What Bassett bought were two sets of computer keycaps: the squarish buttons you press when you type, maybe half a pound of plastic altogether. I was looking at one of the sets, which he had installed on an OTD 360 Corsa, a keyboard that was produced in limited numbers in South Korea in 2013. “The keycaps were made back in the nineties by a German company called Cherry,” he said. On the face of each letter key was a Roman character, in black, and a Cyrillic character, in red. On eBay, for twenty or thirty dollars, you can buy a keycap set that (to me) looks the same, but to Bassett there’s no comparison. “These were made for a Russian company, and only a few sets still exist,” he said. The keyboard was unusual, too. “It’s one of a hundred made by one of the most influential designers in the world. The colour of the case is called hyper grey, and what’s unique about it is that each one is a slightly different shade. The designer was trying to reproduce the grey of an earlier keyboard of his, but he never did get it right.” Bassett acquired the keyboard in a trade. Next to it, on a table, was another scarce model, a Kira 80, whose Escape key Bassett had replaced with a keycap from a series called Mummy II, made by a keyboard artisan known as PunksDead. “That keycap is rare,” he said. “Right after I got it, a guy offered me three grand for it. And I was, like, ‘Hmmm, tempting—but no.’ ”
I met Bassett in June, at the headquarters of Mode Designs, a small computer-keyboard company in Somerville, Massachusetts. The occasion was an afternoon meetup organised by the New England Keyboard Group. There were a hundred or so enthusiasts in attendance, virtually all of them young men. Several were identified on their nametags by their Discord or Reddit handles, or by their usernames on the online keyboard forums Deskthority and Geekhack. The ones I spoke with generally referred to what they do as “the hobby”—as in, “He was out of the hobby for a while, but a few months ago he came back.” Some of the keyboards on display were commercial models from as long ago as the nineteen-eighties, but most were recent creations, which their owners had built themselves, using components they’d bought from specialised manufacturers.
The hobby satisfies some of the same impulses as collecting and customising cars, or maybe brewing small-batch craft beers, or gardening. On a table on the far side of the room, I tried three keyboards that belonged to Arty Ivanenko, a twenty-one-year-old pharmacy technician. He told me later that he had left a dozen other keyboards at home, including a vintage model, a Northgate OmniKey, which he likes so much that he seldom risks using it. Like many people in the hobby, Ivanenko traces his participation to the beginning of the pandemic. “I was looking for something to do anyway, and keyboards quickly became a pretty large part of my life,” he said. “Coming to meetups has helped me figure out where I want to go with my collection, and how I want to expand. It’s just a great community to be a part of. There’s no negativity. Everyone’s, like, ‘Wow, that’s really cool’—even if it’s not their thing.”
I share Ivanenko’s fascination with keyboards, but my obsession predates the pandemic by half a century. I learned to touch-type in sixth grade, during a mandatory six-week mini-course. This was 1966, well before personal computers, so it was notable that an all-boys elementary school even offered typing, much less required it. We learned from enormous Olympia manuals. (They had no characters printed on the keys, so we did exercises while staring at a keyboard diagram hanging on the front wall.) Once a week, our teacher gave us a Wow Speed Test, and I got pretty good pretty fast. Typing is rhythmic, complicated, and soothing, and, when I’m doing it well, my conscious brain doesn’t seem to be involved. It’s as close as I’ll ever come to playing a musical instrument—a nontrivial attraction. My love of typing probably contributed to my decision to become a writer.
My father was happy when I learned, because he believed that typing had survival value. He had enlisted in the Army four days before his eighteenth birthday, in 1943, and was trained as a replacement combat engineer, whose duties included placing explosives and detecting and detonating landmines. He landed in Liverpool on D Day and on Omaha Beach six weeks later. At some point, an officer asked whether anyone in the company knew how to type. My father was the only one who did—his mother, a former secretary, had taught him—and from that moment until the end of the war he was never in harm’s way. He was eventually assigned to the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Versailles, Reims, and Frankfurt. Eisenhower’s Scottish terrier, Telek, got to know him well enough to stop barking at him.
The first commercially practical typewriter was co-invented by a Wisconsin newspaper publisher who had recently served in the state senate. It was sold, beginning in 1874, by E. Remington Sons, which also made sewing machines, bicycles, steam-powered canal barges, and, of course, guns. The standard QWERTY keyboard layout originated with that machine. There are lots of theories about where the layout came from—including the fact that a salesman could type the word “typewriter” using only keys on the top row—but no one really knows. One peculiarity of QWERTY is that for people writing in English, the arrangement of the keys is lopsided: of the fifty letters in what the Times says are the ten best starting words in Wordle, for example, forty-one are typed with the left hand. Shouldn’t a language’s most commonly used letters be spread around more, or typed with the right hand? The best known alternative layout, called Dvorak, is named for one of its co-inventors (a college professor and typing instructor, not the composer). It was introduced in 1936 and is often said to be both easier on a typist’s fingers and faster, although if it were clearly superior you’d expect Dvorak typists to win all the speed competitions. They don’t.
Mark Twain was one of Remington’s earliest customers, and either “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” or “Life on the Mississippi” was probably the first American book submitted to a publisher as a typescript. (An assistant did the typing.) Twain’s machine, like most early typewriters, printed only capital letters, and its key bars struck the paper from underneath, so that he and his typist couldn’t check what they’d written until they’d typed several lines. Twain soon came to hate almost everything about it—“I don’t want people to know I own this curiosity-breeding little joker”—and he gave it to William Dean Howells. (“He took it home to Boston, and my morals began to improve, but his have never recovered,” Twain wrote in his autobiography, which he dictated to a typist.) The technology evolved steadily, and typewriters came to transform writing of all kinds. My father’s father was born on a farm in northern Missouri in 1883, and got a job at the Kansas City Life Insurance Company in 1904. He was hired mainly for his penmanship: he filled in blanks in printed policy documents and wrote letters to agents and policyholders. My grandmother, who was seven years younger, went to work as a secretary at the same company a few years later. By the time she was hired, typists had begun to make much of her future husband’s job obsolete.
Unlike Mark Twain, I’ve loved every typewriter I’ve used regularly, beginning with my mother’s big grey Royal, the brand also favoured by Ernest Hemingway and Ian Fleming. My mother’s was a Quiet Deluxe from the late nineteen-forties. Like many other typewriters of that era, it had no key for the numeral one—you used a lowercase “L” instead—and to make an exclamation point you typed a period, then backspaced and typed a single quotation mark on top of it. My parents bought me an Olympia portable when I was in high school, and I bought myself a Brother electric portable the summer after my freshman year in college. I earned beer money typing papers for other students, and by the time I graduated I’d had three typing-related vacation jobs: junior staffer at a grain-industry trade magazine, fill-in assistant at a book publisher in New York, and typesetter for a car-racing newsletter called Speed Times. (On my first day at Speed Times, the owner yelled at me for correcting “tempacher,” in an article he’d written, to “temperature.” After that, I left his spelling alone.) In all three jobs, I got to use I.B.M. Selectric typewriters—the clerical equivalent, at the time, of playing Steinway grands.
