26 May 2019 _ PopularMechanics.com
HOW YOUR WORLD WORKS
Typewriter Repairman Writes
3,000-Page Book, Wins Pulitzer!
Keeping these typewriters going is turn-
ing into a real job. Because they stopped
making them about 30 years ago, you have
to have a spare supply.
Whenever I do a book there are these
profiles—they all mention I use a Smith-
Corona, so I get a lot of letters. There are
two kinds. The first one says: I have an old
one in my garage, I’d like you to have it, I’m
sending it to you. The second type of letter
says: I have one in my garage, I’ll sell it to you
for $4,000. I answer the first kind of letter.
If a part breaks, you have to cannibal-
ize another typewriter. When the last book
came out, I got up to 14. I’m already down to
11, which worries me.Now, the ribbons. The reason I like the
t y pe to be ver y dark is that I t y pe and ret y pe
these pages so many times that the words
sor t of cease to... hit you. If you want the t y pe
to be bold, it has to be cotton ribbons, not
nylon. Nobody, as in zero, makes cotton rib-
bons anymore. Ina [his wife] found one guy
and called him, and he said, Yeah, I’ll make
you cotton ribbons—if you order a dozen
gross. That’s 12 times 144. So if you ever
want a box of cotton ribbons, I’m your man.
It’s quite interesting—I was born and
worked most of my life in the age of print,
but now I’m in the digital age. It’s like they
changed the rules of the game on me.
—As told to Eleanor HildebrandtHISTORY GOES DIGITAL
Historian Robert Caro has 11 identical typewriters.
To finish his life’s work, he may need more.Presidential records have
expanded to include emails
and even tweets. The Obama
Presidential Center recently
announced it may not have
physical archives at all. Caro
has a fewthoughts about
such things:THE CLOUD
Getting govern-
ment papers requires
bureaucratic approval.
Online archives could
be worse. “What’s
worrisome to me is
that somebody has
to decide what’s digi-
tized,” Caro says.SMARTPHONES
Researchers now
snap pictures of
documents, to read
later. Would he have
made the same
discoveries read-
ing papers on an
iPhone? “Possibly.
But I don’t believe it.”CTRL-F
An infrequent
Googler, Caro allows
that control-F
(“find”) is “the great
help for research-
ers,” letting them
scan massive sets
of documents for a
specific subject.FOUR DECADES AGO, Robert Caro began
writing a multipart biography he calls The
Years of Ly n d o n Joh n so n. He’s still working
on the fifth and (allegedly) final volume. “In
writing about me and my hopes of finishing,
[ journalists] often express their doubts of
that happening in a sarcastic phrase: ‘Do the
math,’ ” Caro, 83, writes in the introduction
to Working, a new book about his research.
Yet concern over longevity might be better
suited to his tools. Caro writes first drafts
longhand, then types them on a Smith-
Corona Electra 210 typewriter. He spoke
to Popular Mechanics about the equipment
that has facilitated some of the best histor-
ical writing of our time, or any time.
Caro and his Smith-
Corona in their
Manhattan office.