If you love me, buy Cormac McCarthy’s typewriter

If they made a mountain for American literature, whose faces would need to be carved? (Image via Wikipedia)

I’m not actually saying this to anybody. But you should all know Mr. McCarthy’s typewriter — the one he’s used for fifty years, on which he wrote all of his books and letters over that period, a total he estimates at some five million words — is for sale.

In the sharp idiom of a rare book dealer:

When I grasped that some of the most complex, almost otherworldly fiction of the postwar era was composed on such a simple, functional, frail-looking machine, it conferred a sort of talismanic quality to Cormac’s typewriter. It’s as if Mount Rushmore was carved with a Swiss Army knife.

via No Country for Old Typewriters – A Well-Used One Heads to Auction – NYTimes.com.

I’m not usually one to covet objects — we move too much — but this would be something worth lugging around.