Cormac McCarthy Auctioning Off Typewriter to Benefit Santa Fe Institute
Posted on December 2, 2009
Cormac McCarthy is about to part ways with his beloved Olivetti typewriter. He is auctioning off the manual typewriter on which he wrote No Country For Old Men and the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road for charity. Christie's will handle the auction. McCarthy has had the typewriter for more than 40 years and it's finally giving out on him.
The machine, which he bought in a Tennessee pawnshop for $50 in 1963, is beginning to betray understandable symptoms of old age and hard usage. If the Lettera 32 had hooves, it would have been dragged out to meet the bolt gun years ago."It has never been serviced or cleaned other than blowing out the dust with a service station hose," said the writer. "I have typed on this typewriter every book I have written including three not published. Including all drafts and correspondence, I would put this at about 5m words over a period of 50 years."
When a friend offered to buy the 76-year-old Pulitzer-prizewinner a replacement, McCarthy volunteered to auction his machine and has promised the proceeds to the Santa Fe Institute, a "transdisciplinary research community" dedicated to expanding the boundaries of scientific understanding.
The machine and a letter of authenticity will go up for auction this Friday in New York at Christie's. The auction house estimates that it could sell for between $15,000 and $20,000.
