The eminent writer is also an avid antique typewriter collector. Butch Dalisay talks to Howie Severino about a bygone pre-internet era when these analog machines were the tools of trade of writers and journalists. Despite the advantages of his laptop, Dr. Dalisay says there’s still a romance and even practicality about typewriters. “Wala kang distraction, you can’t surf,” he says. “It’s much more intimate... You’re disconnected from the world.”

After collecting for years, he’s still searching for one antique model typewriter that was developed specifically for Tagalog writers. He knows it exists because of a trove of 1950s love letters from prison by a Tagalog poet. That typewriter has become, in Butch’s words, his “holy grail.”