WCPO story on WordPlay Cincy and Urban Legend Typewriters

Kristen Skovira of local TV station WCPO visited my basement last week for a story on WordPlay Cincy, the kids' creative writing center that my typewriter repair work helps to support.

You can see the story here:

Unnecessarily Beautiful Spaces for Young Minds on Fire

Unnecessarily Beautiful Spaces for Young Minds on Fire (McSweeneys, 2019) is an inspiring tour of places such as SF’s 826 Valencia which foster youth writing—including Cincinnati’s own WordPlay Cincy. Libby Hunter's kind words about me here are a genuine source of pride. 

  

 

WordPlay Cincy mural features writers and a typewriter

WordPlay Cincy, the nonprofit for which I've volunteered as Typewriter Guy since 2012, is moving into a much bigger building in the same Cincinnati neighborhood (Northside). This will allow the organization to evolve from offering after-school writing programs to becoming a more full-fledged community center. 

Their old location used to feature an impressive mural by Shepard Fairey, featuring the Burmese dissident Aung San Suu Kyi (she later became State Counsellor of Myanmar, and was widely criticized for countenancing the genocidal persecution of the Rohingya minority).

So of course the new building deserves a mural, too. This one was designed by local artist Brandon Hawkins and painted by students. I was pleased to see that it features a typewriter.

 To the right are seven inspiring writers. Starting at the top and going clockwise, they are: 

Amanda Gorman, the 23-year old who was the first National Youth Poet Laureate and who recited a poem at Pres. Biden's inauguration:

Writer James Baldwin, shown here with his Olympia SM7:

Joy Harjo, current US Poet Laureate and member of the Muscogee Nation:

Nikki Giovanni (center), poet who grew up in Cincinnati (her tombstone awaits her a short walk away from my house, in Cincinnati’s Spring Grove Cemetery). Here she is with her electric Smith-Corona:

Paul Laurence Dunbar, pioneering African-American poet from nearby Dayton, Ohio, most famous for the line “I know why the caged bird sings”: 

Pulitzer-prize-winning poet Mary Oliver:

Mexican-American novelist Sandra Cisneros (shown here with her 1930s Underwood Universal):

According to a fundraiser, "For the second phase of the mural, WordPlay and local collaborators and artists will design and install accessible, tactile elements from the ground to approximately 5' high for the blind and visually impaired to interact with the subject matter expressed in the 2-D painting throughout. Those elements will include Braille plates with information about the individuals and student writing depicted in the mural, 3-D ceramic pieces and other unique, inclusive and interactive installments."

I have to ask: Will there be a typewriter? 

Update on the Urban Legend Institute

The Urban Legend Institute, the little shop that supports WordPlay Cincy, has been rechristened Urban Legend Typewriters, since typewriter sales and service constitute nearly all the shop's business. I'm proud to have raised tens of thousands of dollars for WordPlay over the last five years, and I keep learning as I take care of the machines that come in. (Most of the business is service, except at Christmas, when we sell lots of typewriters.)

I recently showed you a Cyrillic Royal P that came in for service. Here are a few more recent repairs.

Here's another Royal P that needed a good cleaning and two new keytops. This typewriter's keytops, which don't look original to me, have just a thin plastic coating over cardboard. The C and N had big pits chewed into them, and I replaced them with legends and thicker plastic tops from a 1930s Royal parts machine.



This Smith-Corona Silent-Super had its drawband tangled around its mainspring, and was spattered with ink and Wite-Out.



The owner of this 1929 Underwood portable found it in a dumpster! He had the platen recovered by J. J. Short but needed some help getting it back into the typewriter and fixing an issue with the ribbon advance. The ribbon covers on this machine were missing. What you see here are 3D-printed covers created by Pete Volz. As I predicted in my book, 3D printing is an increasingly useful source of typewriter parts. There is even a website, 3dtypewriterparts.com, that includes a few downloadable files.



Meanwhile, there has been an update to the exterior of the shop. There's a Shepard Fairey mural on the side of the building featuring Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi. Here's how it looked a few years ago.



After the mural was vandalized by a local graffiti "artist," Fairey recreated it, with slightly different imagery. More recently, with the news about Aung San Suu Kyi's indifference (at best) to the genocidal persecution of the Rohingya, someone altered her face to give this call for human rights an ironic new twist.



Heroes come and go. Typewriters endure.

Designing a typewriter shop receipt for the 21st century

In the 19th and early 20th century, typewriter manufacturers and dealers, like other businesses, printed marvelously intricate images on their stationery and bills. (See Peter Weil's story in ETCetera No. 95.) Here's a nice example.



But I'm personally more fond of mid-20th-century designs, especially Art Deco graphics such as these:




The other day I found a series of receipts from Spain online that particularly impressed me with the density of their imagery. You could buy a couple of typewriter ribbons and get a receipt with a beautifully designed, multicolor letterhead, an elaborate typewritten account of your purchase, a signature, a rubber stamp, and a tax stamp. The receipt was itself a treasure!






REMER, or Reconstrucción Española Máquinas Escribir y Representación (Spanish Reconstruction of Typewriters and Copiers), produced its own typewriter 3 years after this receipt was typed. (Story in ETCetera no. 87.)

The signature on Señor Trumpy's stationery reminds me of Donald Trump's:



I particularly love this image of the tiny repairmen clambering over the typewriter (or is it normal men and a giant typewriter?). A bit of research uncovered this image, uploaded by Georg Sommeregger:

: 
This ad for "over 200 bargain typewriters" dates from 1935, a year later than 1934, the date on the Spanish receipt shown just above. So I don't know when the graphic was originally produced, but the machine shown is indeed a Continental from Germany.

Spanish repairmen seem to have loved images like this, to judge from this sign I saw in 2015 in the window of a Madrid typewriter shop (which was, sadly, out of business).
 

These drawings, probably inspired by the Continental image, show Hispano-Olivetti M40 standards, the most plentiful model of large typewriter manufactured in Spain in the first half of the 20th century.



Even though I don't systematically collect typewriter-related paper, these receipts made me contemplate starting a new collecting line.

But then I had a better idea: I was inspired to try designing a receipt for my own typewriter services (benefitting WordPlay Cincy) which would share some of the charm of these old documents. I had a fine time last night and this morning dreaming it up, along with a business card.






I'm having these printed up by Vistaprint. Now I look forward to providing some collectible paper of my own to the customers of Urban Legend Typewriters.

The oh-so-appropriate image (the skyline even reminds me of Cincinnati and the Ohio River) comes from this August 1930 cover of Fortune magazine (which really was meant for the fortunate few—who else could afford to spend $1.00 on a magazine in 1930?).



View from Cincinnati's Carew Tower:



If you like the fonts I used, you can download Geomancy and Royal Vogue for free. Geomancy has lots of interesting details, and it's really two capital-letter fonts in one, with shifted and unshifted versions.

Typewriter art to benefit WordPlay!

This lovely piece by Martha Lea is being auctioned by the artist, and all proceeds will benefit the typewriter-friendly kids' writing center WordPlay Cincy.

Pitch in on eBay!

Thank you, Martha!

The piece above is for sale within the UK, but this piece is available worldwide and will also benefit WordPlay:



Bid here. Thanks!

Portrait with jackalope

Here's the other item over my desk: