Typecast

The ding from the tiny steel return bell inside the ebony 1936 Royal Deluxe typewriter hangs in the air an impossibly long time, like a slender silver cloud floating across the room. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi.

When it finally fades, Tom Furrier gently pulls the return bar and sounds the bell again. And again. And again.

``Listen to that," he says, head cocked just so. ``Perfect, isn't it?"

It's more a statement than a question. Wrapped around the words is a lifetime of admiration and loyalty to a disappearing craft. Furrier is a typewriter repairman. Among the last of a dying breed.

In an age of color desktop inkjet printers, Pentium Fives, and Wi-Fi high-speed connections, Furrier spends his days bent over the Bakelite shells and steel innards of machines built decades before the Internet was a gleam in Al Gore's eye. Twenty-six years ago, when Furrier first touched spring hook to keyboard, there were eight pages of advertisements for typewriter repairmen in the Boston Yellow Pages. Today there is a handful of lonely holdouts, including his shop in Arlington.

Three times business waned to the point when Furrier thought he was going to have to close his doors. Three times he narrowly escaped. But a funny thing happened on the way to the unemployment line: Business started picking up.

``The younger kids, they're interested in typewriters now," Furrier said, obviously tickled that things have started to come full circle. ``It started about five or six years ago. Nostalgia, I guess. A few teenagers started coming in, looking around. They wanted to buy one."

The phenomenon is pronounced now, not so great that Furrier can count on getting rich anytime soon, but the tide has turned. Young folks, teens and 20-somethings, tired of plastic, characterless computer keyboards that need replacing every 18 months, are seeking something older, more substantial. Something connected to the slow, physical sense of writing.

They march into Furrier's museum piece of a shop on Massachusetts Avenue, unsure of what to buy, just knowing they want a machine that enables them to feel the snap of a spring-loaded steel hammer slam into paper and hear the pop of a key sculpt its hard ridgeline in wet black ink.

Hemingway once wrote that a typewriter writes the way people talk. Hefting the weight of a 1959 Hermes 3000 or a 1946 black enameled Olivetti Portable, it's a sentiment that feels like truth.

And then, of course, there's the bell. ``It just reminds you of another time," said Victoria Maxfield, 13, of Jamaica Plain, who bought a 1930s Remington on eBay last year and took it to Furrier to have it refurbished. ``And I love that you can feel the energy of the people who were writing on it before," she said.

Furrier didn't start out in pursuit of the romantic or the nostalgic. In 1975, he graduated from the University of New Hampshire with a degree in forestry and went to work for a landscape construction company in Burlington. Five years into it, he realized he had taken a wrong turn.

A bit flummoxed about what to do next, he approached a childhood friend to ask if he could apprentice in his typewriter repair shop. Back then, five full-time repair and sales men were working long days to keep up with demand. Business was good. The answer was yes.

That was back in the halcyon days when the electronic hum of IBM Selectrics murmured in every office and the mighty Smith Corona company bragged about its amazing new ``self-correcting" key.

Back then every office in America had a dozen typewriters clacking away. Typewriter repairmen were the software writers of their day. Job security was a given.

The day Furrier started work he knew he had found his calling.

``It all just made sense to me, from the very beginning," he said. ``I loved it from the start."

Alas, he was a man out of time. Business began to dry up almost from the first day he went to work. By 1986 Furrier was the last employee in the shop. In 1990, when the owner wanted to retire, Furrier bought the shop.

Was he foolish to do so?

``No," he said. ``I loved it and figured I could make it work, or at least I'd do it as long as I could."

Business has become so slow at points that Furrier has been within a few weeks of closing his doors for good. But each time something has come up. Today, it's the Selectrics that keep his rent paid. There are enough of the old IBM warhorses scattered around offices in Boston's Financial District to keep Furrier busy making house calls.

Afternoons in his shop where walls are covered with vintage typewriter advertisements and the shelves are stacked with manuals, Furrier painstakingly restores the Olivettis and Royals his customers bring to him in various states of disrepair.

Manual typewriter aficionados are a funny breed. Some are out and out Luddites. Others are contrarians. Some say they just know a good thing when they've found one.

Novelist Larry McMurtry, who famously uses a Hermes 3000, says he just never got around to using a computer.

``No need," he said. ``It's very comfortable. It's easy to use. I don't have any mystical feeling about them. But I've been using one for 25 years, and I see no need to change."

Manual typewriters, said John Levine, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School and one of Furrier's biggest customers, were built before the era of planned obsolescence. They were built to last and look snazzy doing it.

And the motion, the conscious physical act of typing, becomes an act of deliberation on an old Remington or Olivetti.

``It's a form of active meditation," Levine said. ``When you're typing, you're typing. Nothing else."

Furrier says his customers frequently tell him they write first drafts on manual typewriters because the sound and the diminished speed helps their creative process. Then they edit on computers.

Richard Polt, a professor of philosophy at Xavier University in Cincinnati and the editor of ETCetera, a quarterly newsletter for typewriter fans, said the growing appreciation of manuals among teenagers and college students is a national phenomenon.

When he brings his portable Remington Number 7 to his local coffee shop from time to time to mark papers, he inevitably draws a crowd. ``It's a real novelty," Polt said. ``Some of them have never seen a typewriter before. . . . They ask me where the screen is or the mouse or the delete key."

New interest or not, when the septuagenarians who grew up with typewriters pass on, they will be hard to replace.

Says novelist John Updike, who still types postcards on the Olivetti on which he wrote ``The Witches of Eastwick": ``We're growing old and erratic together. . . . The space bar is OK, but the carriage return is a little wobbly. If it breaks down for good, I don't think I'll bother to fix it."

Douglas Belkin can be reached at dbelkin@globe.com.