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After more than 50 years, Boston area’s only typewriter store will close in March
Cambridge Typewriter in Arlington will close on March 31 after more than 50 years in business, owner Tom Furrier said.
After 45 years fixing, selling, and tinkering with typewriters, Tom Furrier will retire and close the iconic Cambridge Typewriter Co. in Arlington after waiting a year for a potential buyer to step up and preserve traditions of a former era.
Owner Tom Furrier, 69, announced earlier this month that Cambridge Typewriter on Massachusetts Avenue will close on March 31.
“(There’s been) an outcry… people love their typewriters,” Furrier told Boston.com Tuesday about customers’ reaction to the news of the closure. “They love the shop, they love coming in. People are really going to miss this place.”
The store is no longer doing repairs, but Furrier is still hoping to sell as many of the “hundreds and hundreds” of machines as possible. In March, typewriters will be going for $25 or $30 each.
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“I’d rather do that than see them get thrown away,” he said about the bargain prices. “There’s a lot of nice, working machines in here.”
Furrier joined Cambridge Typewriter as an employee and later bought the store from the original owner, his former neighbor in Wakefield who founded the store in 1973. “A tinkerer,” Furrier said that he “absolutely fell in love with it on the very first day, and that was almost exactly 45 years ago.”
Like Furrier did when he bought the shop, he was looking for a successor to continue the busy business, which thrived during the pandemic with a 40 percent boom, The Boston Globe reported at the time.
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“I just decided, I’m going to have to close the doors,” Furrier said Tuesday. “My customers are very very upset, happy for me, but upset for them because there’s really no place for them to go.”
The shop made headlines in 2023 when Academy Award-winning actor Tom Hanks, a typewriter fanatic, sent Cambridge Typewriter an autographed Olympia SM4 typewriter from the early 1960s. Furrier said it’s still in the store, and he plans to keep it for a few years.
“People still come in and ask to see it, but I’m going to keep it for a few more years. I like to use it. I like the vibes that I get from it,” he said. “When I do pass it on, I’m going to donate it to a local small charity to auction off to make money for small town causes.”
Since the turn of the millennium, Furrier said more than half of his customers have become younger people under the age of 30 looking to tune up their typewriters after mostly serving older writer types and businesses.
“It caught on, and it’s something that’s grown just a little bit every year,” Furrier said, but for repairs going forward, they’ll have to go out-of-state to Rhode Island or New Hampshire. “That’s it for New England.”
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Cambridge Typewriter will host a “type-in,” or the store’s annual typewriter party, to celebrate Furrier’s retirement toward the end of March. Details are expected to be released in February, he said.
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