Typewriter Guru, Martin Tytell passes away

obituary
Blue-ribbon repairman keyed typewriter's role
By Bruce Weber

The New York Times

Article Last Updated: 09/17/2008 02:20:56 AM MDT

NEW YORK — Martin Tytell, whose unmatched knowledge of typewriters was a boon to American spies during World War II, a tool for the defense lawyers for Alger Hiss, and a necessity for literary luminaries and perhaps tens of thousands of everyday scriveners who asked him to keep their Royals, Underwoods, Olivettis (and their computer-resistant pride) intact, died Thursday in the Bronx. He was 94.

The cause was cancer, said Pearl Tytell, his wife of 65 years. She said her husband also had Alzheimer's disease.

When he retired in 2000, Tytell had practiced his recently vanishing craft for 70 years. For most of that time, he rented, repaired, rebuilt, reconfigured and restored typewriters in a second-floor shop in Lower Manhattan, where a sign advertised "Psychoanalysis for Your Typewriter."
There, at Tytell Typewriter Co., he often worked seven days a week wearing a white lab coat and a bow tie, catering to customers such as writers Dorothy Parker and Richard Condon, newsmen David Brinkley and Harrison Salisbury, and political opponents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai E. Stevenson





In addition to his wife, Tytell is survived by a daughter, Pamela, of Paris, and a son, Peter, of Manhattan. Peter Tytell, who closed the store about a year after his father retired, is a forensic document examiner who frequently testifies in criminal trials, a natural offshoot of the family business.

see full obituary here: http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_10480659