While typing is done quietly on a phone, tablet or laptop keyboard, a Rolla couple is breathing life back into the sound, feel and smell of an older way to put thoughts to the page.
Shane and Amanda Byrne are the owners of Clickety Clack Typewriters, a new store that sells and services old typewriters and is fostering a community of fellow enthusiasts.
For Shane Byrne, the feeling of writing on a typewriter just doesn't translate to plunking pixels on a screen. “It's deliberate, it's [done] with intention." He said. "You're taking your thoughts and putting it on paper and no one can take that away.”
His love affair began in 2019, when he was on a road trip for a job with the Navy. He stumbled into an antique shop in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He saw a Royal Quiet Deluxe typewriter.
“I fell in love right away,” he said. ”The rest is history.”
That began Shane Byrne’s collection of typewriters. Soon, he started to teach himself how to repair them, and reached out to other manual typewriter collectors and enthusiasts to learn as much as he could.
Soon, typewriters began enchanting Amanda Byrne, too. She is pursuing an online master’s degree in creative writing and has to write using a computer often, but she doesn’t like it.
For starters, “It’s very two dimensional, it's very flat,” Amanda Byrne said.
Then, there’s the ephemeral nature of typing to a screen. “You put something out in the cloud and it just kind of goes away and you just really hope that it's still there when you log in the next time,” she said. “But with a typewriter, you have the touch, the feel of it, the weight of your hands, you have the sound, you have the smell of the ink.”
More than a store
Now retired, the Byrnes moved to Rolla to be close to family. They opened Clickety Clack Typewriters in May as a place to be part retail store, part repair shop, part museum and part gathering place for enthusiasts.
The several dozen typewriters on display in their brick-and-mortar shop in the Old Phelps County Courthouse include the Underwood No. 5, the worldwide leader in sales with more than 5 million sold between 1900 and 1932. The collection also includes rare machines with keyboards for different languages.
In addition to selling and fixing typewriters, the Byrne’s host “type-ins” at community events where enthusiasts and the curious can try out typewriters.
“They can basically type up whatever they'd like and take it with them. That's theirs to keep, so they get the experience,” Shane Byrne said. “We have had people attend those events aged 5 to 95.”
The Byrnes especially like seeing kids who have never seen a typewriter before get a chance to try one out.
“People say kids have no attention span and they are glued to their screens, but I’ve seen young kids type on a 75 year old typewriter for close to an hour, and their parents can’t believe how the time has gone,” Amanda Byrne said.
The Byrnes say Clickety Clack Typewriters has so far been more about covering their costs and building a community than it has been about making money. But introducing more people to the manual typewriters that have enchanted them, has been a labor of love that's been paying off one keystroke at a time.
