Requiem for a Manual Typewriter

A celebration, in novel form, of the legendary avant-garde filmmaker's beloved machine

On March 25, 1997, Lithuanian American filmmaker, poet and artist Jonas Mekas (1922-2019) found a dusty roll of computer paper under his desk. He stretched the paper into his beloved Olympia De Luxe, on which he had typed all kinds of texts for so many years: diaries, poems, Movie Journal columns, interviews, manifestos and letters to friends. Compelled to fill this forgotten roll, Mekas began to write a form of text quite foreign to him: a novel.

Requiem for a Manual Typewriter is an ode to his beloved typewriter, on which he practiced writing spontaneously, describing the present on a machine that was already considered technologically obsolete.