Becca White, middle, of White River Junction, Vt., reacts to the news that Donald and and Wanda Nalette are to be selling their South Main Street building in downtown White River Junction to Northern Stage at the end of July. Wanda Nalette, who owns Twin State Typewriter, will be closing the business and joining her husband in retirement. (Valley News - Geoff Hansen) Copyright Valley News. May not be reprinted or used online without permission. Send requests to permission@vnews.com.
Becca White, middle, of White River Junction, Vt., reacts to the news that Donald and and Wanda Nalette are to be selling their South Main Street building in downtown White River Junction to Northern Stage at the end of July. Wanda Nalette, who owns Twin State Typewriter, will be closing the business and joining her husband in retirement. (Valley News - Geoff Hansen) Copyright Valley News. May not be reprinted or used online without permission. Send requests to permission@vnews.com. Credit: Geoff Hansen

White River Junction — The owners of Twin State Typewriter, the typewriter repair and office supply store that has been in business for five decades, are selling the building to Northern Stage and closing the store, owner Wanda Nalette told the Valley News today. 

They expect the sale of the building at 93 South Main Street to close at the end of July. Nalette, 68, and her husband Donald Nalette, 74, will operate the business until that time, she said. 

Nalette said Northern Stage has expressed interest in using the building for office space.

The two-story, 5,800-square-foot building, built in 1946, is assessed at $264,600, according to town records. It includes five apartments on the second floor. 

Wanda Nalette said she went to work at Twin State Typewriter in 1988 as a bookkeeper for the previous owners, Dick and Marine Lawrence. Twelve years later, in 2000, she and her husband bought the business and building from the Lawrences.

And Wanda Nalette said she pretty much runs the business just like a business would have been run in the era of manual typewriters and IBM Selectrics: She still does her bookkeeping in hand-written ledgers, writes sales receipts out in long hand, and calls in her office supply orders over the phone to a distributor in Boston.

Indeed, Nalette said she is not troubled by the absence of modern technology, both in the service her store offers and in the way she runs the business itself.

“We do nothing on the computer,” she said. (She admits to playing bingo on her iPad at night during “relaxation time.”)

Although the world long left typewriters behind, Nalette saidit’s a myth that they have been abandoned altogether and she can see as many as five to seven typewriters per week at the store, where her service technician, Jeff Wells, of Claremont, still comes in one day a week work on repairing them.

Nalette says there is even a cool factor now with typewriters, similar to the comeback of vinyl records. 

“Typewriters have never died,” she says. “Manuals are even bigger now than before.”

But after 26 years as a legal secretary and another 30 years running an office supply store and typewriter repair business, Nalette says she and her husband are ready to stop hitting the keys.

Northern Stage first approached them three years ago about buying their building, and the couple decided the time had finally come to take the arts organization up on their offer.

“We got in touch with them when we thought we were ready,” Wanda Nalette said. “We were pushing it.”

Posted Thursday at 3:55 p.m. Updated at 5:15 p.m. Find a full report in the SUNDAY VALLEY NEWS. 

John Lippman is a staff reporter at the Valley News. He can be reached at 603-727-3219 or email at jlippman@vnews.com.