Not THE typewriter.

Cormac McCarthy’s typewriter—an Olivetti—is getting old and going to auction:

Not THE typewriter.

  • An Olivetti, not THE Olivetti.

Glenn Horowitz, a rare-book dealer who is handling the auction for Mr. McCarthy, said: “When I grasped that some of the most complex, almost otherworldly fiction of the postwar era was composed on such a simple, functional, frail-looking machine, it conferred a sort of talismanic quality to Cormac’s typewriter. It’s as if Mount Rushmore was carved with a Swiss Army knife.”

Horowitz is right—the Olivetti looks more like a machine for typing out form letters than stories about knife fights and cannibalism and serial killers.

The money will go to a nonprofit scientific research institute in New Mexico.

Brend an Kiley has worked as a child actor in New Orleans, as a member of the junior press corps at the 1988 Republican National Convention, and, for one happy April, as a bootlegger’s assistant in Nicaragua....

7 replies on “Ink Meridian”

  3. I saw “nonprofit scientific research institute in New Mexico”, and thought it had to be the Santa Fe Institute, which does some pretty amazing interdisciplinary research in evolutionary systems. So, good cause.

    But I couldn’t make a connection to Cormac McCarthy, until I clicked through and the NY Times helpfully explained that his “primary responsibilities at the institute are eating lunch and taking afternoon tea”. I love science sometimes.

  5. @4 In 50 years people will forget that iPhones were once the pinnacle of stylish and functional machines. “Looks like something you would use to check your bank account balance…”

  6. I’m reading his novel Blood Meridian right now and this typewriter doesn’t have nearly enough blood and gore spatter on it to be McCarthy’s.

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