Go-To Guy from Golden Age of Typewriters Finds a Taker for His Trove

Gabe Angiello, 92, was moving to a smaller apartment and couldn't bring along the sea-green cabinet brimming with hard-to-find parts from 36 years as a typewriter repairman. He fretted that all those painstakingly acquired ribbons and springs, pinions and platens and knobs, would be lost. Then he found a young whippersnapper who said he'd drive up to Scarsdale and take the parts back to his typewriter repair store in Manhattan, one of few left in the city: Paul Schweitzer, 79.

This is the story of what it sounded like when the exchange was made: ricochets of mechanical jargon mingling with memories of how, during the 1980s and 1990s, there was money to be made from bolting typewriters onto desktops for businesses tired of having thieves walk off with them. (Typewriters were valuable then not for their relative scarcity, as now, but their ubiquitous utility.)

But, really, this is a story of how a business becomes a vocation. Angiello ran a small but beloved shop in the Bronx for 36 years; Schweitzer, with his son Justin, owns Gramercy Typewriter, which has been open for nearly nine decades and counts Tom Hanks and other celebrities among its clientele. Both men agree about the classic beauty of the better-made machines, and will tell you that, though they've been transplanted by nimbler technologies, typewriters still have value as tools of both commerce and art.

"I loved going in that store every day," said Angiello of the place where he toiled so long while standing at a workbench that he wore holes in the linoleum floor. The way he says it, you believe him.