Joe Van Cleave’s fingers are punching out words on the small keyboard of a Corona 3 typewriter, one of about a dozen typewriters — manual and electric — he has displayed in the dinette and kitchen area of his Northeast Heights home on a morning this week.
This particular typewriter is a 1929 edition, but Van Cleave said the Corona 3 was mass-produced during World War I.
“They would have been used in the trenches,” he said.
He has a Smith-Corona, circa 1950s, that was the first portable electric typewriter.
“It has a manual return with an electric keyboard,” Van Cleave said. “It was probably the smallest electric typewriter.”
Two handsome typewriters — a Groma Kolibri and a Optima Super — sit near each other on a countertop. Both were made in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) in 1960.
Van Cleave, 65, is an Albuquerque native who learned to type on electric machines at Eldorado High in the 1970s and is retired from Intel, where he worked as a manufacturing tech.
He has 32 typewriters in his collection and is one of the founders of the ABQwerty Type Writer Society, a small, loose-knit group of local typewriter enthusiasts. The society’s name comes from the order of the first six keys — Q, W, E, R, T, Y — on the top left letter row of a keyboard.
From noon to 4 p.m. Saturday, the society is hosting a Type-In at the Special Collections Library, 423 Central NE. The public is invited to see the typewriters on display at the Type-In, and to use them to write letters, poetry, short stories, a chapter in a novel or stream-of-consciousness nonsense. Whatever they wish.
Saturday’s event is the latest in a series of Type-Ins organized by ABQwerty since 2017.
“We set up typewriters and invite people to come play with them,” Van Cleave said. “We get older people who once used typewriters and younger people who have never used them. We have people who sit down at one machine and type for four hours.”
Van Cleave will bring 21 of his typewriters to the Type-In. He started collecting them in 2005 or 2006, which, he said, is about when bloggers across the country started writing about how they were rediscovering typewriters and using them to write creatively.
“They began scanning and posting photos of their typewritten pages to their blogs, a practice known as typecasting,” Van Cleave said.
Van Cleave started blogging in 2006 and also produces YouTube videos in which he discusses in detail the design and function of typewriters in his collection.
Collectors can generally be divided into two categories, Van Cleave said: Tinkers and creatives. He said tinkers collect typewriters as historical objects and like to take them apart, service and repair them.
“The creatives may not be as keen on the maintenance side, but are interested in using typewriters as tools for creative writing,” Van Cleave said. “I am less interested in collecting typewriters as historic objects. My oldest machine is that 1929 Corona 3.
“I collect typewriters as useful tools to write with. Every typewriter has its own touch. There is a certain pleasure in using a manual typewriter that you don’t get with a computer keyboard and the distractions that come with that platform. There is something about being able to create right to paper.”
