A close-up of a 1926 Underwood Standard Portable typewriter previously owned by the legendary author Ernest Hemingway. Photo: NYT
You never know what can be found in a famous person’s typewriter. Joe DiMaggio’s old machine contained the cutup shards of his expired bank card. Steve Soboroff, who bought the New York Yankees Hall of Famer’s typewriter in 2011, found the little pieces underneath the keys while cleaning it.
Soboroff also unearthed childhood photos of Ernest Hemingway in the writer’s 1926 Underwood Standard Portable. But Soboroff’s greatest discovery with these machines – and others, including typewriters belonging to Maya Angelou, Tennessee Williams, John Lennon and Shirley Temple – was a historical connection to great people.
“These are really hard for me to give up,” said Soboroff on a video call.
After 20 years of assembling what may be the greatest typewriter collection in the world, Soboroff is putting all 33 of his beloved machines up for auction. Owning them has been a privilege, he says, and each comes with a unique back story that helped fuel Soboroff’s passion.
Like when Soboroff backed out of a deal with actress Angelina Jolie, refusing to part with Hemingway’s typewriter after she agreed to pay US$250,000 (about RM1.1mil today) for it.
While reports at the time indicated Jolie was the one to walk away, Soboroff said he cancelled the transaction when he learned that she intended to give the machine to her husband, Brad Pitt, for him to use. Soboroff might have allowed Pitt to bang away on Harold Robbins’ or Mae West’s machines, he said, but Hemingway’s typewriter was sacred.
“At that time, I could have used the money,” said Soboroff.
Soboroff, a former commissioner of the Los Angeles Police Department, with his typewriter collection, at Heritage Auctions in Dallas. Photo: NYT
“But nobody’s touching that one. Ernest Hemingway’s typewriter? No chance.”
Now someone else will get the chance to own it, because after two decades bearing the responsibility of protecting, insuring, exhibiting and shipping the typewriters all over the country to promote their legacies, Soboroff, 75, no longer has the energy for it. And he could still use the money.
Some of the proceeds will be donated to the Jim Murray Memorial Foundation, which honours the former Los Angeles Times sports columnist by issuing scholarships to journalism students. Soboroff is a lifelong fan of the Los Angeles Dodgers and revered Murray’s writing. His was the first typewriter Soboroff bought, at auction, in 2005. From there, collecting them became a devotion.
A Los Angeles-based entrepreneur and former commissioner of the Los Angeles Police Department, Soboroff bought most of the typewriters at auctions, though a few were acquired directly from family members or the previous owner.
Tom Hanks, a renowned collector himself, gave Soboroff his own Hermes 3000 after the two met and discussed their shared love of typewriters.
And in 2012, not long after the journalist Andy Rooney died, Soboroff hired a real estate agent to go to the family garage sale at Rooney’s old house and offer US$5,000 (over RM22,000 today) for his beloved 1929 Underwood Model 5.
A 1902 Columbia Bar-Lock typewriter that once belonged to the novelist Jack London. Photo: NYT
The man Soboroff hired turned out to be a retired CIA agent, and despite a three-hour line to get into the sale, he insinuated himself inside and secured the machine. Soboroff said that hours later, he received an offer of US$125,000 (RM555,000 today) from CBS, Rooney’s former employer. He turned it down.
Something special
Typewriters are imperfect little engraving machines, Soboroff likes to say, requiring more physical interaction than today’s laptops. Some exude a personality, a mechanical soul, like a vintage car or a maestro’s violin. The connection to their original owners adds to the mystique.
“They are really hard to find because some heirs don’t want to give them up,” said Soboroff. “They’ll sell the clothes, pictures. They won’t sell the typewriter.”
There is no telling yet the full value of the collection. Heritage Auctions is handling the sale, which goes to gavel Dec 15 in Dallas, Texas and the items will be sold separately.
Last year, Soboroff donated six of his typewriters to the Smithsonian. They had belonged to John Lennon, Elia Kazan, Jerry Siegel (co-creator of Superman), Orson Welles, DiMaggio and Angelou and were appraised at an average of about US$250,000 apiece.
“I shouldn’t own Maya Angelou’s typewriter,” said Soboroff. “That’s for the people of America. I shouldn’t own John Lennon’s typewriter.”
A 1961 Smith-Corona Electra 110 that belonged to the novelist Truman Capote. Photo: NYT
He did, however, allow Pierce Brosnan, to type on Lennon’s machine in exchange for a donation to the Murray foundation.
He lent Siegel’s to comic book conventions, where people lined up for hours to write short notes on the same typewriter used to create Superman’s dialogue.
In making his permanent gift, Soboroff allowed the Smithsonian to choose from his collection.
It passed on typewriters owned by Greta Garbo, John Updike, Philip Roth, Jack London and Gore Vidal, as well as the Braille machine owned by Andrea Bocelli. It declined the Hemingway model because it already owned one. Whoever buys this Hemingway will also get the photo negatives, the prints and the original envelopes stashed inside the case.
When Soboroff first spotted the negatives, he mistook them for ancient strips of bacon. The first one he touched turned to dust, so he scooped the rest up with a spatula and took them to a restorer, where the shots were revealed.
Sandra Spanier, an English professor at Penn State University and the editor of the Hemingway Letters Project, called the photographs a “pretty extraordinary find”.
“Finding negatives from the early 20th, when Hemingway was a small child at his family cottage, inside a typewriter, is a pretty solid link to Hemingway,” she said.
Coming to auction in the US is a clattering collection of typewriters once owned by the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Shirley Temple and Andy Rooney. Photo: NYT
Soboroff said experts from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, which is home to a vast collection of Hemingway’s archives, matched the typeface to confirm it was the author’s typewriter.
He said the forensic investigation showed evidence of desperate words pounded into the roller. He believes they could be some of Hemingway’s final typed thoughts, before he died by suicide in 1961.
Dark tales
One of the typewriters Soboroff probably won’t miss is the 1968 Montgomery Ward Signature Portable 440T owned by Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber. He may have used it to write some of his manifesto before he was captured and handed four life sentences.
Soboroff bought the machine from the US government, in part because the proceeds went to the victims and their families. He then wrote a letter to Kaczynski in prison on the same typewriter, asking him three questions about it.
One related to the whereabouts of the carrying case, which Soboroff knew Kaczynski had used to make a bomb. He replied – “in that creepy handwriting”, Soboroff recalled – that he would only answer the questions after verifying Soboroff’s identity.
Two months later, Soboroff received another card that read: “You are not who I thought you were. Tough luck.”
A 1970 Perkins Brailler previously owned by the Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli, part of the collection assembled by Soboroff. Photo: NYT
“I’m sitting at the Palm in Beverly Hills,” said Soboroff.
“He’s serving 665 years in max security, and he’s saying tough luck to me? I decided I didn’t want any more prison pen pals.”
Soboroff has made most of the collection available for display at museums, universities and special events and asks buyers to also show the typewriters publicly. He tapped out the written requests – typos included – on his own Monarch 101 from 1937. The machine has no delete buttons, no cut-and-paste. Just the click-clack of history.
“This is emotional for me,” he said. “I hope it will be for the people who buy them too.” – ©2024 The New York Times Company
