#Custom typewriter keyboard series#

Like many people in the hobby, Ivanenko traces his participation to the beginning of the pandemic. He told me later that he had left a dozen other keyboards at home, including a vintage model, a Northgate OmniKey, which he likes so much that he seldom risks using it. On a table on the far side of the room, I tried three keyboards that belonged to Arty Ivanenko, a twenty-one-year-old pharmacy technician. The hobby satisfies some of the same impulses as collecting and customizing cars, or maybe brewing small-batch craft beers, or gardening. The ones I spoke with generally referred to what they do as “the hobby”-as in, “He was out of the hobby for a while, but a few months ago he came back.” Some of the keyboards on display were commercial models from as long ago as the nineteen-eighties, but most were recent creations, which their owners had built themselves, using components they’d bought from specialized manufacturers. Several were identified on their nametags by their Discord or Reddit handles, or by their usernames on the online keyboard forums Deskthority and Geekhack. There were a hundred or so enthusiasts in attendance, virtually all of them young men. The occasion was an afternoon meetup organized by the New England Keyboard Group. I met Bassett in June, at the headquarters of Mode Designs, a small computer-keyboard company in Somerville, Massachusetts. And I was, like, ‘Hmmm, tempting-but no.’ ” “Right after I got it, a guy offered me three grand for it.

#Custom typewriter keyboard series#

Next to it, on a table, was another scarce model, a Kira 80, whose Escape key Bassett had replaced with a keycap from a series called Mummy II, made by a keyboard artisan known as PunksDead. The designer was trying to reproduce the gray of an earlier keyboard of his, but he never did get it right.” Bassett acquired the keyboard in a trade. The color of the case is called hyper gray, and what’s unique about it is that each one is a slightly different shade. “It’s one of a hundred made by one of the most influential designers in the world. “These were made for a Russian company, and only a few sets still exist,” he said. On eBay, for twenty or thirty dollars, you can buy a keycap set that (to me) looks the same, but to Bassett there’s no comparison. On the face of each letter key was a Roman character, in black, and a Cyrillic character, in red. “The keycaps were made back in the nineties by a German company called Cherry,” he said. I was looking at one of the sets, which he had installed on an OTD 360 Corsa, a keyboard that was produced in limited numbers in South Korea in 2013. What Bassett bought were two sets of computer keycaps: the squarish buttons you press when you type, maybe half a pound of plastic altogether. The sister-in-law’s friend made the pickup, then sent the package to Spain on the wealthy friend’s private jet. Luckily, Bassett had a wealthy friend, in Barcelona, whose sister-in-law knew someone in Kharkiv. This was more than a year before the Russian invasion, but there were still logistical challenges. Bassett was living in Connecticut and studying computer engineering the seller was in Ukraine. Payment had to be made by bank transfer, and the seller wouldn’t ship. That was a bargain, but there was a catch. He found a collector who was willing to sell him two, for a total of six hundred and fifty.

For months, Luke Bassett had been searching for a particular hard-to-find item, whose market value he estimated at a thousand dollars.