This spring, Los Angeles artist Tim Youd was on an odd historical quest--what kind of typewriters did Nelson Algren use to write "Never Come Morning" and "The Man with the Golden Arm"? Studying photographs of Algren with the typewriters he used in the 1940s, Youd settled on an Underwood Standard for "Never Come Morning" and a Remington Rand Model 17 for "Golden Arm."
You needed to get the right typewriters for his "100 Novels Project." For the last ten years, he has been on a quest to retype one-hundred English-language novels from the last century, when typewriters were regularly used. He retypes each novel on the same make and model of the machine used by the author, in public, in a location with significance to the book.
