Manson Whitlock, 1917–2013

Manson Whitlock repaired manual typewriters even when there weren’t many left, stubbornly resisting the technology that transformed them from essential writer’s instrument to retro artifact. “They’re not tools of necessity anymore,” he admitted in 2010. “Kids are buying them on the Internet—is that’s what it’s called?”

Whitlock began working in the typewriter department of his father’s bookstore in 1930, said the New Haven, Conn., Register, finding a lifelong outlet for his innate tinkerer’s urge. After fighting in World War II, he opened a typewriter repair shop of his own and worked there, often seven days a week and usually in a coat and tie, until his death. Although he was “too modest to talk about it,” he repaired typewriters in New Haven for the great and good, from former President Gerald Ford to the writers Robert Penn Warren and Archibald MacLeish.

A lifetime of repairing 300,000 typewriters left Whitlock with two fingers “permanently curled” from gripping a screwdriver, said The Washington Post. His shelves were stocked with ancient Royals, Remingtons, and Underwoods, “constituting a kind of private museum” of a once ubiquitous machine. Watching over it all was a bust of Mark Twain, whom Whitlock honored as “the first author to submit a typed manuscript to a publisher.”

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Although Whitlock acquiesced to repairing electric typewriters in the 1970s, he remained too proud a Luddite to march any further into the modern age. “I don’t even know what a computer is,” he said, in 2010. “I’ve heard about them a lot, but I don’t own one, and I don’t want one to own me.”