Another Holy-Grail-of: the Holy Grail of Portable Manual Typewriters. According to this page, it’s the Rooy, an elegant, wafer-thin portable made in France in the 1950s. Terribly expensive in its time, it’s one of the few manual typewriters worth more than $5 today. That’s as good an excuse as any for talking about typewriters.
I love manual typewriters, because I love all clever mechanical things. I don’t really use them much, though. I prefer a good old steel pen with sepia writing fluid. This newfangled technology is all very well for you busy office types, but a gentleman of leisure can afford to take some care with his writing.
Nevertheless, I do own a typewriter, but not an elegant little Rooy. Mine is a great hulking beast from the 1940s, an office machine designed to take years of abuse and still keep churning out one dull memorandum after another. There are still things for which a typewriter is simply better than a laptop computer. For example, the computer makes a very poor murder weapon compared with a cast-iron office typewriter. These modern plastic computers would just go to pieces. You could probably murder your worst enemy with an old cast-iron typewriter and then type your confession on the same machine.
Now I’ll tell you an interesting little historico-mechanical detective story. For years I had no idea what brand of typewriter mine was: there’s no nameplate on it at all. My five-year-old son loves typing on it, though, so a few days ago we decided to make a project of cleaning it and restoring it to first-class typing condition.
While I was cleaning the back, I noticed a patch of black that was a little smoother than the rest of the black crinkle finish. I scraped it with a fingernail and discovered some gold letters underneath.
At that moment, I knew how Howard Carter must have felt when he shone his torch into Tutankhamen’s tomb. He must have felt the same way I did, only about ten thousand times better, because all I discovered as I scraped was a label identifying the typewriter as the product of “The Woodstock Typewriter Company.”
Well, there’s a bit of a mystery. Why was the name deliberately obscured, and obscured so carefully that I had never noticed before that it had been obscured?
At this point, a certain number of readers who happen to be older than I am have already guessed the answer. For the rest of us, though, I’ll continue the story.
My son and I looked up Woodstock typewriters on Google. The first entry was what we thought we were looking for: a history of the Woodstock typewriter, with a picture of my exact model (showing the nameplate on the front that has been carefully removed on mine) and a serial-number chart that dated ours to 1946.
Later I started to tell the story to my father. “We discovered that my big old typewriter is a Woodstock,” I began.
“Oh,” my father replied. “Is it the Woodstock?”
And that was when I first learned that every member of my father’s generation immediately associates Woodstock typewriters with Alger Hiss. If you go further down the Google results for “Woodstock typewriter,” the name Alger Hiss keeps coming up. Briefly, the whole case against Hiss hinged on proving that the Hiss family’s Woodstock typewriter was used to type copies of secret documents. For the better part of 1949, the news every day was full of “the Woodstock typewriter.” The Commie mole used a Woodstock typewriter. Woodstock typewriter, Hiss, Woodstock typewriter, traitor, Woodstock typewriter, Communist, Woodstock typewriter.
By a strange coincidence, the Woodstock Typewriter Company went out of business in 1950.
I think what I have in my office is a relic of the Red Scare. I think the name Woodstock must have been deliberately obliterated everywhere it appeared because it was a Commie name.
Now I have a great deal more reverence for my old Woodstock. It’s not just a typewriter; it’s a relic of history. It lived through the Red Scare and still bears the scars. It makes that part of history more concrete for me; by living with that typewriter, I also live, to a certain extent, with the complex legacy of Hiss and Chambers and Nixon and Truman and all the other big players in that strange part of our history.
This must be why so many people are fascinated by the question of whether the “real” Holy Grail still exists somewhere. Is there a chalice in Valencia, or in Wales, or in Scotland, or somewhere else, that Jesus Christ actually used at the Last Supper? Even just imagining that the thing still exists brings us closer to that event.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: you’re asking yourself, “Is there any subject on earth that he won’t manage to tie in with the Holy Grail somehow?”
I don’t know. I haven’t tried all the subjects on earth yet. Give me time.
April 21st, 2007 at 10:20 pm
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Don’t really know why I’m replying, except that I thought you might be interested to know that the Woodstock Typewriter factory is going condo.
I have lived in Woodstock for the past 17 years. For most of that time, the factory was Woodstock Wire Works. I heard that it made tomato cages and lampshade skeletons, not nearly as cool as manual typewriters. You can’t expose corrupt local politicians with a tomato cage, much less justify keeping an almost depleted fifth of rye in the side drawer of your desk while doing it.
A local attorney, a Mr. Gitlin, has a lineup of Woodstock typewriters in his office window. Maybe you can find some geriatric eyewitness to come by and finger the culprit from the Hiss affair.
Coincidentally, my first residence in Woodstock had been, 100 years or so before, the residence of Mr. Roebuck– Alva or Alvah, I don’t remember– but he left the pantry a mess.
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