Amid our chaotic jumble of possessions, there is usually a shoebox in the attic, perhaps many boxes, filled with cards and letters, handwritten fragments of a life. These notes, diaries and journals are uniquely personal records that preserve our stories like fossils for future historians, biographers and archivists. But it’s a vanishing resource as pen and ink are replaced by texting, emailing, and voice messaging—digital communications that are transient and vulnerable to technical obsolescence.  At the same time, the skill of cursive writing is becoming a lost art, and with that decline, the ability to read the handwritten word. Coming soon on The Possession Project, Kelly Crowe explores the decline and fall of the personal archive and the digital loss of memory

This episode of The Possession Project is a story about the revealing traces of identity and personality that we leave on our former possessions, told through the history of a typewriter. 

There’s something appealing about a typewriter—its mechanical precision, its ingenious design, the distinctive tap tap tap of a human thought made suddenly visible, stamped in ink on a piece of paper. The mystique of the typewriter has something to do with the magnetic aura of writers and the physical embodiment of what they’ve written.  But it’s also about the mechanical integrity of the machine, and the nostalgia that accompanies the ringing of the tiny bell that signals the end of a line of type. 

Once an essential tool, the typewriter’s role in daily life was long ago eclipsed by digital keyboard technology. But unlike the unfortunate piano, (see The Possession Project Episode One), last century’s surviving typewriters are quite valued today, because of their intrinsic charm and also because some are now worth a lot of money. 

Join journalist Kelly Crowe as she traces the history of her own Continental Wanderer—and investigates the renaissance of the typewriter.

       There’s something profoundly unsettling about watching a piano being pushed off the back of a truck. The awful shuddering noise as it flies though the air and lands on the garbage pile. And then there’s the silence as it lays there, a hulking carcass, keyboard face down among the rolls of old carpet and the rest of the household trash.

       This sad fate awaits many old pianos.  I discovered this by accident, while browsing some online buy and sell sites. I was amazed to find almost 200 free pianos (and a few free organs) within driving distance of my home. After a bit more research, it became clear that the final destination for many of these unwanted pianos is usually the dump. 

        A piano is an ingenious apparatus made up of thousands of intricate pieces bound together under incredible tension yet standing poised and ready, sometimes for decades, to spring into motion with a simple touch. One gentle tap on the key triggers a cascade of kinetic energy with one objective —to create a musical sound.

       In this episode of The Possession Project, I investigate the transformation of the piano -- with all of its vitality, prestige, and increasingly-scarce raw materials -- into worthless garbage.