Typewronger Books owner Tom Hodges has a friend in Tom Hanks.
Hodges, Scotland’s only typewriter mechanic, typed a letter to Hanks over the summer. He invited the “Greyhound” star to visit his bookshop and the National Museum of Scotland’s typewriting exhibition.
“There are a few typewriter geeks, such as Ben Aleshire in New Orleans and Luke Winter who has the Glasgow Story Wagon, but Tom Hanks gets the crown,” Hodges said, per BBC.
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“I told him how I had run away from Edinburgh to live a Bohemian life in Paris and lived as a Tumbleweed at the Shakespeare and Company bookshop.”
Hodges elaborated on his journeys.
“It is a bookshop in Paris where you can sleep and live there. You turn up and if they have a space you can stay,” he explained. “The tradition there is to be kind to strangers lest they be angels in disguise. I arrived dressed like a mad parrot in all my colours and floor-length coat.
“I think it was a very good disguise as they let me stay. It has lots of nooks and crannies you can sleep in,” Hodges continued. “They had old decrepit typewriters and it was there I taught myself to fix them so I could encourage the other Tumbleweeds to write on them.”
Lo and behold, Hanks wrote him back.
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“I had no idea it was from him,” he said. “I get letters from all over the world and then I saw the letterhead and thought ‘interesting…’ Then inside it said ‘Tom Hodges you are my hero’ and I flipped to the bottom and there was Tom Hanks’ name.
“It was a proper typewritten letter with his mistakes x’d out,” Hodges shared. “Typewriter mechanics hate Tipp-ex because it gets in the mechanics so it was great to see he had x’d out his mistakes instead.”
In the letter, Hanks praised Hodges for “battling against the giants to sell the best of books — and keep typewriters alive.”
