Typewriter fan Steve Soboroff loves the click-clack of carriages When Steve Soboroff gets one of them in his sights, he goes into what he calls "emergency overdrive." He has been known to bug estate lawyers, hoping to move in and make an acquisition before someone else has the same idea. Sometimes, his enthusiasm gets the better of him. That's what happened when Walter Cronkite died in 2009 and Soboroff got a little too pushy too soon. "Let the body cool off," huffed a lawyer for the famed TV anchor before hanging up. That one got away, but Soboroff, a Los Angeles real estate investor and civic leader, has bagged 15 others. The object of his fascination? Typewriters. There's the 1932 Royal Model P that Ernest Hemingway used to write letters during his time in Cuba. There's a tiny Imperial Good Companion Model T on which John Lennon banged out song lyrics years before the Beatles invaded America. There's the 1936 Corona Junior on which budding playwright Tennessee Williams composed his antiwar farce "Me, Vashya" for a student competition at Washington University in St. Louis. He lost! "I love people who are the best at what they do," Soboroff said. The idea that geniuses sat there and accomplished what they accomplished on these typewriters ... it gives me chills. In an era of iPads and text-spouting telephones, the ancient, clunky typewriter has become an improbable object of desire. Analog aficionados of all ages are collecting, admiring, fussing over and rhapsodizing about the noisy instruments. Actor Tom Hanks owns an assortment of more than 200 old machines. An unidentified American collector paid $254,500 in 2009 for the weathered Olivetti manual owned by novelist Cormac McCarthy. At a recent "type-in," millennials, Gen Xers and baby boomers gathered in a Phoenix coffeehouse to compose snippets of poetry and prose on Royals and Remingtons. At similar events throughout the country, participants swap or sell machines. Typewriter fans around the world chat in online forums. "It's an interesting paradox that, in this century, a typewriter has become something very personal," said Richard Polt, a philosophy professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati who collects typewriters and edits ETCetera, a quarterly magazine about historic writing machines. "The durability means you can develop a personal connection to your typewriter more than you can to, say, your laptop," he said. It can be with you your whole life. Soboroff covets typewriters once owned by famous, or infamous, people. His collection includes two Montgomery Ward Signature Portables. One belonged to Jack Kevorkian, the advocate for assisted suicide known to many as "Dr. Death." The other was found in the remote Montana cabin of Theodore Kaczynski, a.k.a. the Unabomber. Soboroff, 63, who lives in Pacific Palisades, has been a prominent figure in L.A. business and politics. He was chief executive of Playa Vista, helping to steer the controversial development in its early stages. An advisor to former Mayor Richard Riordan, he served as president of the L.A. Recreation and Parks Commission and ran unsuccessfully for mayor in 2001.