Stacked in the back of Fern Garside’s white Toyota are her father’s boxes: nearly all Remingtons, all well-loved.
Her father, Ron, worked in typewriters at Remington Rand for nearly 50 years. He died in March at age 97 and Garside has found a home for his things in a small shop near Dundas Street and Carlaw Avenue. She lifts Ron’s boxes, one at a time, onto a cart on the sidewalk.
“That was his life,” Garside said later. “He knew everything there was about typewriters.”
But this is not just any home — it is simultaneously a workshop, boutique, donation centre and improvised museum. Hundreds of machines line the walls of Toronto Typewriters, a cluttered hole-in-the-wall run by a 42-year-old IT-manager-turned-repair-man.
In theory, Chris Edmondson’s shop operates by appointment, but more often than not, it’s filled with walk-ins who wander in off the street. It is the only such store in Toronto, and perhaps the only dedicated brick-and-mortar typewriter shop with regular hours left in Canada. But for Edmondson, business is booming. Typewriters, it seems, are cool again.
“For some people, this place is like a haven, or a heaven, of typewriters,” Edmondson said recently at the shop, his English Cocker Spaniel at his feet. “It’s like an art gallery that nobody knows about.”
Every wall of the shop, roughly the size of a two-car garage, is piled high with typewriters, of which there are more than 250. Manuals and electrics, three-banks and four-banks, Underwoods and Remingtons and Olivettis. There are typewriters lining the floor and stashed away in the rafters.
There is even a model of a typewriter resting atop the washroom toilet.
Edmondson pulls out an Olympia SM3, a stylish burgundy model from 1950s West Germany. He pecks away, the clack of the keys against paper. Then, a ding, and he returns the carriage — the sounds of a craft not yet dead.
Edmondson was once high-tech. He worked as a senior IT manager at Rogers, overseeing a $40-million budget and all the company phones, tablets and computers. When he discovered typewriters about 15 years ago, he started tinkering and never stopped.
The hobby began on a desk in his apartment. Edmondson bought, repaired and flipped typewriters on Craigslist with a $200 or $300 markup. As business grew, he spent his weekends driving around the city to buy up stock.
Five years ago, tired of the corporate world, Edmondson quit his job. Around the same time, he opened the shop, tucked away down a white brick hallway in a repurposed toy factory. People still think he’s crazy for doing what he does.
Part of his love for typewriters is the magic of a technology still perfect for its purpose, a century and a half after it hit the market. Partly, it’s the typewriter’s endurance in an age when devices are discarded within years. And partly, Edmondson said, it’s the intimate experience of making something old, new again.
“Taking a raw, rusty typewriter and turning it into a beautiful, functional piece,” Edmondson said, “it’s sort of like, in my world, this art form.”
Edmondson has help from Jeremy Ing, a friend he once went door-to-door with selling Rogers cable. Ing, in his own words, does the grunt work; Edmondson does the serious repairs.
Each typewriter tells a story, some good enough for Edmondson to keep in his private collection. That includes the Optima Elite near the shop’s entrance, on which a former Spitfire pilot wrote his war stories — including being shot down behind enemy lines. His son donated it to the shop.
Edmondson sells two to three typewriters a week, and repairs double or triple that. He also makes money renting out machines to film and TV productions, including an upcoming Prime Video series about the life of Muhammad Ali.
The shop also turns a profit with accessories. Edmondson 3D-prints typewriter ribbon spools — many of which aren’t made anymore — and ships them around the world. Those sales, along with merchandise like cards and T-shirts, make up almost a third of his business.
Amelia Usher, 44, came to buy ribbon. In town from Ottawa, she’s an avid collector who has 20 typewriters at home, which she sometimes uses to make labels for her husband’s homemade hot sauce. Her friends call her the typewriter lady, and it’s the tactile experience — the punching of keys, smell of ink and ring of the bell — that draws her in. It’s just her and the page.
“The sounds, the feel,” Usher said. “It’s right there in front of you. You’re not going to lose it.”
Bruce McDonald, the Canadian film director, is also a customer and uses his typewriter to write letters. He recently typed one for actor Austin Butler’s agent. They’ve never spoken, but McDonald hopes the letter is cool enough to stand out.
“It’s like a toy that you can use for business,” he said of his Royal Deluxe.
Garside, who donated five of her father’s typewriters, doesn’t use the machines either. But they were her dad’s life. Raised during the Depression, he started with Remington Rand in 1942 at age 14. He spent his days as a mechanic walking around Toronto with only a tool bag and a list of repair requests.
Toronto was once a hub for typewriters, with top companies manufacturing and keeping head offices here. As recently as 2000, there were about a dozen typewriter shops in Toronto, estimated Doug Sanderson of Dominion Business Machines, one of Canada’s oldest office equipment companies.
Only Toronto Typewriters is left — and it may be the only one in Canada with regular hours. In Hamilton, 90-year-old Nick Kadak is still working, although his shop is open only part-time. Kadak is steely-eyed: “Typewriters — here to stay,” he said. “They will never die.”
In some ways, Edmondson is one of the few keeping it that way. For Garside, in donating her father’s machines, that is certainly true.
“It keeps my dad’s memory alive,” she told Edmondson at the shop. “You keep it alive, and it’s beautiful.”
