Sybil Davis—who put the machine up for auction after receiving it from her mother, Jean Vounder-Davis—shared this with me in e-mail correspondence after the auction: He was not a “touch typist.” He preferred the “hunt and peck” system using only his two index fingers I … observed him using it on a daily basis.

The novelist and screenwriter Raymond Chandler said he avoided reading books written by someone who didn’t “take the pains” to write out the words. (It used to be common for writers to dictate into a recorder then have an assistant transcribe those words.) “You have to have that mechanical resistance,” Chandler wrote in a 1949 letter to actor/writer Alex Barris. “When you have to use your energy to put those words down, you are more apt to make them count.”

As Raymond Chandler put it, “when you have to use your energy to put those words down, you are more apt to make them count.”