The Keeper

Nice Try!

The episode explores the profound emotional connections humans form with physical objects, centered around a vintage typewriter named Erica. It

Key takeaways

• Jason Scott serves as a 'free-range archivist' for the Internet Archive, collecting diverse items like rave flyers and obscure cassette tapes.
• The Internet Archive's smallest storage unit is comprised of 90 shipping containers.
• The Teitel Typewriter Company collection included 143 machines that were physically difficult to digitize but historically significant.
• Professor Dori Tunstall argues that performing manual tasks like typing helps individuals understand and respect the value of labor.
• Modern consumerism often encourages 'planned obsolescence,' making repair economically unviable compared to replacement.

Main topics

• Digital and physical archiving
• History of the typewriter
• Design anthropology

Notable quotes

I kind of function as like a Baba Yaga of archiving where somebody just says, Jason Scott should look at this.

Conclusion

The episode concludes that while entropy inevitably breaks things apar

Transcript preview

Speaker 5 (0:01) From New York Magazine's Curbed and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Nice Try. I'm Avery Truffleman, and this is the sound of my apartment. But Jason should be here any moment now. Here he is. I want to end this season with the act of someone entering my home. Speaker 3 (0:29) Sir! Speaker 3 (0:32) An Speaker 5 (0:32) act that is at times mundane or transgressive or exciting, especially if this someone comes bearing a package. Speaker 2 (0:41) All the way to the top. All right. Do you Speaker 4 (0:44) need help? Speaker 5 (0:47) When an item enters your home, you don't always have complete control over it. It can't always be curated or planned. When you rescue a chair from the street, or someone gives you a mattress because they're moving, or you inherit a crockpot from an aunt, there's not always a precise logic to what comes into your haven. Can Speaker 1 (1:07) we unbox this first, or should we unbox this second? It's up to you. It's your show. Speaker 5 (1:17) Once I tell you a little bit more about Jason, it's going to become clear that it's kind of funny that he has driven out a fair distance to my apartment to drop off a package. Because most of what Jason Scott does all day long is pick up stuff from other people. Speaker 1 (1:34) Let's see. Things that I have taken. A warehouse full of manuals for electronic equipment from 1935 to 2005. A collection of... Atari software and computers from a couple where one of them had died and the other one wanted it to go to somewhere meaningful. Jason Speaker 5 (1:55) Scott is a historian and, as he puts it, a free-range archivist for the Internet Archive. It's a digital library probably best known for the Wayback Machine, an online archive of over 629 billion websites. But long before Jason started working there. The stated goal of the Internet Archive and the credo of founder Brewster Kahle was universal access to all knowledge. Speaker 1 (2:22) And then I show up and I'm like, boys, there are a lot of knowledge. I would love to make that knowledge available. Speaker 5 (2:31) Jason picks up boxes of old rave flyers, cassette tapes of obscure bands from the 80s and 90s who have only ever played two shows. Recordings of commercials that ran over speakers at Kmart. VHSs of limited-run anime series. Meeting notes from a furry convention. All to be digitized and uploaded into the Internet Archive. Speaker 1 (2:52) I'll get a call from somebody, and they'll say, I have 300 videotapes that came from my grandfather. He recorded Disneyland every time he went. You seem like the person who would take it. I kind of function as like a Baba Yaga of archiving where somebody just says, Jason Scott should look at this. And I get that anywhere between six and 12 times a week. Somebody will evoke me. So I show up within an hour and I'm like, yes, how's it going? Anyone need any help here? The Speaker 5 (3:22) unfathomably large and super secret storage space of the Internet Archive is measured by the shipping container. Jason told me their smallest storage space, their Speaker 1 (3:32) smallest, is 90 shipping containers. We're on track to pull in one million items this year. Speaker 5 (3:39) Jason is collecting and scanning and uploading an ever-expanding Golden Voyager record. A snowballing time capsule with no particular end in sight and no sense of who in the future would have a reason to use all this stuff. Speaker 1 (3:55) Most of this work is going dun-dun-dun-dun-dun, so that in like a thousand years, someone will go dun-dun. And you don't know, you have no idea what's going to be on the other end of this. Speaker 5 (4:05) How do you decide when something's worth that? Speaker 1 (4:07) Because, Speaker 5 (4:07) yeah, you could collect anything and everything. Speaker 1 (4:10) Well, it's somewhat speculative. I certainly have made mistakes. Speaker 5 (4:14) This is the story of one of those mistakes, which Jason then transferred to me. Speaker 5 (4:23) It was another day at work for rogue archivist Jason Scott. As he does, he got a call from someone trying to clean out a warehouse. And it turned out it was rooms and rooms of old magazines and books and tons of old computer manuals. And this just looked like classic Internet Archive fodder. Jason could totally scan it and upload it. And maybe some of this would mean something to someone one day. And the original owner of this collection had already paid for moving and storage. All Jason would have to do would be to redirect the movers to the Internet Archive's undisclosed location. Speaker 1 (4:58) I said, well, I think we should take all of it. I didn't check with work. I just said, we will take all of it. Speaker 5 (5:07) But what Jason didn't realize was that all Speaker 1 (5:11) of it, among the Speaker 5 (5:12) 20 to 30 pallets of books and catalogs and paraphernalia, also included 143 typewriters. And Speaker 1 (5:21) I was like, well, I can't separate the typewriters. So here we go. Now we have 143 typewriters. Speaker 5 (5:28) Would you have wanted? No, Speaker 1 (5:29) we would have never. How are we going to digitize it? How are we going to deal with it? We have enough problems trying to deal with, like, getting print into digital form and storing it properly. Are we really going to go into the physical business? Speaker 5 (5:43) It turned out that this collection that Jason had agreed to take on was the collection of Martin Teitel, founder of the Teitel Typewriter Company, which sold all kinds of brands in their store on Fulton Street. Speaker 1 (5:57) It was in Manhattan, and it was massive. And it had hundreds and hundreds of typewriters at any given time. Speaker 5 (6:04) Legend has it, Tytel was so formidable that if you addressed a letter to Mr. Typewriter New York, it would end up at Tytel. Apparently, Martin Tytel was a wizard. He could modify typewriters to type in other alphabets or reverse their mechanisms to write in a right-to-left language. Speaker 1 (6:21) And then there was the secondary business of doing forensic analysis of typewriters for law enforcement and government individuals. Speaker 5 (6:29) Because you can trace back letters to certain eras of typewriter and even trace documents back to individual machines. Like when Dan Rather came under fire for presenting inauthentic documents about George W. Bush's service in the Texas National Air Guard, Martin Teitel's son, Peter Teitel, was one of the experts who determined the documents were fakes. Speaker 5 (6:52) The Tytel typewriter company was in business for more than 66 years. Martin Tytel retired in 2000, and the business closed a year later. Speaker 1 (7:01) His son, Peter, who had been mostly doing the forensic stuff, moves offices and takes a sample. Speaker 5 (7:08) This sample of typewriters included a Smith Corona Coronamatic 8000, an Olivetti Latera 25, a typewriter in Arabic, a typewriter in Hebrew. Makes and models from all different eras and a range of colors and materials from wood veneer to orange plastic. And they must have been kept for some reason. So whatever he Speaker 1 (7:31) saw in these, he's like, I'm keeping them. Like, this is something. Speaker 4 (7:34) Yeah. Speaker 5 (7:37) Peter Teitel passed away August 11th, 2020, one week before all these trucks came to cart the archive away. Jason didn't know why these typewriters of all the Teitel typewriters were the ones saved. But nevertheless, Jason was saddled with them. The Internet Archive was confronted with a ghostly flock of its predecessor. Hardware. Hard matter. With no data other than their own mechanical bodies. Nothing to scan, nothing to store. Just 143 round pegs for the Internet Archive's square hole. Speaker 1 (8:14) Typewriters are almost living things. They are a combination of metal and plastic interlocking into gears along with ink that needs to stay wet. And over time, it can start to decay if you don't use it and make sure everything's doing fine. So now we've got 143 of them. Which is why I started actively pursuing finding homes for them to lend to for extended periods of time, because otherwise they're going to sit in the same place we store books, and they shouldn't. Speaker 5 (8:47) And this is why Jason had come to my apartment. Speaker 1 (8:50) What's in the boxes? So two different typewriters. Speaker 5 (8:53) Two typewriters for me to choose from, both from the collection of Martin Teitel. But Jason made it very clear which one he thought was the better choice. It is Speaker 1 (9:02) very clear that this is more deluxe. So you'll see. When you type on it, you'll go, oh, okay. Speaker 5 (9:09) Her name is Erica, with a K. Speaker 1 (9:13) Erica Classic. Speaker 5 (9:17) Erica is an Electra III model from the 1960s. German-made. Banged up a little. Mint green, with the lid missing, so you can peer right into her mechanics. And it wouldn't be enough to keep Erica on a shelf. If I was going to really care for her, for this