From “Typewriter Man,” Ian Frazier’s 1997 Atlantic profile of Martin Kenneth Tytell, a manual keyboard whiz in an age when people had all but given up typing words in favor of processing them:

“The Manhattan Yellow Pages has so many listings under ‘Typewriters’ that you might think getting someone to fix a manual would not be hard. The repair places I called were agreeable enough at first; but as I described the problem (Fixing an e, for Pete’s sake! How tough can that be?), they began to hedge and temporize. They mentioned a scarcity of spare parts, and the difficulty of welding forged steel, and other problems, all apparently my own fault for not having foreseen. I took my typewriter various places to have it looked at, and brought it home again unrepaired. This went on for a while. Finally, approaching the end of the Yellow Pages listing, I found an entry for ‘TYTELL TYPWRTR CO.’ It advertised restorations of antiques, an on-premises machine shop, a huge inventory of manuals, and sixty-five years of experience and accumulated parts. The address was in lower Manhattan. I called the number, and a voice answered, ‘Martin Tytell.’ I told Mr. Tytell my problem, and he told me he certainly could fix it. I said I would bring the typewriter in next week. ‘You should bring it in as soon as possible,’ he advised. ‘I’m an old man.'”

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From the 2008 obituary for Tytell in the New York Times: “When he retired in 2000, Mr. Tytell had practiced his recently vanishing craft for 70 years. For most of that time, he rented, repaired, rebuilt, reconfigured and restored typewriters in a second-floor shop at 116 Fulton Street in Lower Manhattan, where a sign advertised ‘

When he retired in 2000, Mr. Tytell had practiced his recently vanishing craft for 70 years. For most of that time, he rented, repaired, rebuilt, reconfigured and restored typewriters in a second-floor shop at 116 Fulton Street in Lower Manhattan, where a sign advertised ‘Psychoanalysis for Your Typewriter.’

There, at the Tytell Typewriter Company, he often worked seven days a week wearing a white lab coat and a bow tie, catering to customers like the writers Dorothy Parker and Richard Condon, the newsmen David Brinkley and Harrison Salisbury, and the political opponents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai E. Stevenson. Letters addressed only to ‘Mr. Typewriter, New York’ arrived there, too.

There, at the Tytell Typewriter Company, he often worked seven days a week wearing a white lab coat and a bow tie, catering to customers like the writers Dorothy Parker and Richard Condon, the newsmen David Brinkley and Harrison Salisbury, and the political opponents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai E. Stevenson. Letters addressed only to ‘Mr. Typewriter, New York’ arrived there, too.”