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Typing One to a Million on a Typewriter

posted Dec 29, 2025 by Tom Fasano

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Setting goals is a great way to get things done, but sometimes the point isn’t efficiency or even explanation — it’s endurance. Case in point: Les Stewart, an Australian man who decided to manually type out every number from one to one million on a typewriter. In words. One finger. Over sixteen years.

He started in 1982 and finished in 1998, working in disciplined bursts (20 minutes on the hour, every hour), producing nearly 20,000 pages and burning through a thousand ink ribbons across seven manual typewriters. Partially paralyzed after serving in Vietnam, Stewart chose a challenge that fit both his limitations and his love of typing — something he’d once taught professionally.

It’s tempting to ask why, but that’s usually the wrong question. The better one is why not? Some projects exist purely to be finished, and the quiet stubbornness required to see them through is its own kind of achievement.

From Hermes Rockets to Rotary Phones: A Treasure Trove in Amherst

posted Dec 26, 2025 by Tom Fasano

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Jeremy Skillings, a local entrepreneur and CEO of Hemptation USA, is leading the effort to rescue the inventory. Skillings is cataloging the items and moving them into storage to ensure they find “good homes” rather than ending up in a dumpster.

Typewriter City Streets Art Project

posted Dec 11, 2025 by Tom Fasano

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Here’s a wonderful public art project from Everett, Washington, that brings vintage manual typewriters out of collectors’ homes and onto the streets. This was from eleven years ago, but the ideas are fresh.

“Word on the Street” placed ten manual typewriters at locations around downtown Everett during the summer. Each typewriter table was custom painted by local artists celebrating literary themes—Maya Angelou, favorite books, childhood fairy tales. Passersby were invited to sit down and type responses to daily questions posed by the city’s librarians.


It’s a brilliant way to introduce a new generation to the tactile pleasure of hitting keys and hearing that bell ring when you reach the end of a line. Some responses were displayed in storefront windows; others shared on social media.

This is what happens when a community values both the literary arts and hands-on creative expression.

Al Purdy: The Voice of Canada in Free Verse

posted Nov 11, 2025 by Tom Fasano

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Al Purdy (1918–2000) was one of Canada’s most down-to-earth poets—tough, funny, and grounded in the landscape he wrote about. Over five decades and more than thirty books, he told the stories of ordinary people and familiar places, capturing small towns, wild country, and the passage of time with warmth and grit.
His poems, especially those in The Cariboo Horses and Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planets, sound natural and conversational, like talking with an old friend at the kitchen table. Beneath that easy tone, though, is a deep sense of time, loss, and endurance.
Reading Purdy is like hearing Canada talk in its own voice — honest, weathered, and full of stubborn wonder.
 
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Athens Type-In

posted Nov 9, 2025 by Tom Fasano

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Dimitris Nikos is a Greek writer and typewriter enthusiast who writes a blog and has built an extensive gallery on the Typewriter Database. Dimitris shot this video which captures a type-in held at a book café (Enastron Coffee) in the center of Athens — “Tap Tap Athens: 1st Athenian Type-in”). According to Dimitris’s blog, Enastron Coffee supplied all the typewriters.

Each table has a typewriter — some with Greek keys, some with English — a diverse mix of machines. A woman plays guitar and sings in the background, adding to the charm.

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Who Started the First Type-In?

posted Nov 1, 2025 by Tom Fasano

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Mike McGettigan (right) on his typewriter at Bridgewater’s Pub at 30th Street Station. McGettigan sits down next to Nathan Needel of Tampa on his laptop who is passing through 30th Street Station on business.

 

A Wikipedia article states that Michael McGettigan staged the very first type-in event at Bridgewater’s Pub in 30th Street Station on December 18. 2010.

 


At the top of the above article’s last column, McGettigan states he CREATED the type-in. (Click on the article to make it bigger.)

 


Michael McGettigan

 

Joe Hill’s Typewriters

posted Oct 25, 2025 by Tom Fasano

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I caught this on CBS Saturday Morning, a feature on the author Joe Hill. He speaks about creativity, mental health issues, and his use of a typewriter. You can see his Olivetti in action around 7:10 in the video. And if you think he looks like Stephen King, it might be because he’s King’s son.
 
 
It’s always fun to discover a writer who still uses a typewriter. In a recent newsletter from Joe’s Substack he says he uses an Olivetti to type his first drafts.
 
     . . . just in the last couple months, I’ve shifted over to writing my first drafts on the typewriter instead of the computer. It’s the happy spot halfway between scrawling a story on parchment with a raven’s feather and using some bloated piece of word processing software.
 
     If you even want to call working on the typewriter “writing” at all. In the time since I’ve shifted over, I’ve hardly felt like I was writing at all. It’s more like driving nails—or squeezing the trigger on a nail-gun. The steel keys on my Olivetti go chomp-chomp-chomp and eat up the page and a while later I’ve got another 1600 words. No going back to fix things. No second thoughts.
 
     I’ve got a whole stack of functioning typewriters, and I thought I’d rotate them between pieces, see how it goes. I’ve got a frail Selectric III (with a fancy-pants innovation: Correct-Tape!), a robust olive-colored Selectric II, and the one I’m using currently, my blood-red Olivetti, a 60-year-old manual. So far it seems like there might still be some good words left in this antique. Whether I refer here to the machine or the man sitting behind it, I leave you to decide.
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