucky things that happened. From the first day, something clicked. I mean, the very first day something clicked and I just knew right then and there that this was it. This was what I wanted to do.
[The phone on Tom’s desk starts ringing. As he is answering me, he moves toward the desk to pick it up. After a short conversation he says, “Alright, I’ll talk to you later, Barbara.”]
Repeat customer?
That’s my bread and butter is repeat customers. Wouldn’t be here without them.
Who is your typical customer?
These days – this is what’s driving the business the last five, six years – somebody under thirty. They either pick something up on eBay or Craigslist and they bring it in for me to repair so they can start using it. Younger people wanting to start doing creative writing on the typewriter.
What do you think is driving the interest among young people?
Well, it’s not all young people. It’s just a small segment of that population and I guess it tends to be people who are more, I guess you would say on the creative side. Musicians, writers. And they just get old-school things, that there’s a value in doing things the old way. And they’re discovering that, hey, if I type this story on a typewriter, it comes out way better than if I write it on my computer, and they tell their friends and they get psyched about it and pick up a typewriter. It’s not just here, it’s going on all over the country.
On your blog, you post what look like scans of typewritten pages. How often do you actually sit down to use a typewriter?
I use one as often as I can, but I didn’t start doing the blog until a few years ago. A friend of mine from Maine does a blog and he was telling me about all these people that blog on their typewriters. They call themselves Typecasters. He said people would love to hear about it; no other typewriter shop was blogging. So I tried it and it kept spreading and spreading and I thought, Wow, I can’t believe people dig reading about this little tiny hole in the wall, you know?
Have you ever worried about being able to keep what some people might see as an archaic business open?
The typewriter industry basically went belly-up in the late 1980s and that’s when, just before then, if you looked in the telephone pages, there were 30 pages on typewriters in Boston, and overnight it went down to one page. And since then, everybody else went out of business; it was just me and three or four other places, and they have all since gone under so now it’s like I’ve got the place to myself. So that alone caused things to stabilize, but there have been a few times – like 90s, early 2000s – where I was within months, one time within weeks of going out of business, and something would happen just to turn things around. A fluke busy spell that got me over the hump and then something else would happen and keep me going, but I always knew that I would make a go of it. Whatever it took was what I would do to keep it going, because this is what I want to do. I didn’t want to give it up.
Do you have a favorite typewriter?
I don’t have one or two favorite machines, I have 6 or 7 favorite machines. My favorites are the old vintage machines. Royals and Coronas from the 1930s. My favorite typewriters are from Germany. Germans just made the best stuff; it was top of the heap. I like Hermes typewriters from Switzerland, a favorite with writers. I just like weird interesting things in different colors, just all kind of weird names… Oh!
[He pulls a typewriter from under a desk and points to the label.]
A Bing! What the heck is a Bing?
These typewriters that you say are your favorites – [He opens door to let an old man, evidently another repeat customer, enter with a large, heavy-looking typewriter. ]
[To me] Go ahead.
Is there one thing they share that makes you like them?
It’s the eye-catching appeal. The older stuff was beautifully designed. They put lots of thought into beautiful curve and shape and profile that was just pleasing to look at. And typeface. They made all kinds of different typeface back then. The kids today are big time into typeface. You know, real typewriter typeface because they made so much weird stuff. And they just go crazy when they find a real, you know, obsolete bizarro type style that was made 80 or 90 years ago.
[The customer asks Tom if he thinks his typewriter needs to be replaced. Tom plays with the keys a little, resets the carriage. “For what you’re doing with it you should be fine. Just don’t go crazy typing too hard, but a good gust of wind would press these keys so you ought to be alright.”]
You were telling me about what draws you to the typewriters you like.
Yeah. Well at first it’s mostly a visual thing, and then you type on it and it becomes a whole sensory event. At that point, it’s all about the touch, the sound, the feel, which is what the younger people are really flipping out about. People that stick with typewriters, after you get by the novelty of it and you get used to typing, you realize that your thought process is much better on a typewriter. Just something about the sound, the rhythm, the feel of the typewriter meshes with your thought process better or something, but because you’re doing it on a typewriter you have to pick and choose what you want to say before you hit that key. So it’s almost like you’re editing yourself before you put it on paper. So the essence of what you really want to say comes out, whereas with a word processor you just [He mimes typing quickly in the air] all this garbage comes out. You know, 900 words where 150 words would really convey what you want to say.
Have you ever had people give you a hard time for working with something that might be considered anachronistic?
Oh, jeez, all the time. All the time. Well, first of all my family doesn’t understand it. I mean, my wife and daughter do, they’re my biggest supporters, but my brothers say “You’re still in business? I don’t get that.” But the funniest thing is actually when I go on service calls. Basically every morning I’m out doing service calls in downtown Boston and inevitably I’m in a big office and I’m servicing a typewriter on the floor, all these people walking by feel like they have to make a comment. “Oh jeez we still got that thing?” or, “Don’t you feel like a dinosaur?” And some of the more highfalutin firms downtown don’t even want the client to hear the sound of the typewriter, so they’ll take it and stick it as far away from the receptionist as they can. Cause they’re embarrassed that a client would hear the sound of a typewriter. That I don’t get.
When you first started, did you have an interest in typewriters?
Nope. I was actually a forestry major out of college and after a couple years I was just looking to get into something different. The old boss’s son and I were good friends, and he just asked me out of the blue one day if I was interested in coming to work for his dad fixing typewriters. I had always been interested in working with my hands, so I said yeah, I’ll give it a shot. I wasn’t really expecting much, and it was just one of those lucky things that happened. From the first day, something clicked. I mean, the very first day something clicked and I just knew right then and there that this was it. This was what I wanted to do.
[The phone on Tom’s desk starts ringing. As he is answering me, he moves toward the desk to pick it up. After a short conversation he says, “Alright, I’ll talk to you later, Barbara.”]
Repeat customer?
That’s my bread and butter is repeat customers. Wouldn’t be here without them.
Who is your typical customer?
These days – this is what’s driving the business the last five, six years – somebody under thirty. They either pick something up on eBay or Craigslist and they bring it in for me to repair so they can start using it. Younger people wanting to start doing creative writing on the typewriter.
What do you think is driving the interest among young people?
Well, it’s not all young people. It’s just a small segment of that population and I guess it tends to be people who are more, I guess you would say on the creative side. Musicians, writers. And they just get old-school things, that there’s a value in doing things the old way. And they’re discovering that, hey, if I type this story on a typewriter, it comes out way better than if I write it on my computer, and they tell their friends and they get psyched about it and pick up a typewriter. It’s not just here, it’s going on all over the country.
On your blog, you post what look like scans of typewritten pages. How often do you actually sit down to use a typewriter?
I use one as often as I can, but I didn’t start doing the blog until a few years ago. A friend of mine from Maine does a blog and he was telling me about all these people that blog on their typewriters. They call themselves Typecasters. He said people would love to hear about it; no other typewriter shop was blogging. So I tried it and it kept spreading and spreading and I thought, Wow, I can’t believe people dig reading about this little tiny hole in the wall, you know?
Have you ever worried about being able to keep what some people might see as an archaic business open?
The typewriter industry basically went belly-up in the late 1980s and that’s when, just before then, if you looked in the telephone pages, there were 30 pages on typewriters in Boston, and overnight it went down to one page. And since then, everybody else went out of business; it was just me and three or four other places, and they have all since gone under so now it’s like I’ve got the place to myself. So that alone caused things to stabilize, but there have been a few times – like 90s, early 2000s – where I was within months, one time within weeks of going out of business, and something would happen just to turn things around. A fluke busy spell that got me over the hump and then something else would happen and keep me going, but I always knew that I would make a go of it. Whatever it took was what I would do to keep it going, because this is what I want to do. I didn’t want to give it up.
Do you have a favorite typewriter?
I don’t have one or two favorite machines, I have 6 or 7 favorite machines. My favorites are the old vintage machines. Royals and Coronas from the 1930s. My favorite typewriters are from Germany. Germans just made the best stuff; it was top of the heap. I like Hermes typewriters from Switzerland, a favorite with writers. I just like weird interesting things in different colors, just all kind of weird names… Oh!
[He pulls a typewriter from under a desk and points to the label.]
A Bing! What the heck is a Bing?
These typewriters that you say are your favorites – [He opens door to let an old man, evidently another repeat customer, enter with a large, heavy-looking typewriter. ]
[To me] Go ahead.
Is there one thing they share that makes you like them?
It’s the eye-catching appeal. The older stuff was beautifully designed. They put lots of thought into beautiful curve and shape and profile that was just pleasing to look at. And typeface. They made all kinds of different typeface back then. The kids today are big time into typeface. You know, real typewriter typeface because they made so much weird stuff. And they just go crazy when they find a real, you know, obsolete bizarro type style that was made 80 or 90 years ago.
[The customer asks Tom if he thinks his typewriter needs to be replaced. Tom plays with the keys a little, resets the carriage. “For what you’re doing with it you should be fine. Just don’t go crazy typing too hard, but a good gust of wind would press these keys so you ought to be alright.”]
You were telling me about what draws you to the typewriters you like.
Yeah. Well at first it’s mostly a visual thing, and then you type on it and it becomes a whole sensory event. At that point, it’s all about the touch, the sound, the feel, which is what the younger people are really flipping out about. People that stick with typewriters, after you get by the novelty of it and you get used to typing, you realize that your thought process is much better on a typewriter. Just something about the sound, the rhythm, the feel of the typewriter meshes with your thought process better or something, but because you’re doing it on a typewriter you have to pick and choose what you want to say before you hit that key. So it’s almost like you’re editing yourself before you put it on paper. So the essence of what you really want to say comes out, whereas with a word processor you just [He mimes typing quickly in the air] all this garbage comes out. You know, 900 words where 150 words would really convey what you want to say.
Have you ever had people give you a hard time for working with something that might be considered anachronistic?
Oh, jeez, all the time. All the time. Well, first of all my family doesn’t understand it. I mean, my wife and daughter do, they’re my biggest supporters, but my brothers say “You’re still in business? I don’t get that.” But the funniest thing is actually when I go on service calls. Basically every morning I’m out doing service calls in downtown Boston and inevitably I’m in a big office and I’m servicing a typewriter on the floor, all these people walking by feel like they have to make a comment. “Oh jeez we still got that thing?” or, “Don’t you feel like a dinosaur?” And some of the more highfalutin firms downtown don’t even want the client to hear the sound of the typewriter, so they’ll take it and stick it as far away from the receptionist as they can. Cause they’re embarrassed that a client would hear the sound of a typewriter. That I don’t get.
