A Tribute To Tom Lehrer, Musical Satirist

 

[Tom Lehrer, one of the funniest—and wittiest, not to mention most irreverent—satirical songwriters and singers ever to grace an American stage (or record album), died at 97 at his home in Boston on 26 July 2025.  I was a fan, and so was my friend Kirk Woodward, a frequent contributor to Rick On Theater, who composed a tribute to the comical math teacher.  (Now, there’s an unlikely label!) Kirk, it should be noted, is a composer, musician, and songwriter. 

[If any reader doesn’t know Tom Lehrer, who stopped performing in 1967, check him out on one of the many videos posted to YouTube and other platforms (Kirk has included links to some of them in his homage), and, if you can catch it when it airs occasionally, PBS has a recording of Lehrer’s 1967 concert in Copenhagen.  (It was airing in the past weeks, but it may no longer be in the schedule.  It returns from time to time for multiple broadcasts, however.)

[Following Kirk’s profile of Lehrer, I’ve appended the New York Times obituary of Lehrer.  It’s pretty comprehensive in the background and biographical details of the songwriting college professor.  (There’s a link to another obit in Kirk’s tribute as well.)]

TOM LEHRER AND THE COMIC SPIRIT
by Kirk Woodward

Are you a Tom Lehrer (1928-2005) enthusiast, or had you not heard of him until you read his obituary earlier this year? Not everyone knows about him, but Tom and I go a long way back.

My first encounter with his music occurred decades ago in Louisville, Kentucky, at the house of my best friend, Jay Paradis. One afternoon in the early 1960s, when his parents weren’t home, Jay opened the big record cabinet in the living room and showed me and a few others his parents’ collection of “party records.”

Today that might mean “dance music.” In those days it was the name for record albums that were considered off-color or at least disreputable, like those of Redd Foxx (1922-1991). One of those records showed a side view of an audience in an auditorium, with a spotlight singling out a distant figure on stage at a piano.

The album was An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer (Lehrer Records, 1959). At first listening I was a fan for life. There was nothing “dirty” about the songs; but there was plenty of parody, sardonic humor, cheerful melodies played cheerfully on the piano, and funny, perfectly crafted lyrics.

One of the things that impressed me most was that although I didn’t know much about the types of songs he parodied, I knew immediately what those songs had to be like. As it turned out I was right.

Oxford Languages defines a “cult figure” as “a writer, musician, artist, or other public figure who is greatly admired by a relatively small audience or is influential despite limited commercial success.” In this sense Lehrer is a cult figure, but he’s a major cult figure, if there is such a thing.

Fairly often I’ll mention him in conversation, and either the other person has no idea what I’m talking about, or we begin a vigorous round of quotations from Lehrer’s songs:

            “Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down?
            “That’s not my department,” says Wernher von Braun.

            He loved to burn down houses just to watch the glow,
            And nothing could be done, ‘cause he was the mayor’s son.

            Hurl that spheroid down the field, and fight, fight, fight!

That last quotation is from the football song “Fight Fiercely, Harvard” which Lehrer wrote while he was at Harvard (he was admitted at the age of 15), one of numerous times he combined the popular and the highly intelligent. Just thinking about the song’s title makes me laugh.

Although he rated a lengthy obituary in the New York Times (see below) Lehrer still falls, barely, in the “cult figure” category, a fact he doesn’t seem to have minded much. He estimated a few years ago that he had sold about two million records in his career, not a shabby number for a performer who introduced only three albums of original material (in six different releases) containing 36 songs.

Altogether as far as we know he wrote around 50 songs. His music is regularly re-released in some form or other. The most comprehensive collection, if one can get one’s hands on it, is the three CD collection The Remains of Tom Lehrer issued in 2000 by Rhino Entertainment, which includes four songs Lehrer wrote after his performing career was basically over.

That performing career was brief. Fortunately he can be seen on YouTube. A YouTube channel called “Silly Songs with Lehrer” provides a number of interviews with Lehrer.

Lehrer can also be seen in concert, ironically enough performing not in the United States, but in Copenhagen (the availability of the full concert is erratic, but individual songs from it are also there).

He was nearly at the end of his performing career when he gave that concert (1967); he accepted the invitation because he’d always wanted to see Scandinavia.

What is it about those songs of his, then? Why is it that we’re still listening to and enjoying them (I am, anyway) some seventy years or so after they were first performed, and that few of them have “dated?”

Lehrer’s songs can be categorized, loosely, as jolly mockeries and novelty numbers. His mockeries often take the sentimental songs of yesteryear and give them new and often grotesque contexts. They are not parodies in the sense that they put new words to existing melodies like Allan Sherman (1924-1973); his parody, or perhaps more accurately his “burlesquing” of the originals, lies in the lyrics, not necessarily in the music.

An example is the song “The Old Lamp-Lighter” (1946, music by Nat Simon, lyrics by Charles Tobias), an allegedly nostalgic look at a still earlier era. Lehrer, not very subtly, wrote “The Old Dope Peddler” “with his powdered happiness.”

(I mention this song because, as he has acknowledged, when he wrote it “dope” was not a major factor in most lives. Today the drug culture is much more prevalent, and the song now has an unintended resonance.)

Another song, “The Masochism Tango,” mocks a kind of song best represented perhaps by “So in Love,” a ballad by Cole Porter (1891-1964) from the great musical Kiss Me Kate (1948):

            So taunt me, and hurt me,
            Deceive me, desert me,
            I’m yours till I die . . .

Lehrer’s song, again not terribly subtly, piles up the number of things the singer will allow the loved one to do:

            Bash in my brain,
            And make me scream with pain,
            Then kick me once again,
            And say we’ll never part . . .

There are songs about college, an Irish ballad (in which things go very, very badly), a Western number, a number about the Old South, about the Army . . . whatever caught his attention.

The novelty numbers are varied and imaginative. The best known, perhaps, is “The Elements,” a rearranging of the periodic table that Lehrer set to “A Modern Major General” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance:

            There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,
            And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium . . .

(Lehrer said his one experience on stage was playing the Pirate King in a production of Pirates in high school. The music of Gilbert and Sullivan was always important to him.)

(Arthur Sullivan (music; 1842-1900) and W. S. Gilbert’s [libretto; 1836-1911] The Pirates of Penzance; or, The Slave of Duty is a comic opera in two acts. Its official première was in New York City in 1879, where it ran 100 performances and was well received by both audiences and critics. Its 1880 London début ran for 363 performances.)

Also in the novelty category are the songs he wrote for the United States version of the satirical TV show That Was the Week That Was (National Broadcasting Company, 1963-1965), and the ten songs he wrote for the educational TV program The Electric Company (Public Broadcasting Service, 1971-1977), devoted to helping children learn to read. (Lehrer remarked that he never found out if it worked.) The variety of his output is impressive, considering the relatively small number of songs he wrote.

I never met Tom Lehrer, although I wrote him a fan letter, and I’ve only met one person who did, an actor in the revue Tomfoolery (1980 in London, 1981 in New York City). I asked the actor what Lehrer was like, and he said, quoting Lehrer, “There’s a ‘p’ in ‘park.’”

For a person with a disapproving world view, Lehrer appears to have been good-humored and sociable. In interviews he speaks of friends and parties. He put his home address on his first albums, so people could write him for additional copies.

His number was in the Boston phone book for years after he became known. His stage persona was convivial, if sardonic. He was hardly a recluse or antisocial.

Instead, it seems clear that he was what the psychological approach Family Systems Therapy calls “self-differentiated,” that is, he knew what he was and what he wasn’t, and acted accordingly.  He lived his life pretty much the way he wanted to and didn’t feel compelled to behave in the ways that some celebrities feel they must.

And he was a teacher most of his life, a profession that by necessity involves working with people. There is a definite element of teaching in his material. In a way every good artist is a teacher, introducing us to aspects of the world that we may not have been aware of before.

He taught undergraduate mathematics at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California at Santa Cruz. At the latter school he also instituted and taught a class on musical theater, because he found that students didn’t know who Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021) was. He considered Sondheim the greatest lyricist ever. (Curiously, he and Sondheim attended the same summer camp as children from 1937 to 1939.)

Sometimes Lehrer makes the connection with teaching explicit. Two of his songs are “That’s Mathematics” and “New Math.” And any comedian in some way wants to teach us about life. Lehrer was – as much as he was a mathematician – a comedian.

I called this article “Tom Lehrer and the Comic Spirit,” and what I have in mind is a comment by George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) that “comedy is disruption.” Not all disruption is comedy – tragedy is disruption, too, but its rhythm is different. In comedy the disruption comes suddenly.

(For more on Shaw, see “Bernard Shaw, Pop Culture Critic” by Kirk Woodward [5 September 2012], “Two Shaw Plays (Shaw Festival, 2006)” [25 September 2012]. “Eric Bentley On Bernard Shaw” by Kirk Woodward [3 December 2015], “Re-Reading Shaw” by Kirk Woodward [3 and 18 July, 8 and 23 August, and 2 September 2016], and “Shaw versus Shakes” by Kirk Woodward [8 September 2023].)

Lehrer’s songs often set up expectations and then disrupt them. I wonder if the songs above, as described, struck anyone as cheap or facile. It’s a fact that, particularly at first, Lehrer often got his effects by taking a subject and introducing murder or death in it, to disruptive effect.

This kind of disruption of expectation would certainly get a laugh at parties, which is where he first performed his songs. But does it have anything to do with art, or is it just a way of getting cheap laughs?

There are two answers to this question. The first is that Lehrer’s lyrics are invariably matched by lilting, pleasurable melodies that give the songs a higher dimension. Lehrer is in control of this matchup because he almost always writes both words and music.

In an interview he notes that he and the composer and singer Randy Newman (b. 1943) both “take some sardonic attitude and set it to very pleasant music.” It’s notable that a major influence on his songs was the jaunty group of patter songs of Noel Coward (1899-1973), who does much the same thing.

He began playing piano when he was eight. He had a vigorous, percussive style and he knew his way around a keyboard. For proof, visit the song “(Oh, My Darling) Clementine” (traditional, with 1884 lyrics attributed to Percy Montrose [fl. 1880s]) in which he plays that chestnut in the styles of Cole Porter, Mozart (1756-1791), bebop jazz (flourished, 1945-1955), and Gilbert and Sullivan. Note in particular how well he understands the bebop style.

His lyrics too, regardless of the subject, are skillfully crafted. I learned more about writing song lyrics from Lehrer’s songs than from any other place. They set a high standard; they fit their melodies, they move along smoothly, they suit their subjects perfectly, and they are funny.

The songs he wrote for The Electric Company are practically a textbook in lyric writing, for example in his demonstration of “Silent E:”

            Who can turn a cap into a cape?
            Who can turn a tap into a tape?
            A little glob becomes a globe instantly,
            If you just add Silent E.

            He turned a dam – Alikazam! – into a dame
            But my friend Sam stayed just the same.

(In “Tomfoolery” he added:

            Once I had to hop, now I can hope,
            And of course my pop is now the Pope.)

A second answer to the question about the ultimate value of his work is that by his approach Lehrer calls into question the comfortable, comforting nature of earlier songs and, by implication, of earlier social conditions.

Some of his songs directly challenge staples of Fifties life – Christmas (“A Christmas Carol”), segregation (“I Wanna Go Back to Dixie”), nuclear armament (“We All Will Go Together When We Go”). Others simply raise a little hell.

In effect, then, his music is an event on the way to the consequential change that begins to flower in the 1960s. Just by their disruptive nature, the songs helped set the stage for attitudes of rebellion that are now commonplace.

I don’t know if he thought so; usually he talks about his songs as pure entertainment. Very little in entertainment is pure, though, and his songs provided an alternative way of looking at a lot of things for people like me, huddled around a record player in the Fifties.

Lehrer has said that his aim with his songs was not to change anyone’s mind, since anyone who heard him perform agreed with him already. He just “titillated the audience,” he said.

Two comments, again, on this way of thinking: it leaves out the effect of his work on people like me who heard it for the first time, and it ignores the way that art can change perceptions not as much by what it says as about how it says it.

When he turned his songwriting attention to political affairs, writing for That Was the Week that Was, he demonstrated that at a minimum he could raise awareness:

            If you visit American city,
            You will find it very pretty.
            Just two things of which you must beware,
            Don’t drink the water and don’t breathe the air.

A common misconception about Lehrer is that he hated performing. He didn’t, as long as the performing was for a purpose. He wanted people to hear his songs, and as he pointed out, after a while everyone at Harvard had heard them “ad nauseam,” so he began to perform them more widely, also, in the process, polishing them so they were ready for recording, another way of getting people to hear them.

But he didn’t see the point of performing for people who already knew his music. He accepted some tour dates in Europe because he wanted to see Scandinavia, but once his fundamental purpose had been met – to introduce his music to people – he mostly stopped performing.

A similar misconception is that he stopped writing songs. He didn’t; he has said in interviews that he continued writing occasional pieces, including verses for friends. In the Remains collection are four songs that were written after the original six albums.

A YouTube video provides several examples, as well as a cheerful look at the man himself.

But it’s true that 1965 saw his final original album release. Why no more? He has said it’s because he had nothing else to say, but I would guess there’s more involved. David Byrne (b. 1952), formerly the lead singer of Talking Heads and a remarkable artist, gives a clue in his book How Music Works (Three Rivers Press, 2012/2017). Byrne writes that

context largely determines what is written, painted, sculpted, sung, or performed. . . . We unconsciously and instinctively make work to fit pre-existing formats. Of course, passion can still be present. Just because the form that one’s work will take is predetermined and opportunistic (meaning one makes something because the opportunity is there), it doesn’t mean that creation must be cold, mechanical, and heartless. Dark and emotional materials usually find a way in . . . . Opportunity and availability are often the mother of invention.

Lehrer’s performance career illustrates Lynch’s point clearly. The musical culture in the early 1950s, and society at large at that time, provided the context for many of his songs. That culture and that society changed, and with it the “formats” he had drawn on for his songs changed as well. The material for his music was no longer there.

Mathematics, he said, provided a continuing way of looking at the world, it was his first interest, and he enjoyed spending his time there. He continued to listen to music, or try to. I am happy to report that he admired the Beatles.

Wikipedia’s article on Lehrer reports a wonderful episode in his later years:

In 2012, rapper 2 Chainz sampled Lehrer's song “The Old Dope Peddler“ on his debut album, Based on a T.R.U. Story. In 2013, Lehrer said he was “very proud” to have his song sampled “literally sixty years after I recorded it”. Lehrer went on to describe his official response to the request to use his song: “As sole copyright owner of 'The Old Dope Peddler', I grant you motherfuckers permission to do this. Please give my regards to Mr. Chainz, or may I call him 2?”

“Fun” is a word he often uses, and we see why. It’s an interesting choice of a word for a man who purported to believe that people mess up just about everything they touch, but he made his own place in that world and wasn’t obsessed with what others did, mostly using it as material for comedy.

What is Lehrer’s rank among American composers? High, I think, because of his lyrical and melodic skill and his unstoppable sense of humor. There are things, we should note, that he does not attempt. For example, there are no love songs in his work, and remarkably little about sex. “I Got It From Agnes” is about as close as that gets, and only inferentially:

        She then gave it to Daniel,
            Whose spaniel has it now.
            Our dentist even got it,
            And we’re still wondering how.

Lehrer cast a cold eye on romance, patriotism, religion, many things that we hold dear or claim to. That’s what comedians do – they disrupt our pretentions. When armed with weapons of music and lyrics, they are all the more potent. Thanks to Tom Lehrer for keeping us alert, and for helping us to laugh.

And we mustn’t forget the song about the Boy Scouts, which got Lehrer in a bit of trouble during a tour to Australia in 1960:

Be prepared!
That's the Boy Scouts' solemn creed
Be prepared!
And be clean in word and deed
Don't solicit for your sister, that's not nice
Unless you get a good percentage of her price

Be prepared!
And be careful not to do your good deeds
When there's no one watching you
If you're looking for adventure of a new and different kind
And you come across a Girl Scout who is similarly inclined
Don't be nervous, don't be flustered, don't be scared
Be prepared!

*  *  *  *
“TOM LEHRER, 97, SATIRIST WHOSE
PEPPY MELODIES LEAD DARK VERSE, DIES”
by Richard Severo and Peter Keepnews 

[Above, I embedded a link to an obituary of Tom Lehrer in Kirk Woodward’s profile of the comic songwriter.  I used the notice from Variety, the renowned daily entertainment newspaper, because I think coverage if Lehrer’s death in a show business publication would be apt.  Since, however, Kirk specifically mentions the New York Times obit further down in his article, and the notice is particularly comprehensive, I decided to run it following Kirk’s report.

[The obituary notice below appeared in the Times on 28 July 2025, in the front section.  It was also posted as “Tom Lehrer, Musical Satirist With a Dark Streak, Dies at 97” on the New York Times website on 27 July and updated on 7 August.  (Richard Severo, a New York Times reporter from 1968 to 2006 and cowrote the Lehrer death notice, died in 2023, two years before his subject.  I’m sure ROTters know how and why this happens in the newspaper business, but if anyone doesn’t, check out “An Obituary Written From Beyond the Grave? Not Quite.”)]

A mathematician by training, he acquired a devoted following with songs that set sardonic lyrics to music that was often maddeningly cheerful.

Tom Lehrer, the Harvard-trained mathematician whose wickedly iconoclastic songs made him a favorite satirist in the 1950s and ’60s on college campuses and in all the Greenwich Villages of the country, died on Saturday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 97.

His death was confirmed by David Herder, a friend.

Mr. Lehrer’s lyrics were nimble, sometimes salacious and almost always sardonic, sung to music that tended to be maddeningly cheerful. Accompanying himself on piano, he performed in nightclubs, in concert and on records that his admirers purchased, originally by mail order only, in the hundreds of thousands.

But his entertainment career ultimately took a back seat to academia. In his heart he never quit his day job; he just took a few sabbaticals.

He stopped performing in 1960 after only a few years, resumed briefly in 1965 and then stopped for good in 1967. His music was ultimately just a momentary detour in an academic career that included teaching posts at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, and even a stint with the Atomic Energy Commission.

As popular as his songs were, Mr. Lehrer never felt entirely comfortable performing them. “I don’t feel the need for anonymous affection,” he told The New York Times in 2000. “If they buy my records, I love that. But I don’t think I need people in the dark applauding.”

Mr. Lehrer’s songwriting output was modest, but it was darkly memorable. In the tasteless world he evoked, a seemingly harmless geezer turned out to be “The Old Dope Peddler” and spring was the time for “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.”

In “The Masochism Tango,” which the sheet music instructed should be played “painstakingly,” he warbled, “You can raise welts/Like nobody else.” In “Be Prepared,” his “Boy Scout marching song,” he admonished, “Don’t solicit for your sister, that’s not nice/Unless you get a good percentage of her price.”

Thomas Andrew Lehrer was born in Manhattan on April 9, 1928, one of two sons of James Lehrer, a successful tie manufacturer, and Anna (Waller) Lehrer. Young Tom was precocious, but his precocity had its limits. He took piano lessons from an early age, but balked at learning classical music and insisted on switching to a teacher who emphasized the Broadway show tunes he loved.

He also developed a fondness for Gilbert and Sullivan; one of his early songs, “The Elements,” was a list of the chemical elements set to the tune of “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General” from “The Pirates of Penzance.” (Years later “The Elements” would be performed by the young scientist played by Jim Parsons on the hit sitcom “The Big Bang Theory.”) [Actor Daniel Radcliffe also sang the song on TV in 2010; here’s a video of the performance.]

After graduating early from the Loomis Chaffee School in Connecticut, Mr. Lehrer went to Harvard, where he majored in mathematics and received his bachelor’s degree in 1946, at 18. He earned a master’s from Harvard the next year and then pursued doctoral studies there and at Columbia University. (He continued his studies on and off for many years, but he never completed his Ph.D. thesis.)

While at Harvard, Mr. Lehrer began to write songs for his own amusement and that of his fellow students. He told his friends that the songs simply came to him and that he wrote them down in just about the time it took him to brush his teeth, but they quickly found an audience on campus. One of his earliest efforts, written in 1945, was a parody of football songs called “Fight Fiercely, Harvard,” in which he exhorted:

Fight, fight, fight!
Demonstrate to them our skill.
Albeit they possess the might,
Nonetheless we have the will.
How we shall celebrate our victory?
We shall invite the whole team up for tea!

In 1952, as he looked forward to becoming a researcher for the Atomic Energy Commission in Los Alamos, N.M., he wrote “The Wild West Is Where I Want to Be,” whose lyrics suggested that he was not to have a fruitful career in atomic research: “’Mid the yuccas and the thistles/I’ll watch the guided missiles/While the old F.B.I. watches me.”

By that time Mr. Lehrer had begun performing his songs in Cambridge, Mass. He did not want to abandon research and teaching, but he saw the possibility of combining the contemplative life with an entertainment career.

In 1953, encouraged by friends, he produced an album. To his surprise, “Songs by Tom Lehrer,” cut and pressed in an initial run of 400 copies, was a hit. Sold through the mail and initially promoted almost entirely by word of mouth, it ultimately sold an estimated half-million copies.

The cover contained a drawing of Mr. Lehrer seated at the piano, with horns coming out of his head and a devil’s tail emerging from his formal attire. (His follow-up album, “More of Tom Lehrer,” used the same image.) The 11 songs lived up to that image, among them “My Home Town” (where the “just plain folks” included the pyromaniacal son of the mayor and the math teacher who sells dirty pictures to children after school) and the necrophiliac ballad “I Hold Your Hand in Mine.”

The record’s success led to nightclub engagements in New York, Boston, San Francisco and Los Angeles. His performing career was interrupted by a two-year Army hitch [1955-57]; when he returned to civilian life in 1957 he hit the road again, giving concerts in Canada and overseas as well as in the United States.

In 1959, in an unusual move, he simultaneously released a new studio album, “More of Tom Lehrer,” and a live album, “An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer,” which contained concert versions of the same songs. (He later also rerecorded the songs from his first album in concert.) But after another year of touring, he stopped performing and returned to the Harvard faculty.

In 1964 and 1965 he wrote several songs for “That Was the Week That Was,” the short-lived satirical NBC television series [1963-65]. He did not appear on the show, but he did return to the road for a while, recording his new songs at the hungry i in San Francisco for the 1965 album “That Was the Year That Was” — not a do-it-yourself effort this time, but released on Reprise, a subsidiary of Warner Bros. Records.

His new numbers, in which he focused on political and social issues, included “A Song for World War III” (“So long, Mom/I’m off to drop the bomb”), which was sung on “That Was the Week That Was” by Steve Allen [1921-2000; television and radio personality, comedian, musician, composer, writer, and actor; in 1954 became the first host of The Tonight Show, the first late-night television talk show], and “Wernher von Braun,” about the German scientist [1912-77] who designed weapons for the Nazis and later worked for NASA: “‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?/That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.”

The album also contained what may have been the most controversial song Mr. Lehrer ever wrote: “The Vatican Rag,” his response to the Second Vatican Council’s [1962-65] attempt to, in his words, “make the church more commercial.” The lyrics begin:

First you get down on your knees,
Fiddle with your rosaries,
Bow your head with great respect
And genuflect! Genuflect! Genuflect!

The song was condemned by clergymen and school administrators. When Channel 13 [WNDT until 1970, when it became WNET], the New York public television station, played it as part of a [1967] fund-raising drive, the station received hundreds of calls and letters of protest.

Mr. Lehrer gave up performing again after a concert in Copenhagen in September 1967. This time he stuck to his decision. The rest was almost, but not quite, silence.

His last sustained burst of songwriting came in 1971, when he contributed “Silent E” and other educational ditties to the PBS children’s series “The Electric Company.” The next year he performed at a rally for the presidential campaign of Senator George S. McGovern , [1922-2012; politician, diplomat, and historian; served as a representative (1957-61) and three-term senator from South Dakota (1963-81), and was the Democratic Party presidential nominee in the 1972 presidential election]. But there were no more nightclub or concert performances, and no more albums.

By 1981 he had fallen so far off the cultural radar that, he told The Harvard Crimson, some people thought he was dead. (“I was hoping the rumors would cut down on the junk mail,” he said.)

A new generation was introduced to the Lehrer songbook in 1980 when the British impresario Cameron Mackintosh [b. 1946] presented “Tomfoolery,” a revue of his songs, in London. The show was a hit there and was later produced in New York [Village Gate (Off-Broadway), 1981-82], Washington [Kreeger Theatre (Arena Stage), 1982], Dublin [Gates Theatre, 1981] and elsewhere.

With characteristic self-deprecation, Mr. Lehrer attributed the show’s success to a shortage of new songwriters. “It was inevitable,” he said, “that someone would peer into the almost empty barrel and notice me down there.”

When “Tomfoolery” played at the Village Gate in New York in 1981, Mr. Lehrer explained to The Times why he had stopped writing. “The Vietnam War is what changed it,” he said. “Everybody got earnest. My purpose was to make people laugh and not applaud. If the audience applauds, they’re just showing they agree with me.” On another occasion he famously offered another explanation: “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger [1923-2023; German-born diplomat and political scientist; United States Secretary of State: 1973-77 and National Security Advisor: 1969-75 under presidents Richard Nixon (1913-94; 37th President of the United States: 1969-74) and Gerald Ford (1913-2006; 38th President of the United States: 1974-77)] was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize” [1977].

In October 2020, Mr. Lehrer announced on his website that “all the lyrics on this website, whether published or unpublished, copyrighted or uncopyrighted, may be downloaded and used in any manner whatsoever, without requiring any further permission from me or any payment to me or to anyone else” — in other words, that he was relinquishing the rights to all his songs, except for the melodies of those few that used his words but someone else’s music.

He expanded on, and formalized, this announcement two years later, stating among other things that “permission is hereby granted to anyone to set any of these lyrics to their own music, or to set any of this music to their own lyrics, and to publish or perform their parodies or distortions of these songs without payment or fear of legal action.” Adding that he planned to shut down his website “in the not too distant future,” he concluded: “In short, I no longer retain any rights to any of my songs. So help yourselves, and don’t send me any money.” (His website, and the notice, were still online at his death [and still yet at this posting].)

It was a highly unusual move, Abby North, the chief executive of a music rights management company [North Music Group], told the public radio show “Marketplace” [airs on many public radio stations during the last segment of the NPR program Morning Edition], because for many songwriters, royalties “have been sustaining multiple families for multiple generations.”

Mr. Lehrer divided his time for many years between Cambridge, where he taught at both Harvard and M.I.T., and Santa Cruz, where he taught courses on mathematics and musical theater at the University of California from 1972 to 2001.

When a fan once asked Mr. Lehrer if he had ever married or had children, he replied, “Not guilty on both counts.” He leaves no immediate survivors.

Reflecting on his bicoastal life in a 1981 interview for Newsday, he said he planned to keep his Massachusetts home “until my brain turns completely to Jell-O, at which time I will of course move to California full time.”

[If I had to pick a favorite Tom Lehrer song, it’d be a hard assignment.  “Be Prepared” tickles me endlessly—I was a Boy Scout before I was in high school, though I doubt that’s why the song gets me—and “The Vatican Rag” makes me laugh—maybe because I’m not Catholic. 

[But if I were forced to make a choice, sort of like Stephen Colbert’s question on his “Colbert Questionert,” except restricted here to “You get one Tom Lehrer song to listen to for the rest of your life: what is it?"  As Colbert might explain, “It’s not that it’s playing in your head endlessly, or on a loop.  It’s just that whenever you choose to listen to Lehrer’s music for the rest of your life, that’s the only song you’ll hear.”

[In that case, I’d have to choose “Alma” (1965).  The only reason I can figure for that is that its references are so obscure—how many people recognize the names Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), Walter Gropius (1883-1969), and Franz Werfel (1890-1945) off the tops of their heads?  (Well, maybe Mahler--if you’re into classical music.)

[Then, the rhymes are sooo . . . I don’t know—surprising.  A little forced, perhaps—pairing “Alma” with “embalma,” for example (though I love “Bauhaus” and “chow house”!)—but very chuckleworthy.  It’s just not anything anyone—well, me, anyway—would imagine.  Not even from Tom Lehrer. 

[Just for my own amusement, then, here are the lyrics:

The loveliest girl in Vienna
Was Alma, the smartest as well
Once you picked her up on your antenna
You’d never be free of her spell

Her lovers were many and varied
From the day she began her beguine
There were three famous ones whom she married
And God knows how many between

Alma, tell us
All modern women are jealous
Which of your magical wands
Got you Gustav and Walter and Franz?

The first one she married was Mahler
Whose buddies all knew him as Gustav
And each time he saw her he’d holler
“Ach, dot is de fräulein I must have”

Their marriage, however, was murder
He’d scream to the heavens above
“I’m writing ‘Das Lied von der Erde’
Und she only wants to make love”

Alma, tell us
All modern women are jealous
You should have a statue in bronze
For bagging Gustav and Walter and Franz

While married to Gus, she met Gropius
And soon she was swinging with Walter
Gus died, and her tear drops were copious
She cried all the way to the altar

But he would work late at the Bauhaus
And only came home now and then
She said, “What am I running, a chow house?
It’s time to change partners again”

Alma, tell us
All modern women are jealous
Though you didn’t even use Ponds
You got Gustav and Walter and Franz

While married to Walt she’d met Werfel
And he too was caught in her net
He married her, but he was carefell
’Cause Alma was no Bernadette

And that is the story of Alma
Who knew how to receive and to give
The body that reached her embalma
Was one that had known how to live

Alma, tell us
How can they help being jealous?
Ducks always envy the swans
Who get Gustav and Walter
You never did falter
With Gustav and Walter and Franz

[Just for the record, Alma Mahler-Werfel was born Alma Margaretha Maria Schindler (1879, in Vienna – 1964, in New York City).  She was married to composer Gustav Mahler from 1902 to 1911, architect Walter Gropius from 1915 to 1920, and novelist and playwright Franz Werfel from 1929 to 1945.

[Richard Severo was a science journalist who wrote for the New York Times from 1968 to 2006.  During that time, he won a George Polk Award from Long Island University in 1975, as well as a Meyer “Mike” Berger Award from the Columbia School of Journalism. 

[Peter Keepnews, formerly of the New York Post, Soho Weekly News, and Jazz Magazine, is a veteran music journalist and an editor at the Times.

[Alex Traub contributed reporting.]

Rare First Edition of 'The Hobbit' Discovered

 

[Last Tuesday, 5 August, I read a really wonderful little story in the front section of the New York Times: “A ‘Hobbit’ Gem Rediscovered in England” (published on the paper’s website as “A Rare Copy of ‘The Hobbit’ Is Found on an Unassuming Shelf” on 4 August.)  As you’ll see shortly, it’s a report on the serendipitous discovery of a first edition of J. R. R. Tolkien’s initial book in the Middle Earth saga, The Hobbit.  In my 20’s, I was a Tolkien fan.  I wasn’t obsessive—I never tried to learn any of the languages Tolkien invented, for instance (which is perhaps odd, since I was a linguist)—but I loved the stories (and, 30 years later, the movies).

[I became engaged by the books sort of by happenstance.  I was in the army—this was the summer of 1971, by the way—and posted to West Berlin.  I arrived with just a suitcase of clothes and uniforms and very little else.  I was forewarned that I’d be wearing civilian clothes on duty, so I needed to bring enough suits, slacks and jackets, shirts, ties, shoes, and socks for five days so I wouldn’t have to repeat within a week of work.  (Up till then, in the 2½ years I’d been in the service, I wore a uniform, so who’d notice if I wore the same one two days in a row?)

[All my other personal effects were being shipped from home courtesy of the army, but it wasn’t an express delivery.  So, I had a radio, but no television or stereo.  If I went out, Berlin had plenty of diversions, but I’d eventually have to come back to the BOQ, even if only to turn in for the night.  (Army office hours started at 8 a.m.)  So, I stopped by the PX newsstand, which was also the bookstore, and browsed the reading material on offer.  I spotted a boxed set of the Ring Trilogy and its predecessor, The Hobbit.

[I’d heard of the saga, of course.  It was popular on the campus of my college, my last stop before the army.  But I hadn’t read any of the books yet.  So, I grabbed the four paperbacks to see what all the fuss was about—and hopefully to have something to pass the time and occupy my mind and imagination when I was off duty at home.

[Well, long story short (if it’s not already too late): I not only couldn’t put the books down, but I was sort of transported to Middle Earth in such a way that everything around me in my apartment became part of the fantasy world.  Even when I wasn’t reading the stories—even when I’d finished them (and, boy, was that a let down!)—if I heard a song that was on the radio when I was reading in bed, or if I ate a snack I’d often had while I was reading, I was flashed back to the saga.  Not literally, but emotionally or psychically: I’d feel again however I’d felt when I was immersed in the book.  

[That flashback sensation lasted for a few years; it’s gone now, perhaps unfortunately, but it stayed with me for a long time.  The only other book that did that to me was T. H. White’s The Once and Future King (1958), which I’d read—also in bed at night—when I was about 12.  (I loved the Narnia books [1950-56] and the Oz books [1900-20]—those latter [only the first three or four, I think] were actually read to us by our elementary school librarian when I was really young—but they didn’t transport me the way the Hobbit saga and little Wart’s story did.)]

“‘UNIMAGINABLY RARE’ FIRST EDITION OF 
JRR TOLKIEN’S ‘THE HOBBIT’ DISCOVERED IN U.K. HOME”
Jo Lawson-Tancred

[This account of the find was reported on artnet magazine’s website on 7 August 2025.]

In near pristine condition, the book easily surpassed estimates to fetch $57,000.

An exceptionally rare first edition of JRR Tolkein’s [1892-1973] fantasy bestseller The Hobbit [1937] was sold for £43,000 ($58,000 [or €50,000]) by a local auction house in Bristol, England, yesterday. The literary gem soared past its conservative high estimate of £12,000 ($16,000 [or €14,000]) in an online sale by Auctioneum, meeting expectations but failing to pull in one of the eye-watering sums that Tolkein’s first editions have previously commanded.

The book’s discovery would be a once-in-a-lifetime moment for any rare books specialist. While out on a routine appraisal of the contents of a home in Bristol, England, Caitlin Riley [b. ca. 1997] spotted an unusually quaint, faded green cover. As a seasoned connoisseur, she knew what she might be looking at, but surely it was too good to be true? On closer inspection, there could be little doubt that she was holding a first edition of JRR Tolkien’s masterpiece The Hobbit, in near pristine condition, no less.

“It was just a run-of-the-mill bookcase, containing the usual reading and reference books you’d expect to find,” Riley said. As she flicked through the pages, surveying a title page with no previous publication dates, the magnitude of the discovery dawned on her. “When I realized what it was, my heart began pounding. It’s an unimaginably rare find.”

Indeed, though the fantasy novel would go on to sell an estimated 100 million copies, becoming one of the best-selling books of all time, The Hobbit‘s original 1937 print run consisted of just 1,500 copies. Of these, only a few hundred are believed to remain, and since many likely once belonged to children, unsurprisingly, bear signs of wear and tear.

The book was an immediate success and its first print run was swiftly followed by a second, just a few weeks later. A key difference between these runs can be found in the illustrations, which are based on Tolkien’s originals. In the first run, the illustrations were done in black-and-white to save on costs. When it became clear the book would be a hit, they were recommissioned in color.

Coveted literary treasures like these, especially those touting the name of Tolkein [pronounced, by the way, TOLE•keen], have been known to fetch over $100,000. First editions of The Hobbit are so rare that they almost never come up for auction but, in 2015, one similar copy sold for £137,000 at Sotheby’s London. However, this sum, which converts to around $182,000 today, was partly owed to the book retaining its original dust jacket and containing Tolkien’s inscription to the recipient, one of his students, as well as four lines of handwritten Elvish.

A London book specialist, Oliver Bayliss [b. 1992], has estimated that the copy found in Bristol might sell for over £50,000 ($67,000 [or €58,000]), according to the New York Times. He only slightly overestimated the eventual sum.

Riley’s find was all the more unexpected because the house’s late owner has remained anonymous, with their estate being overseen by an executor. While specialists are not sure how The Hobbit ended up on their bookshelves, the copy can be traced to the library of celebrated botanist Hubert Priestley [Joseph Hubert Priestley (1883-1944)], who studied and lectured at University College, Bristol.

It has been speculated that Priestly may have met Tolkien via another acclaimed English author, C.S. Lewis [1898-1963; British writer, literary scholar, and lay Anglican theologian; held academic positions in English literature at both Magdalen College, Oxford (1925–1954), and Magdalene College, Cambridge (1954-63); best known as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56)], with whom both men corresponded. Whatever the case, the various owners of this copy of The Hobbit appear not to have been avid readers. Its noticeably un-thumbed pages suggest that it may never have been read at all, or possibly by someone taking great care not to leave many traces.

[Jo Lawson-Tancred, European News Reporter, writes about news happening across the art world, including at museums, in archaeology, on the gallery scene, and emerging uses of tech in art.  In longer form, she reports on new trends in the art and museum worlds, interviewing important artists working today, or bringing to light the forgotten stories of historically marginalized artists or portrait subjects.  Her book A.I. and the Art Market was published by Lund Humphries in 2024 in the U.K. and 2025 in the U.S.]

*  *  *  *
“HOW TO IDENTIFY FIRST EDITION COPIES OF 
THE LORD OF THE RINGS AND THE HOBBIT”

[WeBuyBooks, the website of a recommerce company in the United Kingdom specializing in recycling books, CD’s, and DVD’s, published a guide to Tolkien first editions.  I’m reposting it for the edification of any ROTters who are not only Tolkien fans, but collectors.  This post was last updated on 26 March 2025.

[(Since “Rare First Edition” is about The Hobbit, not the writer’s whole Middle Earth oeuvre, I’ve truncated the WeBuyBooks posting after it covers that one book; interested readers should click on the link above to access the website and the collectors’ guide for The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Silmarillion.  I’ve also taken the liberty of italicizing the book titles below, which the website didn’t do.  Because the post is all about books, spotlighting the titles from the other writing seems significant and useful.)]

Do you own a copy of The Lord of the Rings (first published, 1954-55)? If you do, you could be in for a surprise. In this article, we will uncover the secrets behind first-edition J.R.R. Tolkien novels to find out just how valuable they are.

Since the release of The Lord of the Rings following the successful launch of Tolkien’s first book, The Hobbit, it has seen success after success, leading to over 150,000,000 copies printed to date. We aren’t just going to be looking at your average copy of The Lord of the Rings however, we are going to be examining the true first editions and explaining how you can identify them.

We are going to be exploring some tips and tricks to help you identify what a first-edition Lord of the Rings book looks like and how to spot a fake. We will also be taking a look at first-edition copies of The Hobbit and The Silmarillion, as well as some of Tolkien’s other lesser-known titles.

So, if you have an old copy of The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, or The Silmarillion (1977), now’s the time to dig it out and see if you are unknowingly in possession of a first-edition Tolkien classic.

So, grab yourself a cuppa [for those not up on Britspeak, in the U.K., where WeBuyBooks lives, this colloquial contraction of cup of means “tea”], get comfortable, and let’s get started.

What is the difference between ‘first edition’ and ‘first printing’?

Reader’s Note: Throughout this article, we will be referring to ‘first edition’ and ‘first printing’, these are phrases that come up a lot when considering rare literature, but they both have different meanings, here’s what they mean:

First Edition: A ‘first edition’ book is a copy of the first version of the book. A second edition is a version of a book after adjustments are made to the original. These can be in the form of new artwork, corrected errors, or simply changes in the wording.

First Printing: ’First printings’ (or ‘first impressions’) are the copies of a book that are part of the first print run of an edition. For example, if a new edition of a book is released with new cover art, the first printings will be the ones that are printed first.

The size of print runs varies from book to book, it’s common to find that books written by relatively less well-known authors or books that are the first of their series have a much smaller number of first edition, first printing copies. This is due mainly to the fact that the publisher can’t guarantee the book’s success and is less willing to invest in large-scale printing straight away.

For true collectors, a first printing of a first edition is the ultimate goal as these tend to be the rarest, but later printings and editions can still hold significant value.

Before we begin, just a warning, the following content may contain some spoilers so if you haven’t already read any of the Tolkien books, continue with care.

Who was J.R.R. Tolkien?

Born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, in 1892, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, more commonly known today as J.R.R. Tolkien is best known as the author of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Tolkien’s contributions to the high fantasy genre aren’t his only achievements however, during his professional career he was the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon history at the University of Oxford. He later took the position of Professor of English Language and Literature at the same university.

[Tolkien died in Bournemouth, Hampshire, on 2 September 1973 at the age of 81; his wife, Edith (née Bratt), had predeceased him by 21 months. He had had the name “Luthien” [sic] engraved on her tombstone at Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford. When he was buried in the same grave, he had “Beren” added to his name.]

[The story of Lúthien and Beren recounts the love between Beren, a mortal man, and Lúthien, an immortal elf-maiden. Their forbidden love leads to Beren undertaking an impossible quest and Beren and Lúthien face numerous perils together, ultimately succeeding in their quest and proving the power of love and sacrifice. Though Beren dies after the quest, Lúthien chooses mortality to be with him (as Edith Bratt converted to Catholicism for Tolkien), and they are later restored to life. Their tale is one of enduring love and the triumph of good over evil.  It’s mentioned briefly in The Fellowship of the Ring, the first part of the trilogy, and related in full in The Silmarillion.]

The Hobbit First Edition

For the sake of chronology, we are going to start with the first of Tolkien’s published novels, The Hobbit. Being the first of Tolkien’s novels and the book that has inspired multiple modern adaptations including Peter Jackson’s [b. 1961; New Zealand filmmaker] film trilogy [Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-03); later, the Hobbit trilogy (2012-14)] that took the same name, a first edition of The Hobbit has been valued at up to £40,000 [$54,000 or €46,000] depending on condition.

The Hobbit follows an unsuspecting hobbit (otherwise known as a halfling) of the shire on an epic adventure that takes him and his new dwarven companions on an adventure to reclaim the Lonely Mountain, the ancestral home of the dwarves.

Published on the 21st of November 1937, the first print run only consisted of 1,500 books, which sold out in just under three months. Since then, The Hobbit has sold around 100,000,000 copies worldwide, which means that the 1,500 first printings of the first editions make up around 0.0015% of all the copies in existence. The passage of time has only made them even rarer due to the inevitable disappearance and damage of some books.

When you come to identify a true first printing of a first edition The Hobbit you need to look for the following details:

• The publisher should be “George Allen & Unwin Ltd”.

• The Publication date should be 1937. [The copyright page should have no mention of subsequent impressions.]

• All of the illustrations in the book should be in black and white. After the success of the first print run, a second print run was released with coloured illustrations.

• On the inside of the back cover of the first edition dust jackets there is a mistake. Halfway down the page, the word Dodgson is spelled “Dodgeson”, including an ‘e’ where there shouldn’t be one. In most first edition copies, this ‘e’ has been crossed out by hand using black ink.

[This is in a brief comparison of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871), written by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-98), better known by his pen name, Lewis Carroll, with The Hobbit, and of Carroll/Dodgson and Tolkien as writers of fantasy stories.

[Carroll/Dodgson and Tolkien were both Oxford dons and authors. This shared Oxford connection and literary legacy led to Dodgson’s name being included in the information about Tolkien's work on the back flap of the dust jacket. In addition, there’s speculation that Dodgson, though deceased at the time of The Hobbit's publication, may have critiqued, proofed, or influenced Tolkien's early work; however, this theory lacks strong evidence, not to mention that Dodgson died when Tolkien was six, and should be considered with caution.]

. . . .

Signed Copies of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit

Copies of The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit signed by J.R.R. Tolkien himself are scarce, so if you find yourself looking to add a signed copy to your collection you are going to need to write a big check.

Putting a value on a genuine signed copy of The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit is difficult as the price range varies so much, but if you do manage to find one you can expect to pay anything from a few thousand for a signed copy of a later edition, to £500,000 [$672,000 or €576,000] for a complete, signed first-edition Lord of the Rings trilogy.

[The tale of the remarkable discovery reminds me a little of my search for the source of one particular quotation.  I tell the story in "Literary Detection" (3 January 2011).  

[Over the years, I have gone in search of many quotations using my dubious skills as a literary detective to track them down in a kind of documentary skip-trace.  If I came across a statement attributed to someone, and I thought I’d like to use it in something I was writing, I needed to find the actual source—or, at least, a citable one—before I could comfortably (and, really, legitimately) quote the statement myself.  That’s not a problem if the statement is documented in the book or article in which I found it.

[Sometimes, however—more often than I’d like—authors misattribute their quotations, giving the wrong originator or the wrong publication or the wrong date, or they don’t identify them at all.  Then, if I want to use the statement, I have to track down a viable source.

[In a pamphlet from a 1999 exhibit of Mexican muralist Diego Rivera’s work at the Cleveland Museum of Art was a very intriguing statement.  I knew I’d want to use it somewhere in a paper I was writing, but the pamphlet didn’t name the source of the quotation.  The Internet, my usual first step, revealed nothing.  The statement appeared numerous times on many websites, but not one gave any kind of origin for it.  The statement wasn’t listed in any dictionary of quotations I could find.

[So, off I went to search biographies of Rivera and articles by and about him that included statements he made.  Rivera, of course, is an artist much written about so his footprint is huge.  I made the rounds of the art collections in New York City libraries and searched every book and article about or by Rivera I could locate and never found the statement or anything remotely resembling it.  I even tried contacting the Rivera museum in Mexico City, but no one ever responded to my inquiry.

[I even wrote the Cleveland museum to see if anyone there knew the source of the quotation they’d used—no one did—and a reviewer of another exhibit who’d quoted the lines in her article, but she didn’t know where the statement came from, either.

[I started looking for the Rivera quotation probably around 2000 or 2001. I kept looking from time to time, doing a ‘Net search every six or eight months in the hope that something new had been posted since my last try.  Sometime in 2007, I hit on an essay in a journal that quoted the Rivera statement.  I hoped it would be documented, but I couldn’t access it from my home computer; I could only download the essay at a research library.  Finally, I got the article on a terminal at a research branch and, lo and behold, it was footnoted.  I copied down the citation for the quotation, a book about Rivera, and put in a request for it.

[Well, the only circulating copy of the book in the system turned out to have been “on trace” for months and my request was soon cancelled when the book was officially declared missing.  My only recourse now was to search the book at the non-circulating main research branch of the library, so I took myself off one subsequent afternoon. 

[En route, I passed by the lending branch that covered art and artists, where the book would have been housed if it weren’t missing.  On a whim, I decided to go up and just have a look on the shelf.  The book was sitting there, in all its glory—not out of order, not on a shelving cart, not mistakenly on the reference shelf—just where it was supposed to be shelved.  

[I had a quick look at the book right there, and there was the quotation, very clearly indented near the beginning of the text.  It was even footnoted: the source was a collection of random comments, oral and written, Rivera made to the book’s author, a friend of his and his wife, Frida Kahlo’s. 

[So I found the book and my source and could state that Rivera did actually say what's attributed to him (or as surely as a sourced publication of the words can make it).  After years of on-and-off searching.  After having looked through every book and article on or by Rivera I could locate; why I missed this one, which dated from 1971 so it wasn’t newly released or a recent acquisition by the New York Public Library, I don't know.  Nonetheless, mission (finally) accomplished.

[It was the same kind of serendipity that landed the Hobbit first edition in the hands of Auctioneum’s Caitlin Riley.  Yes, she wasn’t looking and I was, but at this point, all I was doing was periodically searching a few databases.  Then, for both of us, something valuable and important to each of us simply fell into our hands.  For both of us, I suspect, it was a lagniappe—an unexpected gift.]

"The Quest for a Lost Chinese Typewriter"

by Veronique Greenwood 

[At the end of last month, I posted a pair of articles on the new words and phrases being added to out speech, however temporarily, by Generation Alpha, drawn from their socializing on the Internet (see “New Word Coinages” [29 July 2025]).  Now here’s a slightly different language report, based more in the past than today’s use of language, and more about writing, or more precisely typing, than speaking.

[Veronique Greenwood’s piece about one man’s quest for an almost-80-year-old typewriter just intrigued me.  As it happens, I engaged in a long—though not years-long—search for something that became an obsession not unlike Thomas Mullaney’s.  In my case, it was a published letter from Tennessee Williams, and I told the tale in “A Tennessee WilliamsTreasure Hunt” (11 April 2009).

[Typewriters have been the topic of a post on Rick On Theater before.  Check out “Pearl Tytell, Matriarch of Document Sleuths (1917-2021)” (17 October 2021).  Greenwood’s article was published in the “Metropolitan” Section of the New York Times of 27 July 2025.  It was also posted on the paper’s website as “A Professor’s Hunt for the Rarest Chinese Typewriter” on 22 July 2025, updated 24 July 2025.]

A professor’s search for a machine that could produce thousands of characters.

In 2010, Tom Mullaney found himself way out in the suburbs of London. A woman there wanted to show him a Chinese typewriter. She was going to be renovating her house soon, she told him, and it needed a new home.

Dr. Mullaney [b. 1978], a professor of Chinese history at Stanford University, had spent years searching the globe for Chinese typewriters, wondrous machines capable of printing thousands of Chinese characters while remaining small enough to keep on a desk.

The typewriter, 50 pounds of metal frame and levers, was one of a dying breed. If he didn’t save it, would it wind up on a scrapheap?

It went into a suitcase and he took it back to California, where it joined a growing collection of Asian-language typing devices that he’d hunted down.

But there was one typewriter that Dr. Mullaney had little hope of ever finding: the MingKwai. Made by an eccentric Chinese linguist turned inventor living in Manhattan, the machine had mechanics that were a precursor to the systems almost everyone now uses to type in Chinese.

Only one — the prototype — was ever made.

“It was the one machine,” he said recently, “which despite all my cold-calling, all my stalking, was absolutely, 100 percent, definitely gone.”

Dr. Mullaney’s mania for clunky text appliances began in 2007, when he was preparing a talk on the disappearance of Chinese characters and found himself contemplating the disintegration of everything.

Among the vast number of characters in the Chinese language — around 100,000, by some estimates — there are hundreds that no one alive knows how to pronounce. They are written down, plain as day, in old books, but their sounds, even their meanings, have been lost.

Sitting in his office, wondering at how something seemingly immortalized in print could be forgotten, Dr. Mullaney went down a mental rabbit hole.

It would have been physically impossible to build a typing machine to include all the characters that were historically written out by hand, he thought. Some characters must have made the cut, while others were left behind. He sat back in his chair and asked himself: Could he recall ever having seen a Chinese typewriter?

Two hours later, he was lying on the floor of his office, looking at patent documents for such devices. There had been, over the last century and a half, dozens of different Chinese typewriters made. Each one was an inventor’s take on how to incorporate thousands of characters into a machine without making it unusable — a physical manifestation of their ideas about language. Never plentiful, the typewriters were now increasingly rare, gone the way of most obsolete technology.

Dr. Mullaney was fascinated.

That evening turned into months of research, which turned into years of searching, as Chinese typewriters became one of his areas of historical expertise.

He cold-called strangers and left voice mail messages for private collectors, people whom he suspected, from faint traces left on the internet, of having typewriters. He pored over Ancestry.com, looking for the next of kin of the last known owner of a particular machine. He called museums and asked, “Do you, by any chance, have a Chinese typewriter?”

Sometimes, they said yes. A private museum in Delaware happened to have a surviving IBM Chinese typewriter, of which only two or three were ever made. Someone at a Chinese Christian church in San Francisco got in touch with him to say they owned a typewriter that they were trying to get rid of. Dr. Mullaney took it off their hands.

Then there was the fellow in Northern California who had held on to two Japanese typewriters, as rare as the Chinese varieties, for some decades. “He looked at me and said, ‘Is your trunk big enough?’” Dr. Mullaney recalled. It was, just.

Dr. Mullaney took home those typewriters, and the typewriter in London and others like them, because it had begun to dawn on him that he might soon be one of the only people alive who knew what these machines were, who really understood their stories. He might be the last thing standing between these machines and oblivion.

The MingKwai [sometimes written as Ming Kwai or Mingkwai] is legendary among the handful of people who know about Chinese typewriters.

It was invented by Lin Yutang [1895-1976; see bio below], a Chinese linguist and public intellectual who had begun to worry in the 1930s that without some way to convert ink-brush characters into easily reproduced text, China would be left behind technologically — perhaps destroyed at the hands of foreign powers.

Attempts to create typing machines usually stumbled over the problem of cramming a galaxy of characters into a single machine.

Dr. Lin’s solution was an ingenious system housed in what looked like a large Western typewriter. But when you tapped the keys, something remarkable happened.

Any two keystrokes, representing pieces of characters, moved gears within the machine. In a central window, which Dr. Lin called the Magic Eye, up to eight different characters containing those pieces then appeared, and the typist could select the right one.

Dr. Lin had made it possible to type tens of thousands of characters using 72 keys. It was almost as if, Dr. Mullaney said, Dr. Lin had invented a keyboard with a single key capable of typing the entire Roman alphabet.

He named his machine MingKwai, which roughly translates to “clear and fast.”

Dr. Lin, who was then living with his wife and children on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, hired a New York machinist firm to make a prototype, at enormous cost to himself. He presented that prototype in a demonstration to executives from Remington, the typewriter manufacturer.

It was a failure. The machine malfunctioned at a crucial moment.

Dr. Lin went bankrupt and the prototype was sold to Mergenthaler Linotype, a printing company in Brooklyn.

And that, as far as Dr. Mullaney had been able to find out, was the machine’s last known location. When Mergenthaler Linotype moved offices sometime in the 1950s, the machine disappeared.

In his 2017 book, “The Chinese Typewriter,” Dr. Mullaney wrote that he believed the MingKwai had most likely ended up on a scrapheap. The right person hadn’t been there to save it, to tell its story.

This past January, Jennifer and Nelson Felix were in their home in Massapequa, N.Y., going through boxes that had been in storage since Ms. Felix’s father died in Arizona five years before. They were looking at a wooden crate sitting among the cardboard boxes. “What’s this?” Ms. Felix asked her husband.

He’d had a peek in the crate back in Arizona. Oh, he said, it’s that typewriter.

She opened it, and realized it was not a typical typewriter. The symbols on the keys looked like Chinese. Mr. Felix, who often sold and bought items on Facebook, quickly found a group called “What’s My Typewriter Worth?” and posted some photos.

Then they set it aside and moved on to other things. An hour later, Mr. Felix checked on his post.

There were hundreds of comments, many written in Chinese. People kept tagging someone named Tom.

The couple looked at each other. “Who’s Tom?”

Dr. Mullaney was in Chicago to give a talk when his phone started going off — ping, ping, ping.

The small community of people he’d encountered in his long quest were sending up digital flares, urgently trying to get his attention.

As soon as he saw the post, he knew exactly what he was looking at. It was the MingKwai.

But he didn’t rejoice. He didn’t sigh with relief. He was gripped with fear.

What if they didn’t know what they had and sold it before he could get to it?

Someone could buy it with a click on eBay. They could make it into a coffee table. Take it apart and make steampunk earrings. It would be gone, just like that.

He posted a comment on Facebook, asking the poster to contact him right away. After a few frantic hours, he got a reply, and the next day he and the Felixes were on the phone.

He told them the MingKwai’s story. He said that while it was up to them what they did with it, he hoped they would consider selling it to a museum. He was afraid that if it were sold at auction, it would disappear, a trophy hidden in the vacation home of an oil tycoon.

Ms. Felix was bewildered by what was happening. It was just a typewriter in a basement.

But Dr. Mullaney had made an impression. “It was lost for half a century,” she said. “We didn’t want it to get lost again.”

“To me it’s just a typewriter,” she continued. “But to other people it’s history; it’s a story, a life, a treasure.”

Dr. Mullaney figured out that Ms. Felix’s grandfather, Douglas Arthur Jung, had been a machinist at Mergenthaler Linotype. It’s likely that when the company moved offices, he took the machine home.

Then it was passed down to Ms. Felix’s father, who, for more than a decade, had kept the MingKwai with him.

“That’s what my dad decided to keep and bring across the country when they moved,” Ms. Felix said.

Why, of all he had inherited from his own father, did he hang on to this typewriter? She doesn’t know. But she feels it must have been a conscious choice: The MingKwai would not have been packed by accident. It weighs more than 50 pounds.

In April, the couple made their decision. They sold the machine for an undisclosed amount to the Stanford University Libraries, which acquired it with the help of a private donor.

This spring, the MingKwai made its way back across the country. When it was lifted out of the crate onto the floor at a Stanford warehouse, Dr. Mullaney lay down to look at it.

The history professor could see that it was full of intricate machinery, far more delicate than any other typewriter he’d seen, and he began to imagine how engineers might help him understand it — perhaps revealing what was going on in Dr. Lin’s mind in 1947 when he invented a machine he thought could rescue China. Perhaps they could even build a new one.

Lying on his stomach, Dr. Mullaney began to wonder.

[Veronique Greenwood is a freelance science writer and editor.  She’s written for the New York Times, The Atlantic, National Geographic, Pacific Standard, Time, Discover, Aeon, Popular Science, Scientific American, and many others. She writes a column about food and science for BBC Future, a website and section of the British Broadcasting Corporation that delves into a wide range of subjects, including health, technology, climate change, social trends, and psychology.

[Wikipedia has a page on the “Chinese typewriter” which includes a section on the MingKwai.  Thomas Mullaney has several books and articles on the subject of Chinese typewriters and related devices:, The Chinese Typewriter: A History (MIT Press, 2017); "90,000 Characters on 1 Keyboard," Foreign Policy (July 2018); "Meet the mystery woman who mastered IBM's 5,400-character Chinese typewriter," Fast Company (17 May 2021); The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age (MIT Press, 2024).

[At the end of the article on the Chinese typewriter, Wikipedia reports:

The Chinese typewriter was ultimately eclipsed and made redundant with the introduction of computerized word processing, pioneered by engineer and dissident Wan Runnan and his partners when they formed the Stone Emerging Industries Company in 1984 in Zhongguancun, China's "Silicon Valley".  The last Chinese typewriters were completed around 1991.]

*  *  *  *
A SHORT BIOGRAPHY OF LIN YUTANG 

[This bio-sketch is from the website Academic, drawn from the Wikipedia entry for Lin Yutang.]

Lin Yutang (October 10, 1895 – March 26, 1976) was a Chinese writer and inventor. His informal but polished style in both Chinese and English made him one of the most influential writers of his generation, and his compilations and translations of classic Chinese texts into English were bestsellers in the West.

Lin was born in the town of Banzi in Zhangzhou Fujian province in southeastern China. This mountainous region made a deep impression on his consciousness, and thereafter he would constantly consider himself a child of the mountains (in one of his books he commented that his idea of hell was a city apartment). His father was a Christian minister. His journey of faith from Christianity to Taoism and Buddhism, and back to Christianity in his later life was recorded in his book “From Pagan to Christian” (1959).

Lin studied for his bachelor’s degree at Saint John’s University in Shanghai, then received a half-scholarship to continue study for a doctoral degree at Harvard University. He later wrote that in the Widener Library he first found himself and first came alive, but he never saw a Harvard-Yale game. He left Harvard early however, moving to France and eventually to Germany, where he completed his requirements for a doctoral degree (in Chinese) at the University of Leipzig. From 1923 to 1926 he taught English literature at Peking University. On his return to the United States in 1931, he was briefly detained for inspection at Ellis Island.

Dr. Lin was very active in the popularization of classical Chinese literature in the West, as well as the general Chinese attitude towards life. He worked to formulate Gwoyeu Romatzyh a new method of romanizing the Chinese language, and created an indexing system for Chinese characters.

He was interested in mechanics. Since Chinese is a character-based rather than an alphabet-based language, with many thousands of separate characters, it has always been difficult to employ modern printing technologies. For many years it was doubted that a Chinese typewriter could be invented. Lin, however, worked on this problem for decades and eventually came up with a workable typewriter -- brought to market in the middle of the war with Japan [1937-45].

He also invented and patented several lesser inventions such as a toothbrush with toothpaste dispensing.

After 1928 he lived mainly in the United States, where his translations of Chinese texts remained popular for many years. At the behest of Pearl Buck [1892-1973; humanitarian and Nobel Prize-winning writer], he wrote “My Country and My People” (吾國与吾民，吾国与吾民) (1935) and “The Importance of Living” (生活的藝術，生活的艺术) (1937), written in English in a charming and witty style, which became bestsellers. Others include “Between Tears and Laughter” (啼笑皆非) (1943), “The Importance of Understanding” (1960, a book of translated Chinese literary passages and short pieces), “The Chinese Theory of Art” (1967), and the novels “Moment in Peking” (京華煙雲，京华烟云) (1939) and “The Vermillion Gate” (朱門，朱门) (1953), Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage (當代漢英辭典，当代汉英词典) (1973).

His many works represent an attempt to bridge the cultural gap between the East and the West. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times in the 1970s.

His wife, Lin Tsui-feng [1936-95] was a cookbook author whose authentic recipes did a great deal to popularize the art of Chinese cookery in America. Dr. Lin wrote an introduction to one of her and their daughter Lin Hsiang Ju’s (林相如[; b. 1930]) collections of Chinese recipes. His second daughter, Lin Tai-Yi (林太乙[; 1926-2003]) was the general editor of Chinese Readers’ Digest from 1965 until her retirement in 1988.

Dr. Lin [died in British Hong Kong at the age of 80, and] was buried at his home in Yangmingshan, Taipei, Taiwan. His home has been turned into a museum, which is operated by Taipei-based Soochow University. The town of Lin’s birth, Banzi, has also preserved the original Lin home and turned it into a museum.

[The Chinese inserts embedded in this post are in the original text.  I assume they’re translations of the titles of Lin’s books and transcriptions of the Chinese names that have been romanized here.  I neither read nor speak Chinese, so I can’t attest to the accuracy of the translations/transcriptions, but rather than strip them all out, I have chosen to leave them for any reader who does read Chinese.]