Jack Kerouac's Personally Owned Hermes 3000 Typewriter Manual and Repair Slip.

KEROUAC, Jack.

Jack Kerouac's Personally Owned Hermes 3000 Typewriter Manual and Repair Slip.

Jack Kerouac's Personally Owned Hermes 3000 Typewriter Manual and Repair Slip Used to Compose Vanity of Duluoz

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Jack Kerouac's personally owned Hermes 3000 typewriter user's manual and repair slip, which he used to compose most of his 1968 autobiographical novel Vanity of Duluoz. The manual is rectangular duodecimo, nine pages with a fold-out specification diagram, detailing machine preparation, general typing rules, maintenance, changing the ribbon, and the tabulator. The repair slip, issued by Accurate Business Machines of St. Petersburg, Florida, to "Stella Kerouac, 5169 10th Avenue N.," documents that the Hermes typewriter was brought in for repair on January 21, 1969, having been "Dropped." Stella Sampas Kerouac (1930–1992) was the third wife of Jack Kerouac, whom he married in 1966. Kerouac acquired the typewriter in 1966, explaining in a letter to his agent that the machine was necessary, "as the old one broke in two, but, and that's what broke my budget, and now it'll be taxes." Kerouac did in fact buy one more typewriter, a Smith Corona in May 19, 1967, to finish up Vanity of Duluoz. Both pieces are in fine condition, with light soiling to the manual. The manual measures 8.25 inches by 5.75 inches and the repair slip measures 6 inches by 3.25 inches.

Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, literary iconoclast Jack Kerouac is generally considered the father of the Beat movement, although he actively disliked such labels. Kerouac’s method was heavily influenced by the prolific explosion of jazz in 1960s America and later by his studies in Buddhism that originated with fellow beat and academic Gary Snyder. Vanity of Duluoz is a key volume in Jack Kerouac's lifework, the series of autobiographical novels he referred to as The Legend of Duluoz. With the same tender humor and intoxicating wordplay he brought to his masterpieces On the Road and The Dharma Bums, Kerouac takes his alter ego from the football fields of small-town New England to the playing fields and classrooms of Horace Mann and Columbia, out to sea on a merchant freighter plying the sub-infested waters of the North Atlantic during World War II, and back to New York, where his friends are the writers who would one day become known as the Beat generation and where he published his first novel.