For seventy years, Martin Tytell rented, repaired, reconfigured, restored and rebuilt typewriters for customers such as Dorothy Parker, Adlai Stevenson, Dwight Eisenhower, David Brinkley, Harrison Salisbury, Richard Condon and a host of others. He could reproduce keyboards in 145 different languages and dialects with his stock of two million type fonts, including Farsi and Serbo-Croatian, Thai, Sanskrit, Coptic and Ancient and Modern Greek. Born on the Lower East Side, ninth child of Russian-Jewish immigrants and former U.S. Marine, he worked for the O.S.S. in WWII and any letter addressed to "Mr. Typewriter, New York" would get to him at his second floor shop at 116 Fulton Street, where a sign "Psychoanalysis For Your Typewriter" hung. Ian Frazier, one of my favorite authors (Coyote vs. Acme, Travels in Siberia) tells his story here.