Features

It’s windy and cold at the Rochester Public Market, and the black box that houses Karl Smith’s 1926 Underwood typewriter keeps falling to the pavement. As Smith picks it up, he spots a couple walking past crates of apples, pumpkins, and gourds. They’re among the few customers shopping on this blustery Tuesday morning.

“Would you like a story?” Smith asks with a smile. “Just 10 cents a story.”

The couple looks unsure.

“Or,” he says, “I’ll do it for free.”

Sitting on a folding chair, tapping away on his 90-year-old typewriter, Smith creates stories on demand, for a mere dime. Since September 2013, the 27-year-old has set up shop at the market, the Rochester Museum and Science Center, the Strong Museum of Play, a cocktail lounge in Rochester, and even in Manhattan this past summer while serving as an American Association for the Advancement of Science mass media fellow at Scientific American magazine .

“I can’t describe what I feel when I’m writing,” Smith says. “It does something to me. It’s like I was put here to do this. I want to make the world a stranger, more whimsical place.”

A PhD candidate in biophysics, Smith studies glass filters 10,000 times thinner than a human hair as part of the Nanomembranes Research Group. It’s because of his rigorous academic schedule that he began the 10-cent project. “I wanted something to keep me sane at the end of the day when I left the lab,” he says.

The Pittsburgh native has written more than 900 stories, each roughly 500 words, on half sheets of paper. Strangers give him a prompt, and he pecks away. He’s crafted stories about lost loves, lost dogs, sea lions, flying princesses, and frogs who jump over the moon. Stories about babies, treehouses, aardvarks, and dancing polar bears. Stories about murder.

“It’s dizzying the stories I’ve been told,” he says. There was the woman who asked him to write about being unable to tell a man she loved him. The reason? “I’m married,” she told Smith.

He says “writer’s block is not an option.” And neither is Liquid Paper. If he makes a typo, he backspaces and types over the word with capital X’s.

Smith has long been fascinated by typewriters and began collecting them while studying physics and English at Allegheny College. He found his current one on Craigslist for $30.

“I use a typewriter because it’s impossible to ignore,” he says. “The tapping and the ring of the bell is a draw. And when I’m done, I have a one-and-only physical object.”

He catalogs each story by taking a photo of the finished product on his phone. He posts several each week at 10centstories.com and Facebook.com/10centstories, where he also lists his upcoming appearances.

Why 10 cents? “When my dad was in second grade, his brother told him that he needed to collect dimes,” Smith says. “ ‘Pennies are worthless, nickels are too heavy. Dimes have the best value-to-weight ratio,’ And my dad took it to heart. When he asked my mom to marry him, he paid for the engagement ring with dimes.”

“There really is a story for everyone,” he says. “I don’t know what my future holds, but I know I want to keep doing this. I feel it’s a calling.”

—Jim Mandelaro