Tom Furrier greeted a customer walking through the door of Cambridge Typewriter, a tiny shop crammed wall to wall with old typewriters.
The customer, Ron Lewis, had brought in a small portable typewriter he bought on eBay.
“Oh, it’s a cute little thing. Look at that,” Furrier said as he opened its case.
“The carriage gets stuck and the bell doesn’t work,” Lewis complained.
“Yeah it certainly does get stuck,” Furrier agreed as he tapped at the keys.
On this recent day, Lewis traveled two hours to Furrier’s shop — which, despite the name, is located in Arlington — to ask him to fix his machine. He got here just in time. He hadn’t heard the news yet that the shop is closing at the end of March.
“Retiring? Completely closing the shop down?” Lewis asked.
“I can’t find anyone to buy the shop,” Furrier replied.
In the age of texting and artificial intelligence, you might think that Furrier’s decision to retire is based on dwindling sales of an old, mechanical device that’s considered a relic of the past. But he says nothing could be farther from the truth: the business of selling and servicing the old school technology hasn’t been this good in decades.
Still, it’s been a long journey over the 45 years that Furrier has been at Cambridge Typewriter . It all started when his friend, whose father owned the store then, asked if he wanted to try out fixing typewriters.
“I came in and worked the entire day,” Furrier said. “It flew by in minutes, it seemed like. At the end of the day, this voice in my head said, ‘This is it.’”
When he first started working here in the early ’80s, Furrier said, there were about 40 typewriter shops across metro Boston that sold and fixed the machines for businesses. Then, of course, came the personal computer.
“I remember how quickly it happened and being so shocked that the transition — which I thought was going to take years — happened almost overnight,” he said.
Everywhere, typewriter shops were closing. And as the owner of Cambridge Typewriter considered calling it quits, Furrier made the seemingly crazy decision to buy the shop in 1990. By then, there were almost no customers.
“Sometimes I’d go like three or four months, or six months, without getting paid,” Furrier said. His wife supported him through the tough times, financially and emotionally.
“Whenever I’d come home and I had a bad day, I’d come home and my shoulders slumping and my head’s down, and she’d go, 'Shoulders up there, soldier!’”
It was like that for years.
But around 2001, he noticed something new. A high-school aged girl came in the shop looking for a manual typewriter. Then, over a month or so, a few more did. His curiosity piqued, he asked one of the new customers what was behind the trend.
“I said, 'You know what’s up with the old Remington typewriters?’” Furrier recalled asking. “And she goes, 'Well, that’s a typewriter Sylvia Plath used to write her poetry on.’ And ding, ding, ding! The light went on over my head. It’s like, oh my God, this is going to be the new thing, you know, young people looking for vintage typewriters to write their stories, their poetry.”
Sure enough, business started picking up. And because Furrier’s typewriter shop was the last one standing in the Boston area, all the customers came to him.
Things got even busier during the pandemic with people stuck at home wanting to write.
“I had a line of people waiting outside my store,” Furrier recalled.
The resurgence of typewriters has continued. Shops have opened in recent years in Chicago, Dayton, Ohio, and Merrimack, New Hampshire. There’s an annual typewriter festival in Milwaukee, which claims to be the birthplace of the typewriter.
Furrier says business is better now than ever before. But he’s about to turn 70, and he’s ready to retire.
“It is very bittersweet,” Furrier said. “I am going to miss my customers so much. I get emotional just thinking about it.”
Another customer, Steve Woelfel, walked in the shop’s door.
“I have a 10-year-old who’s an old soul, and he wants a typewriter,” he told Furrier.
“[I] hear it all the time,” Furrier replied.
“We got him a laptop for Christmas and he said 'I was hoping for a typewriter,'” Woelfel said.
For that 10-year-old and others growing up surrounded by advanced technology that can do the writing itself, maybe typewriters could be the antidote, allowing them to find their own creativity.
