The last typewriter made in America
By: James Biber
Tags: Typewriter, Product Design, Design, Prison, Architecture

My Lettera 22 typewriter, still the most beautiful made, even 70 years later

For a guy who grew up around typewriters (my father ran an office supply store complete with a typewriter sales and repair shop) I have missed nearly EVERY opportunity to collect examples of these magnificent icons of design. While I still have my first typewriter (Olivetti Lettera 22, classic blue, with racing stripe matching case, designed by Marcello Nizzoli, 1949) I didn’t bother to grab a single typewriter when my father closed his shop.

Eliot Noyes designed IBM Selectric typewriter, 1961, the second (or third) most beautiful ever made

And when, in a retrospectively ‘anti-design’ moment, Pentagram Design trashed our two red IBM Selectrics (full Don Draper style, designed by Eliot Noyes) I stupidly didn’t bother to lug one home. And now I wonder what was wrong with me that I didn’t pick up a Sottsass-designed Valentine when their value bottomed out.

My electric Swintec typewriter, a 3D Xray of a machine

But I leapt into action hours after reading the New Yorker article by Daniel Gross describing the last American typewriter manufacturer, and purchased a New-Jersey-made transparent Swintec. Transparent, because a large part of Swintec’s business is selling typewriters to the incarcerated population. Prisons demand transparency to obviate the hiding places these mostly empty machines would offer. And who could make up the name Swintec for a company making wares for prisoners?

As one of the biggest captive audiences in America (yes, pun intended) incarceration and transparency seem like a growth industry. I don’t understand why “Transparent is the New Black” has not been a Netflix/Amazon joint. I get the Orange…; escaping prison in an orange jumpsuit is a litmus test for either IQ or creativity (“officer, this is just my Halloween costume!”). But hidden weapons are a much more serious incarceration industry problem than Shawshank Redemption style escapes. [Andy Dufresne had the civilian garb worked out, although it is hard to understand how a stolen suit that fit a short warden could fit the 6'-5" tall Tim Robbins (n.b. while doing a bit of research I discovered that Bob Gunton, who played the warden, is in fact 6'-1" so I take it back).]

BARBAIRELLA inflatable chair

The entire transparent fashion moment is so very late 1960’s, but like many objects of desire it can weather a comeback, and dedicating the transparent revival solely to the incarcerated is just setting up another prison-to-populace appropriation (the untied shoelaces, saggy beltless pants, and threatening neck tattoos). If prisoners can make style stick, then a transparent revival is in your future.

Picture this:

-Cells equipped with transparent inflatable mattresses, clear mylar blankets, clear lucite chairs, a lucite table with a transparent typewriter, transparent medicine cabinet, even all-glass-block walls.

-Much more mesh clothing, and those transparent sneakers, and lots of those clear plastic raincoats.

-Dinners of cellophane noodles in clear plastic dishes with clear plastic sporks (I mean if we have to use them…)

-Transparent basketballs and (of course) glass basketball backboards.

Wonder Woman in her invisible airplane

This idea updates every fictional superhero holding cell; every Hannibal Lechter, Magneto, Raymond Reddington, Sherlock (the new one, with his sister) and Bond villain into the real world. What could possibly go wrong with that? Wonder Woman had a transparent jet, and what about a transparent automobile?

Ghost Car, 1939 World’s Fair, Pontiac Deluxe 6 Touring Car

That’s already been done. There’s an incredible 1940 transparent body Ghost Car made for the 1939 World’s Fair. Fast forward to nearly every modern concept car and they are often much more transparent than solid. But the most innovative, and safety minded, use of transparency in cars is the future perfect version in which the rear view mirror displays an array of cameras that dissolve the car body to allow views from the inside out of the entire scene, all 360˚.

Back to the transparent typewriter…why are we denying prisoners more modern technology? Do we insist they write with crayons because pencils can be weaponized? Typewriters are collectables, not modern tools (for most), and are ultimately stigmas, like laceless shoes.

Diller Scofidio X-rayed Samsonite luggage, one of 50 displayed as part of Tourism project

If we are going to lock prisoners into ancient technology, let’s make it a fashion statement. Students in some schools already must don transparent backpacks. And transparent luggage would make air travel so much more interesting, and might eliminate intrusive x-rays (which btw, was made into high art by Diller Scofidio). Transparent trash bags are mandated for those violators of recycling laws in NYC. So, there is a precedent for transgressors of society’s rules being relegated to transparency.

Isn’t transparency an admirable societal ethos, even if aspirational? Shouldn’t we demand it of our politicians? And where on the spectrum of opacity/transparency is the outgoing president? Is he completely opaque or completely transparent? Interestingly, he is both.

Trump lies more or less continuously. Actually Trump lies continually, not continuously, as in ‘at regular intervals’ not ‘without interruption’. Some may debate that. Anyway, nearly everything he says is at least partially dishonest, usually wholly dishonest, as in an outright lie, he’s a baldfaced, stone cold (to quote Giuliani) liar. He has constructed a wall between us and the truth; opacity at its most extreme. There is no access to White House public visitor logs, transcripts of meetings with Putin, or companies receiving federal covid funds. He rejects oversight and background checks. The list is practically endless.

Yet when he speaks publicly he is often the most transparent public figure on earth. He rarely hides his motives or his intentions. He hides facts and data, accountability and responsibility, but he somehow manages to be utterly frank about much of what he is thinking.

His choice of appointees is as transparent as his admitted motives; he appoints lobbyists to run the departments they once lobbied; a competitor and provider to the Post Office to destroy that service; a supreme court justice who labored lasciviously on the Bill Clinton impeachment, but has somehow ‘reversed’ his views as to presidential prerogative. He is the crime boss appointing (and ruthlessly eliminating/firing) his capos and soldiers; their job is to protect and serve…the Don. This is not someone trying to conceal his corruption; he wants you to know he knows you know he knows. Or words to that effect.

Mary Trump tells a remarkable story about working for and attending an event with Uncle Donald. He introduced her with a tale about her drug use and successful struggle to move past it. She stood there, knowing it was a lie, knowing he knew it was a lie. After he winked at her she realized this was arousing for him. The obvious lie no one challenges is his porn, more than Russian urination or actual porn stars.

So, when he didn’t want a cruise ship filled with covid-infected American travelers to disembark in the US, he said it loud and clear; he didn’t want his numbers (the infection and death rate) to go up. Fuck the passengers, just keep his numbers down. It was a matter of fact admission, which we consider barbaric and monstrously insane but he sees as acceptable. It’s the transparency, stupid. His admission is disarming.

When he says “well, to tell the truth…” before a claim, he is notifying us he is about to lie. His lying ‘tell’ is a kind of moral mirror; if he accuses Biden of stealing the election he is telling us that he intends to steal the election. It is so easy to read that it amounts to an open book.

Superman’s Bizarro World counterpart, cover

If you are ‘honest’ about the lies you tell are you still lying? Are you concealing the truth or are you revealing it and fulfilling our quest for transparency? Is this actually Bizarro world where everything is the same, but reversed. Or inverted, or maybe the converse, I forget which is which.

This is not a George Costanza ‘do the opposite’ realization, when yes is no and up is down. This is a more nuanced reordering of reality. A veneer of candor to expose the venality is, for many, exactly what his fans wish they could get away with.

There are different breeds of liars; the occasional liar (like most of us) who tell targeted lies to maintain our own prerogatives, and the full immersion liar (like Trump) who erect elaborate scaffolds of lies to construct an alternate reality. I, for one, can’t become the latter type because (in addition to thinking it, you know, wrong) I simply can’t keep track of the scaffold. It’s too much work and my brain just doesn’t work that way. Are Trump’s fans in the former category? Is that the nearly half a nation that admire, even worship, him because of, not in spite of, his ability to lie without repercussions?

My copy of Transparency, published in 1968, with a translation included

The title of this essay (and forgive the esoteria for a moment) is a reference to one by Colin Rowe with Robert Slutzky: Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal, written in 1955–56. It is a piece of seminal importance, but only to a very small group of very geeky architects. Of which I am one.

Rowe/Slutzky’s posit transparency in the material sense (glass, etc.) against conceptual transparency (simultaneity, viewed with the mind rather than the eye) or as they write “There is a continuous dialectic between fact and implication”.

In our case it is the literal transparency of a typewriter, a mythic airplane, a ghost car or an inflatable chair posited against the apparent transparency but conceptual opacity of Donald Trump. It is about transparency in service of opacity; transparency as one in a series of layers, a frontispiece to a vanta-black-like wall obscuring critical truths. A continuous dialectic between fact and implication.

The reordering of reality has taken 5 years (or 50 years, depending on whether you ask a journalist or an historian) but has created a real crisis of transparency.

While its attribution is disputed (George Burns, or Groucho Marx or Jean Giraudoux or Celeste Holm or Samuel Goldwyn or Daniel Schorr or most unlikely, Joe Franklin) its basic truth is not:

The key to success is sincerity [or honesty, in some tellings]. If you can fake that, you have it made.

Reordering reality is a tall order, but redefining transparency is a start.

We need more literal and figurative transparency, not less, and starting with typewriters is fine with me.