Can a love once lost be restored? I found my answer in a garage in north Phoenix, surrounded by rows of vintage typewriters and a repairman who never stopped believing people would come back to them. Turns out, he was right.
I grew up with the comforting sound of a Selectric II clicking away in our house. My mother typed dissertations for graduate students at KSU and wrote voluminous letters to family and friends — 100 words a minute, carrying on light conversation while doing so. I was of the generation that took typing class in school. My brother didn't. Decades later, when computers arrived, he was still pecking at the keys with two fingers while I channeled my mother and was a whiz, albeit with more errors than she ever afforded herself. My college years were carried along by that Selectric. And then came computers, and I too moved on. Until recently.
My renewed interest was sparked when I read about National Park Ranger Elyssa Shalla, who placed a $5 Goodwill typewriter at Plateau Point in the Grand Canyon — a scenic overlook reached after a 6-mile hike — and invited hikers to share their thoughts.
The note beside it read: "Dear Hiker, welcome to Plateau Point. You've hiked a long ways. Please take a seat in the chair and relax. Look around. Take it all in. What does this moment mean to you?"
People responded with love letters, reflections on life and even a marriage proposal. Shalla called the project Towers & Type, an invitation to be fully present in a place that deserves full attention. It was a perfect collision of old technology and raw human emotion, the kind of moment a smartphone photo simply can't replicate.
Not long after, I was given a broken-down Selectric II. What a shame, I thought, that such a marvelous machine should be relegated to the dustbin. So I searched for typewriter repair and found Duane Jensen at Phoenix Typewriter in north Phoenix. I drove 2.5 hours to his shop, tucked inside his garage in a quiet cul-de-sac. His place was a marvel: machines dating from the early 1900s through the 1990s lined the walls like a museum, and he seemed to have the parts and know-how to fix every last one. He restored my Selectric II, and it now sits ready to serve.
Duane Jensen passed away in January of this year. With him went a rare and deep well of expertise, the kind that takes decades to accumulate and simply cannot be Googled. He was part of a vanishing brotherhood of repairmen who kept a quiet flame burning for these machines long after the rest of the world had moved on. His loss is worth pausing over.
Because that stubborn loyalty — from repairmen like Duane and the customers who sought them out — is exactly why typewriter repair never fully died. I liken it to Cuba, where the streets still roll with 1950s Chevrolets, Buicks, and Plymouths, tail fins intact, engines humming decades past their intended lifespan. When the U.S. embargo cut off new American cars, Cubans simply didn't stop driving. They fabricated parts, swapped engines and coaxed another hundred thousand miles out of machines the rest of the world had scrapped. The cars survived because the people who loved them refused to let go.
Typewriters followed the same logic. When computers swept through offices in the 1980s and 90s, plenty of people quietly held on — writers who liked the feel, offices that didn't trust new technology, individuals who saw no reason to replace something that worked. It's the repairmen who kept that love alive, the ones who could still true a carriage, source a vintage ribbon or coax life back into a seized type bar. And that love runs deep for a reason: Typewriters have been with us for over 200 years.
The origin story is refreshingly messy. Historians credit Italian inventor Pellegrino Turri with a significant early role. In 1808, he reportedly built a writing device to help his blind friend correspond independently. From there, inventors across Europe and America tinkered for decades. Christopher Latham Sholes created the first practical commercial machine in the 1860s, eventually selling his patent to E. Remington & Sons. That first Remington typed only in capitals. The shift key came later, as did the QWERTY keyboard — designed to keep frequently-used type bars from jamming — a layout we're still using 150 years on.
If the Remington built the industry, the IBM Selectric redefined it entirely. Launched in 1961, it was an overnight sensation. One salesman reportedly sold 500 to 600 machines in a single branch office where 50 to 60 had been forecast. The secret was the "golf ball," a rotating spherical element that eliminated jammed type bars entirely. With 2,800 parts and seven years of engineering, it was a radical machine, with interchangeable font balls, support for Hebrew and Braille, and eventually a correcting tape that lifted errors cleanly off the page. By 1978, IBM held 94% of the electric typewriter market. More than 13 million Selectrics were sold before the line wound down in the mid-1980s.
Typewriters are now having a genuine cultural moment, and it isn't just nostalgia. Enthusiasts have organized type-ins in cities like Phoenix, Philadelphia, Seattle and Cincinnati, gathering in public spaces to try vintage machines and share their work. At a recent Albuquerque brewery event, three dozen enthusiasts explored machines like a 1964 Olivetti Lettera 32 and a 1947 Royal KMM. Taylor Swift using a vintage Royal 10 in her video "Fortnight" sparked a full typewriter bull market. Tom Hanks is an avid collector. In an era of rapid-fire texts and tweets, people are hungry for more deliberate communication, and nothing forces deliberateness quite like a machine with no backspace.
In the end, that may be the typewriter's greatest gift. Every keystroke is a small act of commitment. In a world where everything can be undone with a click, there's something quietly radical about a machine that makes you mean what you say. Duane Jensen understood that. He spent a lifetime keeping that commitment alive, one repaired machine at a time.
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