Grease, Gears, and Grit: The Dying Breed Keeping Typewriters Alive in a Touchscreen World

Walk into Paul Lundy's repair shop in Cincinnati and the first thing you notice is the smell. It's a specific combination of machine oil, aging rubber, and something faintly metallic that doesn't have a clean name. Shelves run floor to ceiling, packed with Royals, Olivettis, Smith Coronas, and a few Hermes machines that look like they were pulled from a Cold War embassy. Lundy has been fixing typewriters for thirty-one years. He's one of maybe two hundred people in the entire country who still does it professionally.

"Two hundred is probably generous," he says, not looking up from a 1962 Olympia SM4 he's coaxing back to life with a set of dental picks. "I'd say closer to a hundred and fifty who actually know what they're doing."

That's the rough consensus among the loose, informal network of technicians who've kept this trade alive well past every reasonable expiration date. No trade association. No certification body. No industry conference. Just a handful of people spread thin across the country who learned from someone older, or taught themselves from manuals that are increasingly hard to find, doing work that most people assume stopped being necessary sometime around 1995.

The Machine That Refused to Become a Museum Piece

Typewriters were supposed to be done. The PC killed them, then the laptop finished the job, and then smartphones made even laptops feel heavy. But the machines never fully disappeared — they just relocated. Into attics, estate sales, thrift stores, and eventually back into people's apartments, not as decoration, but as tools.

The resurgence started quietly. Writers who were frustrated with distraction started experimenting. Journalists who wanted a first-draft process that didn't involve a glowing rectangle started buying vintage machines off eBay. Then activists noticed something that felt important: a typewriter produces a document that can't be remotely wiped, hacked, or surveilled in the way a connected device can. That's not paranoia — that's physics.

Demand crept upward, and suddenly the repair shops that had survived on inertia found themselves actually busy. Lundy says his turnaround time went from two weeks to six in the span of about three years. He stopped advertising entirely because he didn't need to.

"I get a machine in from a novelist in Brooklyn, then a retired teacher from Dayton, then a twenty-four-year-old who just wants to write letters," he says. "It's not one type of person. That surprised me."

What It Actually Takes to Fix One

The repair work itself is a discipline that resists shortcuts. Modern electronics can be diagnosed with software and swapped out with replacement parts that are still in production. Typewriters are different. The parts haven't been manufactured in decades. Every repair is a negotiation between what the machine needs and what's available — which usually means salvaging components from donor machines, fabricating small parts by hand, or finding workarounds that preserve function without perfect restoration.

Mariela Voss runs a one-woman operation out of a converted garage in Albuquerque. She learned the trade from her uncle, who ran a business machines shop from the 1970s until he retired in 2008. When he closed up, she inherited his tools, his parts inventory, and his client list — which she's since tripled.

"The hardest part isn't the mechanical stuff," she says. "It's the rubber. The platens degrade, the feed rollers get hard and brittle. You can't just order new ones. You either find a specialty vendor who still makes them — and there are a few — or you send the part out to be re-rubberized, which takes time and costs money."

Voss charges between sixty and two hundred dollars for most repairs, depending on complexity. She's also started doing what she calls "daily driver builds" — taking a machine that's mechanically sound but cosmetically rough and tuning it specifically for heavy regular use, the way a mechanic might prep a car for someone who actually drives rather than just collects.

The Clients Who Won't Budge

Ask the people who use these machines why they haven't moved on, and you get answers that are less sentimental than you might expect.

Dennis Prater writes longform journalism. He's been using a 1969 Hermes 3000 as his primary drafting tool for eleven years. His reasoning is almost clinical. "When I'm on a computer, I'm always one click away from something else. The typewriter has one function. I think better when I can't multitask."

For others, it's about the physical record. A typed page exists in a way that a digital file doesn't — it can't be altered without evidence, it doesn't require a power source to read, and it doesn't disappear when a platform shuts down or a subscription lapses. These aren't abstract concerns. They're practical ones.

Then there's the underground market that's developed around refurbished machines. Small operations — some formal, some barely that — have sprung up buying, restoring, and reselling typewriters at prices that would have seemed absurd twenty years ago. A well-restored Hermes or Olympia in good working order can go for three to five hundred dollars. Rarer machines go higher.

Holding the Line

None of the technicians working in this space think they're saving an industry. They're too practical for that. What they're doing is more modest and, in its way, more interesting — they're maintaining a functional alternative for people who've decided that the default tools of modern life don't actually serve them.

Lundy finishes with the Olympia and rolls a test sheet through it, typing a quick paragraph to check the alignment. Every key lands clean. He pulls the sheet out, holds it up, and seems satisfied in the specific way of someone who fixed a real thing.

"People ask me if this is depressing, being in a dying trade," he says. "But the machines keep coming in. The people keep showing up. I don't know what dying looks like, but I don't think it looks like this."