You never know what can be found in a famous person’s typewriter. Joe DiMaggio’s old machine contained the cut-up shards of his expired bank card. Steve Soboroff, who bought the Yankees Hall of Famer’s typewriter in 2011, found the little pieces underneath the keys while cleaning it.
Mr. Soboroff also unearthed childhood photos of Ernest Hemingway in the writer’s 1926 Underwood Standard Portable. But Mr. Soboroff’s greatest discovery with these machines — and others, including typewriters belonging to Maya Angelou, Tennessee Williams, John Lennon, and Shirley Temple — was a historical connection to great people.
“These are really hard for me to give up,” Mr. Soboroff said on a video call last week.
After 20 years of assembling what may be the greatest typewriter collection in the world, Mr. Soboroff is putting all 33 of his beloved machines up for auction. Owning them has been a privilege, he says, and each comes with a unique back story that helped fuel Mr. Soboroff’s passion.
Like when Mr. Soboroff backed out of a deal with the actress Angelina Jolie, refusing to part with Hemingway’s typewriter after she agreed to pay $250,000 for it. While reports at the time indicated Ms. Jolie was the one to walk away, Mr. Soboroff said he canceled the transaction when he learned that she intended to give the machine to her husband, Brad Pitt, for him to use. Mr. Soboroff might have allowed Mr. Pitt to bang away on Harold Robbins’s or Mae West’s machines, he said, but Hemingway’s typewriter was sacred.
“At that time, I could have used the money,” Mr. Soboroff said. “But nobody’s touching that one. Ernest Hemingway’s typewriter? No chance.”
Now someone else will get the chance to own it, because after two decades bearing the responsibility of protecting, insuring, exhibiting, and shipping the typewriters all over the country to promote their legacies, Mr. Soboroff, 75, no longer has the energy for it. And he could still use the money.Some of the proceeds will be donated to the Jim Murray Memorial Foundation, which honors the former Los Angeles Times sports columnist by issuing scholarships to journalism students.
Mr. Soboroff is a lifelong fan of the Los Angeles Dodgers and revered Mr. Murray’s writing. His was the first typewriter Mr. Soboroff bought, at auction, in 2005. From there, collecting them became a devotion.
A Los Angeles-based entrepreneur and former commissioner of the Los Angeles Police Department, Mr. Soboroff bought most of the typewriters at auctions, though a few were acquired directly from family members or the previous owner.
Typewriters are imperfect little engraving machines, Mr. Soboroff likes to say, requiring more physical interaction than today’s laptops. Some exude a personality, a mechanical soul, like a vintage car or a maestro’s violin. The connection to their original owners adds to the mystique.
“They are really hard to find because some heirs don’t want to give them up,” Mr. Soboroff said. “They’ll sell the clothes, pictures. They won’t sell the typewriter.”
There is no telling yet the full value of the collection. Heritage Auctions is handling the sale, which goes to gavel Dec. 15 in Dallas, and the items will be sold separately. Last year, Mr. Soboroff donated six of his typewriters to the Smithsonian. They had belonged to John Lennon, Elia Kazan, Jerry Siegel (co-creator of Superman), Orson Welles, DiMaggio and Angelou and were appraised at an average of about $250,000 apiece.
“I shouldn’t own Maya Angelou’s typewriter,” Mr. Soboroff said. “That’s for the people of America. I shouldn’t own John Lennon’s typewriter.”
He did, however, allow Pierce Brosnan, the actor, to type on Lennon’s machine in exchange for a $5,000 donation to the Murray foundation. And he lent Siegel’s to comic book conventions, where people lined up for hours to write short notes on the same typewriter used to create Superman’s dialogue.
In making his permanent gift, Mr. Soboroff allowed the Smithsonian to choose from his collection. It passed on typewriters owned by Greta Garbo, John Updike, Philip Roth, Jack London, and Gore Vidal, as well as the Braille machine owned by Andrea Bocelli. It declined the Hemingway model because it already owned one. Whoever buys this Hemingway will also get the photo negatives, the prints, and the original envelopes stashed inside the case.
When Mr. Soboroff first spotted the negatives, he mistook them for ancient strips of bacon. The first one he touched turned to dust, so he scooped the rest up with a spatula and took them to a restorer, where the shots were revealed.