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here’s no way to think of a typewriter without being nostalgic.

You conjure up an early black and white movie, with a detective in a crum-pled hat in his office late at night, ciga-rette in mouth, typing away under a table lamp.

Vinyl records can be the same. You remember playing those old LP’s on your parent’s phonograph.

How many of these vintage products exist? Quite a few, actually, and some west-side com-panies are in the business of offering, and in some cases, restoring them.

Don Read, owner of Pacific Typewriter on Multnomah Boulevard, has seen more than his share of old typewriters. These days, most of Pacific Typewriter’s business comes from commercial

firms in Vancouver, Portland and Salem. But once in a while, a customer will bring in a typewriter that dates back to the 1930s, ’40s or ’50s. These customers may want to get a ribbon or cleanse the machine of an oily build-up.

“The oil, if it’s 30 years old, gets very gummy and sticky. Just like if you had a 30-year-old automobile that had never had an oil change,” says Read, adding that

Pacific Typewriter has a process to totally remove the messy goop. The idea is to clean the machine and add new lubrica-tion.

A lot of people, he says, are becoming interested in typewriters.

“People are seeing these and dragging them out of their attics and basements — because they want to display them or use them,” says Read, noting that even young kids learn about typewriters, perhaps by watching a movie or by noticing a type-writer at an office or at their grandmoth-

er’s house.

Kids learn that with a typewriter, they don’t have to go onto their computer, create a text and print it. “They’re intrigued with it,” he points out. “They’re interested in the whole process and want to buy one.”

Read says computers often don’t perform tasks that people use typewriters for. He says typewriters are great at filling out multi-part forms such as tax forms or printing small labels and individual envelopes. Typewriters also work well with manual checks and manual invoices.

In this high-tech world, where just about everybody wiggles and jiggles a computer mouse, Read sees the beauty in typewriters.

When you’re typing, he says, “you get the hand-eye-ear coordination and feel. So when you touch a character, you hear (and