Philly Typewriters’ Bill Rhoda & The Evolution of Saying Yes

Last year I had the honor of interviewing Chloe Harris from Starr Garden to highlight a location where Craft Coven events take place. At the time my monthly poetry workshop was hosted there as well as a few clay nights. However, with summer approaching, my workshop interfered with Starr Garden’s schedule with their summer camp program, and I needed to find a new home. On a whim, I took a stroll into Philly Typewriter, located on East Passyunk Ave in South Philadelphia. I had often passed by and admired the store and wondered just how a typewriter shop could even exist in today’s world.

This is when I met Bill Rhoda, one of the two owners, alongside founder and owner Bryan Kravitz, of Philly Typewriter. He was in the midst of excitedly explaining one of the typewriters to someone and to this day, I am hard to find anyone as enthusiastic as Bill about the work they do. Once they were finished, I got to introduce myself and give him the spiel about my workshop. How Starr Garden had been so gracious to have had me in their space and that I was looking for a new place that also honored the fact that one of my main goals of my workshop is affordability. Plainly, I needed to keep it free/donation based. Perhaps with even more gusto in his enthusiasm than when he was talking about typewriters, without hesitation, he said yes.

Bill has since become someone I know and appreciate. His upbeat attitude to life, with his vast knowledge and various experiences, from teaching to music to typewriters, and even a at home baker, with each new adventure Bill has said yes to, his evolution has led to one of the best examples of the perfect person at the right place and time. And because of this, my poetry workshop has yet again found a wonderful place to call home.

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Let’s get the party started! Thinking back to before you stumbled on Philly Typewriter, would you say that there was an accumulation of events or things that had happened in your life that kind of led you towards this place?

Bill: So I have always said - when asked this question - the same way that I had found teaching, the same way that I had found music. Everything has always been this series of random events. I’ve been very lucky and privileged in my life that many times, I’ve been able to throw the “sails up” and sort of floated along to say ‘ok, I guess I’m doing this.’ And this is pretty much the most direct answer. Everything has been this beautiful random set of ripples that has also bounced off of one another.

When I was doing music, I was also doing music repair. Before that I was in education. Eventually I moved back to Philadelphia and not too long after that I had met Bryan and we started doing this (Philly Typewriter). Which eventually led to the thought of ‘Oh, we should teach typewriter repair’. And so everything I had done had started to pile into itself, as well as I started to find a way to loop these things together.

Yeah, it sounds like a unique set of evolution.

Bill: Yes!

What was the moment when you discovered Philly Typewriter?

Bill: That was the moment when I moved back to Philly. I was a hammer without a nail, wandering around, and I had taken some time off for myself to breathe. One day my Mom called me up and was like ‘I need you to take some decorations to the basement’. I said alright and I headed up to Northeast Philly, where I was born and raised. And in the midst of taking things to the basement, over in the corner, I see her typewriter. An R.C. Allen reconditioned military surplus typewriter that her Father gave to her. It was the only gift he gave to her without her Mother’s permission because it was this big expense

So here is my Mom’s typewriter with such a special memory attached to it of her Father. At that time, I had also recently unplugged and got a flip phone. I didn’t know it was a thing at the time and that others experienced this, but I was going through a digital burnout, and I had really felt it. I had “pulled the cord” out. I took the SIM card out of my phone and put it into my Grandmom’s old Pantech flip phone. I was looking for more patience. I was looking for more quiet. And I thought that the typewriter was a good idea for this too. But there was no ribbon. I went to Google typewriter ribbon, and I thought surely, it’s going to be Amazon, right? Amazon is going to be the first to pop up. But it wasn’t, it was Bryan. Bryan, down here in South Philly, on the corner of his family’s old hotdog cart that used to be here in the 50’s. I called him up and asked what he was doing. Instead of asking for the ribbon, I asked if he wanted help. And... yeah!

That’s really fun! And what has it been like to run such a unique business?

Bill: Well, I’ve never done anything like this before. Ever. Typewriters, business ownership. I’ve done management in a sense when I was teaching. I was teaching my students, managing their schedules, giving them assignments, those sorts of things. It was this sort of faux management. The difference really is that my students were paying for me to teach them, while I pay my employees now.

So going back to when I first started, it was like ‘ok, deep breathe and go’. What is nice about the kind of work we do is that its labor based. The work we do is all mechanics and hyper specific detail. However, there had to be more than that. There needed to be a community aspect. There needed to be events, programming and education. There had to be diversity to what we were doing. And something I always admired and had pulled out was from Tomas Kalnoky of Streetlight Manifesto. He had said once in reference to Streetlight that he had taken on musicians from all different backgrounds so that everyone had a different way of thinking. And I’ve always loved that. With our hiring process, every single person that we’ve hired has a completely different background from each other. And this way we don’t get so buried in the work that we can’t see the forest for the trees. Everyone has their own set of skills and ways of looking at things. It benefits all of us to work with and get to know people from all different backgrounds and different ways of thinking. Ryan and I actually have this running joke. He’ll come to the top of the ramp of the showroom, look at me at my bench and say ‘can you do that thing, where I have been staring at it for 30 minutes, and you’ll go up and do it in 30 seconds.’ And I’ll say ‘yup!’ And we do that back and forth all the time.

On the “business” business side of things, especially being a small business and as niche as this one is, I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t hard at times. It is so much fun, but man.. There are nights I don’t sleep. I’m staring at the ceiling, thinking about what's on the schedule, what’s the next machine we need to get done in the queue. That’s always tedious because machines can also throw curveballs. Many machines have some kind of surprise we didn’t expect. They’re not reliable in the sense of what’s wrong. They’ve all lived different lives. Because these machines have lasted for so long, they have problems that no service manual has documentation on. The original engineers would be floored to know that we are sitting here having a conversation about these typewriters today in 2025. This also then leads to us to having real conversations with our clients about the expectations of what their machine may need. Because it also involves the investment of time. How far do our clients want to take it? We can take this all the way down to the heart of the machine. Yet that is going to cost in both finances and time. And we too need to keep moving. It has to make sense for both our clients and for us. There are challenges to pretty much every aspect of what we do. It’s a lot of work, but man it’s a lot of fun.

You mentioned that you were in music repair. Do you see similarities between that and the repair on typewriters?

Bill: Just details. It’s honestly not as mechanical as typewriter repair, not in the same way. But you are dealing with extreme subtle tolerances. On some instruments, you’re dealing with pad work. When you’re using cigarette paper to figure out clearances on how much a pad is actually pressing down on a tone hole for example. And that’s pressure. It’s super subtle. And the same can be said about typewriters. Ironically, we were trying to figure out a shift alignment on one of the machines. There were these two stops - up and down - and we couldn’t figure out if they were touching. So I grabbed cigarette paper and ran it over to the machine to test it out. Pulled that trick out of the ol’ toolbox.

So there are subtleties to both; the detail aspect such as polishing, cleaning, chemical treatments, organization and just knowing the specific tools needed for the job are shared components.

Do you find that people are now, much like how you were when you stumbled upon Philly Typewriter, looking for that disconnect from newer technology and reaching for this older technology?

Bill: Oh absolutely. We noticed the first boom in 2015. And there were these three events that took place starting at that time. 2015, ‘The Typewriter Revolution’ comes out, written by Richard Polt at Xavier University. In 2016, the documentary ‘California Typewriter’ came out, talking about this little typewriter shop in California that was struggling to stay open. It had artists, musicians, and even Tom Hanks talked about the importance of the machine. Then in 2017, we opened. These three things combined is what I think about as the first wave of demand. The typo-sphere as we call it, started to gain a shocking amount of momentum. And then in 2020 was the real one. 2020 was when March 13th happened and boom, everybody was all in front of a screen. That’s it. You’re talking to each other through text, Google Meet, Zoom - the dawn of Zoom - we don’t even say Skype anymore. Everyone was in front of screens and the digital hit was like oh my god, too much. It was all too much at once. The other part was that people were furloughed, laid off and such and they were home. They started to think to themselves ‘well, I’m home and I said I was going to clean out the attic last year. I should finally do it.’ And so they go upstairs and find Great Aunt Ruth’s typewriter. They end up having a similar origin story as me. Over all these years, I see that I wasn’t alone in this idea. Seeing a typewriter and thinking ‘oh this would be so cool to use.’ It’s not a computer; it’s just a writing device.

With the invention of A.I., people in the typo-sphere are split. Some utilize it, as others are against it. However, having a typewriter, you can put your words into something that is just words. I’ve said to people that a server is just a fancy word for someone else’s computer. At the end of the day, everything that we’re putting online, could become someone else’s.

What has been a highlight thus far for you?

Bill: For me, honestly, I talk about this all of the time. It’s the people. I get to work with some of the best people I’ve ever met in my life. As well as, I get to meet the clients and the people that come in that are curious. Something I’ve talked to a lot of people about is how typewriters invite goodness. For instance, we have public typewriters that sit out front. People stop when they’re walking by and they’ll type a few things on them. Sometimes it’s gibberish, sometimes you have the older generation who type “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party.*” (*Original quote by Charles E. Weller.) But what we do find the most is that the things that are being written on those typewriters are positive affirmations. We’ve never taken out the paper and found anything transphobic, racist or anything hateful. And there’s anonymity to it, right? Someone could walk up and type something damaging. Yet no one ever does. Which I love! I think it’s because it holds up a mirror to a person. When you strike those keys, you have to lead with intention, it’s permanence. You have to look into that mirror and say it. Can you? Verses when you’re sitting on a computer. ‘Never read the comment section’ you’ll hear. Because not only is there anonymity, there is also I can go back and delete it. But not with a typewriter.

You mentioned it before, even just now with the last answer that you gave. The connection between this place (Philly Typewriter), the community and everything else that happens here - poetry mics, music performances, comedy shows - Do you think that is in the nature of this business that draws it in?

Bill: Absolutely. We’ve always gotten creatives in here since we opened. (As well as a lot of eccentricity!) There have been a lot of pitches for events here. While some may not be our speed, for the most part, we get a lot of lovely people and events hosted here. 

It started off with a poetry reading.

That was the first event?

Bill: Yes, the very first. Another thing that then happened, a Philadelphia staple known as a ‘Type In’ (type-in.org) which my fiancé lovingly refers to as the car show for typewriter nerds. The first one started in Philadelphia at 30th Street Station and now they’re all over the world. While that one is obviously typewriter related, so many of the events we hold here are more for other people to come in and have our worlds meet.

Then there was the Talk and Share. We became friends with local comedians and shows started happening. ‘Don’t Tell Comedy’ (IG: @donttellcomedy) being one of them, which is a pop up comedy show where you find out the location day of. How cool is it to receive an email and see that a comedy show is in a typewriter shop. And it blew up! The comedy shows are always packed. Now we have every Friday night, Jamie Pappas’s ‘Playtime Comedy’ (IG: @playtimecomedyshow) uses Philly Typewriter as a sort of base of operations. Through all of the events, people are introduced to us and do come back for the store itself later on. We also now have an artist in residence, who is a typewriter artist. Yidan (IG: @yidan_zeng).

I too am connected in that way. I came in and said ‘Hey, so I have this poetry workshop…’ and at the time, there wasn’t anyone asking to do that here (Philly Typewriter), but now it seems there has been.

Bill: Yes, more and more. You were the good luck charm. You started having your workshop here and it’s been amazing. Now all of a sudden, there’s poets coming in asking about their events here. There are poets coming in to use the typewriters and work on their writing. There are more of them now realizing ‘oh hey, they were serious when they said come in and hang out’. We truly are a third space.

Moving forward and looking towards the future, what are your biggest hopes and goals?

Bill: So last year was the official launch of the Philadelphia Typewriter Trade School, which is a four-year degree program designed to bring in and train the next generation of typewriter mechanics to then go out into the world and keep on doing this. As opposed to putting more benches into this shop. We want to send them off and make a franchise of Philly Typewriter. Although, we do joke about’ what does that look like’. If you’re in Pittsburg and see a shop called Philly Typewriter, how does that work? The thing with typewriter shop names is that we’re all really creative. Usually, the shops just named after the city or area they’re in. Philly Typewriter, Cambridge Typewriter (RIP), Chicago flipped it to Typewriter Chicago. The goal is to eventually franchise this off and get it out there. With our standards, our quality, our spirit, our inventory! We are 10 LBS in a 5 LB bag. I’d love to be able to send out a mechanic and outfit them with the tools, the machinery, and the parts.

You mentioned your materials, your quality. What is it that you think sets y’all apart?

Bill: I’ve been told by many people in the industry, some who’ve been in it for over 50 years, that we are the closest thing to remanufacturing typewriters since the original factories. When it comes to what is standard, every machine gets rubber, every machine gets feet, every machine gets feed rollers, and every machine gets sound insulation if it needs it. We do everything. The machine never gets just one thing. Our goal is to be a factory reset button, while also preserving its history. Getting them as close to how the factories built them. 

I don’t know what other shops are doing personally. I am going off of what other people have told me. I have people coming in here from all over the country. There are also options online. Buying off Ebay as an example. Yet we even have had a client fly in from Fairbanks, AL. And I think there’s a reason for that. If someone is willing to travel that far to have us look at their machine, it speaks for itself.

What is the one thing that you would want people to know and take away from Philly Typewriter?

Bill: What is the one thing… whew..

[Bill mutters to himself ‘what is one thing’, over and over for about 40 seconds..]

I don’t know!

I don’t know which way to go. I want people to think about the investment in what they’re putting into this.This is something that will last the rest of their lives. And probably beyond that. While we live in a very disposable society. We often feel like, wow, I spent all of this money, and the moment the warranty expires, the fridge dies. Your phone screen cracks and you need a new one. Everything is disposable and replaceable. With typewriters, you have something that is generational. You have something that passes down.

I joke with people that when I’m 70, what will I pass down. A cell phone? It doesn’t work. Especially when the phone isn’t fully mine. When the service is shut off, that’s it. And I think it’s ok to think about and want to invest in something and trust that it will last.

Last question! Would you encourage somebody to get into this business in some way, shape or form? Even just to learn how the machines work?

Bill: Oh absolutely. We offer repair courses.

Is that here?

Bill: Yes. You can come in and not only is there a four year degree program, there’s also a 4 day course. It is 12 hours in total and we are flexible with people’s schedules. You would come in and over the course of 12 hours, you take apart a machine and receive a crash course in repair and cleaning. The machines will have some problems that you will work on figuring out. Then those machines will go out for free to schools and libraries. The crash course feeds this program.

There is also a selective service to own program that we offer to folks where after the graduate the repair course they can continue to work at the shop for $20 an hour that goes towards owning a typewriter. We understand that things are expensive while also having a budget ourselves. I want things to be accessible. Shirley Min from WHYY said “Philly Typewriter is about community and access.” I loved it so much when she said that, I jumped up in excitement and said “That’s it! She got it!” That’s exactly what we’re supposed to be doing. That’s what the purpose of our programs are, that’s the purpose of offering here as a third space, that’s..

THAT’S THE THING! That is the one thing I want people to take away from Philly Typewriter. Is that we are about community and access. We’re about always trying to work with you, to make what you want happen, and to stand by you for the duration.

What’s the takeaway... That.