![]() Sometimes flakes of snow would somehow appear inside. Winter came, and a cold wind constantly blew through the room. The next day new flowers would do the same thing. A giant morning glory had taken over the backyard, and I marveled at how its purple flowers would open to admit the pollinators, and then close in the afternoon and die. A row of poorly sealed windows looked out onto the street and other crooked little houses. My bedroom on the second floor of that house on School Street tilted alarmingly. Those poems were a mess, and I would stare at them afterward with bored incomprehension. Occasionally I would try to let things go completely, and exert as little control as possible over the language. In it, other people are mysteriously uninterested in me, which is sad and lonely for me, and for them, whether or not they know it. The city, if you have not been informed, is lonely at night. I had already figured it out, and mostly it was banal and obvious. No matter what I said, the thoughts in them were never new. Those poems always felt labored and ponderous. I was still toiling away, writing a lot of poems the way I used to: choose a subject, and try to write something “about” it. ![]() For a while, the typewriter just sat there in the corner of my room. Thankfully I did not yet know that a manual typewriter was a writerly cliché. I had moved from California back to the same weird little valley where I had gone to college, to go to graduate school for poetry. I lugged it to the house I was living in on School Street, in Northampton, Massachusetts. My grandfather was the sort of person who would make sure it was in pristine working order, and when I opened the case, the keys gleamed. In the attic where we used to sleep as kids, and where my grandfather would come in at bedtime and sing “Goodnight, Irene” to me and my younger brother and sister as we lay in a row in our little cots, I had found my mother’s typewriter, a Royal Quiet Deluxe, perfectly preserved from her high school days. When I was in my twenties, my grandparents finally moved out of the house my mother had grown up in. ![]() When production resumed in 1946, the Royal Quiet DeLuxe continued to gain a following among on-the-go writers and journalists.Matthew Zapruder’s Royal Quiet Deluxe typewriter and a typewritten draft of a 2018 poem. It was introduced just before World War II, but its production was suspended when Royal Typewriter Company, like other typewriter manufacturers in the United States at the time, was converted to an ordnance factory to produce weapons. The Royal Quiet De Luxe put the user right in touch with literary history - it was one of Ernest Hemingway’s favorite machines. Remington, Smith Corona, and Underwood manufactured portable typewriters, but their models couldn’t compete with the Royal De Luxe model. This was the first model in a series of the Royal Quiet De Luxe line that outsold any other portables of the time. It was sold in various colors including, pink, red, green, gray, blue, and black. From the 1930s through the late ’50s, Royal produced the Quiet De Luxe model, a compact design that retailed for about $50. In 1926, the Royal Typewriter Company introduced its version of the portable typewriter.
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