“To me, these typewriters are like Picasso’s paintbrushes," says Soboroff. "A lot of these people swore these typewriters helped with their writing. Bocelli wrote to me on that typewriter in Braille and said it was a partner in creating his poetry. Harold Robbins’ wife told me you couldn’t get through to him when he was on that typewriter. He would become the character he was writing about. These typewriters were their partners.”
Soboroff, a former president of the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners, said that his run on the police commission taught him one thing about collecting: “Everything is a fake until it’s proven real. I didn’t trust anything. I had to have three sources that showed me it was real, such as a photo, a letter from the family, a typescript match, original documentation. I call it forensics.”
Soboroff also had one rule as he filled out his collection - the typewriters had to belong to people who appeared on the cover of Time. The only one of the 33 in this auction that breaks the rule is the 1887 Crandall New Model. Named after its inventor, Lucien S. Crandall, it’s among the most beautiful in Soboroff’s collection and was bought because of its significance and condition.
Highlights include:
- Jack London’s 1902 Bar-Lock #10, made by the Columbia Typewriter Manufacturing Company, with separate keys for lower and upper case letters, no exclamation point and a 2WBMRN rather than QWERTY layout
- Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 Underwood Standard used to write his letters from Finca Vigía, his estate near Havana
- Tennessee Williams’ 1936 Corona Junior, purchased while he was attending Washington University in St. Louis, and probably used to write his first play, Battle of Angels
- E.M. Forster’s Oliver Standard Visible Writer No. 3, intriguing since Forster disliked machines of any kind
- the 1939 Corona Standard Barbra Streisand’s character gifts to Robert Redford’s writer in The Way We Were
“They’ve become part of my identity, something no one else in the world did, and I was lucky enough to be recognized for it,” Soboroff says of his decision to auction this assemblage of writing machines. “But every time I saw them in my study, I said, ‘This is not right.’ That led me to this point, and I hope the people lucky enough to get them will celebrate them more than I can. I believe these typewriters belong to the world.”
