Ever since Tom Furrier announced he was closing Cambridge Typewriter the phone has been ringing off the hook.
“I’m going out on top,” hollered the 70-year-old on a recent morning at his storefront on Massachusetts Avenue in Arlington, where he moved the business, which has been around for more than 50 years, after buying it from his old boss in 1990. “I’m busier than ever.”
Furrier’s tiny shop is a mid-century relic, with the smell of ink wafting through the door, framed period ads on the walls, and dozens of vintage manual typewriters emblazoned with names such as Underwood, Remington, Smith-Corona, and Royal perched on shelves and sitting on the floor in sturdy cases.
Like so many businesses, Furrier’s was disrupted by the digital revolution of the 1990s. But recent years have brought a modest renaissance for the 19th-century communication technology as a wave of young customers with a penchant for manual typewriters boosted the store’s finances.
This new cohort joined the shop’s shrinking group of regulars, which over the years has included celebrated writers like Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough, novelist Celeste Ng (“Little Fires Everywhere”), memoirist Susanna Kaysen (“Girl, Interrupted”), and poet Louise Glück, who won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature — and generations of Harvard, MIT, and Boston-area students and faculty members.
Although his business is still robust, Furrier says he’s ready for retirement. Decades of lifting and fixing typewriters (about 30,000 by his count) have left him with worn cartilage in his hands and chronic back pain. After plans to sell the shop failed twice, he will shut down at the end of March.
It’s bittersweet.
“I’m really going to miss this place,” said Furrier, his work jacket showing stubborn grease stains and, in his pockets, his favorite tools: a spring hook and a small screwdriver to reach inside the machines’ nooks and crannies. “I’m going to miss my customers. My regular customers are very upset because now they’ll have to travel to southern New Hampshire, Rhode Island or southern Connecticut … But I’m just done.”
A forestry major and lifelong tinkerer, Furrier began as a typewriter technician in the 1980s, when he was 25. In those days he did mostly service calls at MIT and Harvard Law School, where he would fix machines used by scholars such as Lawrence Tribe, Alan Dershowitz, and others, he said.
In recent years, others with links to Harvard have visited his shop, among them Tayari Jones, a 2011-2012 Radcliffe Fellow who became a typewriter devotee.
Jones’ encounter with Furrier was as serendipitous as it was consequential. Struggling with writer’s block, she visited the shop seeking inspiration.
“Tom made me into a convert,” said Jones, who teaches creative writing at Emory University, in a phone interview. “It wasn’t until I went to Tom’s that I discovered manual typewriters … Tom is the greatest typewriter doctor because he doesn’t run his shop like a museum. He’s not fussy and prissy about it. He’s very practical and down to earth. He wants us all just to have fun with the typewriter; just get it; put some paper in there; make some noise and make some art.”
“Tom is the greatest typewriter doctor because he doesn’t run his shop like a museum.”
Tayari Jones
Jones now writes on vintage manual typewriters. In fact, her 2018 award-winning best-seller “American Marriage” was produced entirely on a typewriter — one of the 11 in her collection, five of which she bought from Furrier.
“There’s so much pressure in the industry to be fast,” Jones said. “Using a typewriter made me feel like, I can slow down and work at my own pace … And there is something so satisfying about raising a racket when using a typewriter.”
Professors Jill Lepore and Leah Price visited Furrier’s shop as they were preparing for “How to Read a Book,” a seminar they co-taught a few years ago. The class askedstudents to think about the tools they use to take notes by recapitulating the history of note-taking technologies, Lepore wrote in an email. Students used clay and a stylus, paper and quills, typewriters and smartphones.
Lepore said she used the typewriters she bought from Furrier in a history class she taught in the fall.
“We visited Cambridge Typewriter some years back to stock up,” wrote Lepore. “I still use the three typewriters that I bought from him then … It’s harder and harder to find typewriters to use. When the ones I’ve got break down, or when I can no longer replace the ribbon, this crucial piece of the history of technology will be lost.”
Reached by email, Price, an associate in Harvard’s English Department and Henry Rutgers Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University, said she had sort of an epiphany at Furrier’s store.
“Visiting Tom’s shop helped me understand that coming up with ideas is the easy part,” said Price. “Repairing the tools that record and transmitting those ideas turned out to be surprisingly tricky, and banging out their thoughts on a typewriter keyboard helped slow down our students to a pace where they had to think before they wrote. Come the apocalypse, every Crimson journalist may want to know how to change a typewriter ribbon.”
“Visiting Tom’s shop helped me understand that coming up with ideas is the easy part.”
Leah Price
Visitors often come to Furrier’s shop as if it were a museum or a curiosity shop.
“If people come in by themselves, they come back with family or friends because they say, ‘You’ve got to come to see this shop,”’ Furrier said. “Or people come with their grandkids to show them that this is what they used to write with.”
Furrier said it took him by surprise when a younger crowd started appearing in the early 2000s. Some were aspiring writers who wanted to emulate legendary ones, like the customer looking to purchase a Hermes 3000, the model famously used by American poet Sylvia Plath. Others were looking for something computers can’t offer.
“To write on a typewriter is a totally different experience than writing on a computer,” said Furrier. “It’s a sensorial experience; the sounds of the click-clack, the feel of the keys and the paper, the smell of the ink. And there are no distractions. Typewriters only do one thing; you can’t multitask on it, and that’s a new thing to younger people.”
“It’s a sensorial experience; the sounds of the click-clack, the feel of the keys and the paper, the smell of the ink. And there are no distractions. Typewriters only do one thing; you can’t multitask on it, and that’s a new thing to younger people.”
Thomas Furrier
Reflecting on his career, Furrier said he most cherishes the friendships he made with writers and some customers, and a couple of stints as a typewriter consultant for period films, among them one by documentary filmmaker Errol Morris.
Other highlights include the time when actor Tom Hanks, a typewriter collector, gifted him an autographed Olympia SM4 machine with a typewritten letter asking him to “take good care of it and help it keep doing its job for another hundred years.”
And then there was being mentioned in the acknowledgment section by Jones in “American Marriage.”
To bid farewell, Furrier will hold a retirement party with typewriters for people to use on March 22 at the Fox Library in East Arlington. Longtime customers, friends, and the general public are all invited.
“It has been beyond my wildest dreams,” Furrier said of his career. “For a tinkerer like me, fixing typewriters has been fun and rewarding. I got to befriend some amazing writers and geek out about typewriters. And how many people can say they got movie credits and a book acknowledgement?”
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