Some celebrities collect art, rare film prints or plain old action figures. (Welcome to the club, Leonardo DiCaprio.) Tom Hanks, somewhat famously, collects something that’s simultaneously more practical and unwieldy: typewriters. And unlike Steve Martin’s paintings or Leo’s figures, you can currently get a look at some of the Hanks typewriters at The Church, an exhibition venue in Long Island’s Sag Harbor.
Some of Tom’s Typewriters includes 35 from his collection of over 300, chosen by Hanks himself. These include an electric typewriter from the set of Mad Men (the curators are, as yet, unclear as to how Hanks obtained this, but he’s recording an electronic guide to accompany the show that they are hoping will explain), an original 1969 Olivetti “Valentine” typewriter designed by Ettore Sottsass, and, in one of the more surprising touches, a relatively new model: a translucent typewriter, still manufactured by a company that pivoted from calculator production in the 1980s, for use by incarcerated writers. The exhibit also includes some less fancy beaters set aside for a more interactive experience; the physical presence, after all, is such a part of the typewriter’s mystique.
The origin of the Hanks typewriters has been told, albeit fictionalized, in his short story These Are the Meditations of My Heart, from his collection Uncommon Type. In the story, a woman brings an old typewriter in for repair, only to have a life-changing conversation with the man she hopes will repair it. Hanks has said that the conversation was taken almost verbatim from his own experience, which involved being told, essentially, that what he brought in was closer to a toy, and being presented instead with a Hermes 3000, as an object of surprising durability and utility. Hanks now totes a typewriter – not always the same one – with him nearly everywhere, and uses one nearly every day. He doesn’t necessarily use them for his longer-form writing (a laptop is still going to be the more efficient tool for that), but will use a typewriter the way others might jot something down on scrap paper, or tap into a notes app: to make a grocery list, say.
But while Hanks provided the typewriters and some stories to go along with them, it fell to the renowned creative director and author Simon Doonan, who has worked on everything from a Warhol exhibit to window-dressing at Barney’s to Christmas decorating at the Obama White House, to actually design and assemble the exhibit. It’s easy to see why Doonan would match well with the playful, gentle-natured Hanks persona; when I mention using my mom’s old typewriters as a kid some 35 years ago, he asks her name and repeatedly incorporates her into his thoughts: “Typewriters had a massive impact on Linda and I,” he says. “The soundtrack to the 20th century was the clacking and clanging of typewriters,” Doonan says, “because that was the huge revolution in the early part of the century, and into the 50s, 60s, and 70s.” He cites his own parents as an example: “They both left school very young, sort of headed to factory work, except they learned to type, so it changed the course of their lives.”
“For younger people,” he notes in terms of people who didn’t grow up accustomed to the devices, “it’s like, holy crap, look at these insane machines that are simultaneously very simple and wildly labyrinthine and complex. Looking into a typewriter is like looking into someone’s brain; it’s terrifying.” For a friendlier analogy, Doonan likens the hobby to collecting (and playing with) vintage guitars, where there’s an element of interaction, rather than simply displaying the wares with reverence. In that sense, assembling this show recalled his work on The Warhol Look, a show that ran at the Whitney focusing on fashion and clothes: “You’re dealing with a lot of objects that don’t come with this heavy art imprimatur.” He notes that it was also akin to his work at Barney’s, where he was a window dresser for decades, and others would select the materials he worked with: “I’m used to handling merch, without all the preconceived ideas of art.”
That doesn’t mean, of course, that these machines lack aesthetic pleasures. “For me, it’s a visual thing. It’s like a big box of chocolates,” Doonan says, evoking a famous Hanks character. “Every one is so laden with design language that you just get completely obsessed with the era.” Does he have a favorite style of typewriter? He says he’s torn between more space-age-style typewriters of the mid-20th century and older models, which evoke a kind of dark glamour: “I love the really heavy Victorian ones, that are very sinister – [you can picture] poison-pen letters and hate mail written on them. That’s the thing about typewriters: yes, love letters, screenplays, books, but also treacherous communications that make your blood run cold when you take them out of the envelope. Typewriters have shown up in so many movies in so many sinister contexts – the key that identifies a murderer, or in Jack Nicholson’s case [in The Shining], the typewriter that reveals the true extent of his psychosis.”
That extends to the physical feel of using them, too, especially on pre-electric models: adjusting the paper by hand, hitting keys to trigger a satisfying whack for each letter, moving the carriage at the end of the margin. Doonan has no particular writing rituals of his own, but still notes that the physical process has changed from “thumping, to the tickling of the ivories”, losing a certain force along the way. (“The violence!” he enthuses.) For the multiple generations who have made the switch, and the multiple generations who never had to, Some of Tom’s Typewriters can at least offer a brief, blown-up version of those lost experiences.
Some of Tom’s Typewriters is on display at The Church in Sag Harbor until 10 March
