“You think when you wake up in the mornin’ yesterday don’t count. But yesterday is all that does count.
What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin’ else.”
Cormac McCarthy, passage taken from ‘No Country for Old Men’
Cormack McCarthy is one of this century’s greatest writers.
But, putting his stratospheric status as an American author aside, there’s something that’s even more impressive about him.
He’s no poseur.
Check this out.
According to the New York Times, a heavily weathered, light blue, Lettera 32 Olivetti manual machine that a writer bought in 1963 for $50 was sold at Christie’s to an unidentified American collector for $254,000.
This manual typewriter was traced back to Cormack McCarthy and it was the machine he used to type all his novels, including a couple that won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award.
The best part of the whole story?
Mr. McCarthy will not be using the opportunity to go digital after all these years. A friend of his recently bought him a replacement typewriter, the same Olivetti model — for less than $20.
Like I said, poseurs be damned–McCarthy typed more than a million of the best words that have ever been recorded on a manual typewriter–and he’s not going to change.
Is that cool or what?
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