Synopses & Reviews
This is the story of relationships. Between a writer and an artist. Between a writer and his typewriter. Between an artist and his obsession with the writer's typewriter. This is also a collaboration: Paul Auster's story of his manual Olympia typewriter, more than 25 years old, and Sam Messer's welcome, though somewhat unsettling intervention into that story. Auster's Olympia has been the agent of transmission for the novels, stories, and other writings he has produced since the 1970s, a body of work that stands as one of the most varied, creative, and critically acclaimed in recent American letters. Messer's muscular and obsessive drawings and paintings of both author and machine have, as Auster writes, "turned an inanimate object into a being with a personality and a presence in the world."
Review
"Both Messer and Auster are consumate craftsmen, and both work well with others, but the skill, pleasure, and wit manifest in this particular meeting of minds is something new. And what they are best at is making it all seem easy, as if the brushes and typewriter keys were doing the work themselves." Nancy Princenthal
Review
"The charming Story of My Typewriter details the shared obsession of Auster and the painter Sam Messer with the writer's 40-year-old Olympia portable typewriter....In more than 30 paintings and drawings, Messer demonstrates his fascination with the typewriter as an artifact and with the connection that he perceives between Auster and the mechanical tool of his trade....[A] whimsical delight." Diane Cole, New York Times
About the Author
Paul Auster has written novels, poems, essays, and screenplays. Among his many works are
The New York Trilogy, Moon Palace, The Music of Chance, Smoke, Timbuktu, and
The Invention of Solitude. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.
Sam Messer has been exhibiting his paintings since 1983. His work is in many public and private collections worldwide, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. His previous book One Man By Himself: Portraits of John Serl was published by Hard Press in 1995. He commutes regularly to teach at Yale University from the house he shares in Santa Monica, California with his daughter and filmmaker wife.