Thursday, July 28, 2011

The 1700 Typewriters of Sidney Kaufman



In The Memory Of All That, I refer often to the FBI records concerning my father, Sidney Kaufman. Here's a page from among nearly 800 pages. Note the generally insane look of this document, which could have been a prop page created by the mad mathematician in A Beautiful Mind. Your tax dollars at work! The 1700 typewriters of Sidney Kaufman were a minor obsession of the Bureau for years. What was he up to, what master plan for world domination was taking shape in our garage, where these 1700 flimsy East German typewriters (which did not have a QWERTY keyboard) were quietly rusting into a solid coral reef of uselessness?

2 comments:

  1. Well? Why DID he have seventeen hundred typewriters -- from East Germany or anywhere else?

    Don't tell me: "Read the book and find out."

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  2. Presumably, it seemed like a good idea at the time, as was the case with so many of my father's dubious schemes.

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