Eleven years ago, Paul Lundy was dying a slow, workingman’s death under fluorescent light.

For three decades, he had worked in facilities management — an honest trade that ground him down until, in his mid-50s, he had money, an authoritative title and a soul that was being sucked dry. He managed buildings for Seattle-area biotech firms, where people in lab coats made discoveries that saved lives. He kept the infrastructure running. He was good at it, maybe great, but facilities managers are overhead, essential but invisible. Nobody notices until something breaks.

Lundy had reached a ceiling. No college degree meant no room to grow in a world that valued credentials above experience. Retirement at 65 stretched before him like a prison sentence. The three-hour commute was killing him — a ritual that thousands endure to afford living near Seattle.

“Fun was not what you would call it anymore,” allows Lundy, a trim, neatly pleated man with a soft, welcoming face.

One Sunday morning in 2014, he opened The Seattle Times and found a feature story about Bob Montgomery, age 92, known to friends, customers and locals simply as Mr. Montgomery. The article read like an obituary for a vanishing trade — fixing typewriters — suggesting that when Mr. Montgomery went, seven decades of expertise would vanish into the digital ether.

Lundy read it once, then a second time. He had never given old typewriters much thought, but something stirred in him that he could not quite name. He showed the story to his wife, Lisa.

“I think this might be it,” he told her. The next weekend, he drove to Bremerton, a weary naval town an hour’s ferry ride away and a world apart from gleaming, digitized Seattle.

Finding Mr. Montgomery’s shop required determination. No sign marked the building; no indication that inside, five floors up, a master craftsman was keeping alive skills that predated the computer age. You took an elevator that groaned. When the doors opened, you knew immediately you were in the right place: a 1916 Royal Model 10 typewriter stood guard outside an open door, and the air smelled like oil. Once inside, you encountered a shop stacked and stuffed with typewriters — Underwoods and Coronas, Royal KMMs and Remington Portable 3s.

And there, at a workbench, sat Mr. Montgomery.

He was small, frail, bent by osteoporosis enough that “he had a right angle,” Lundy says.

But his hands moved across the typewriter before him with unconscious grace, removing screws without looking, adjusting linkages by feel alone.

“Welcome to the crazy house,” Mr. Montgomery said, his standard greeting.

Lundy had planned to stay 20 minutes. He stayed four hours. What captured him was not nostalgia. What captured him was watching Mr. Montgomery work, the old man dismantling a machine while carrying on a conversation, barely glancing at the complexity beneath his fingers.

Mr. Montgomery had grown up in Depression-era Seattle, the son of a typewriter repairman who had a shop in the city’s downtown. When he was not learning the trade, he would sneak through alleyways into grand old theaters to watch rehearsals, developing a love for performance that would shape his life nearly as much as typewriters.

Then came World War II. Drafted at 18, he expected to carry a rifle through Europe. But the Army discovered his skill and put him to work fixing typewriters at Supreme Allied Command. “Probably saved his life,” Lundy says. After the war, his family opened Bremerton Office Machine Company in 1947. For the next 70 years, Mr. Montgomery stayed within a few blocks of downtown Bremerton, always fixing typewriters, even as the world abandoned them.

What Lundy discovered over the following months was that Mr. Montgomery knew how to patiently stretch everything — even a meal. Lundy began taking him to lunch every Saturday, and their meals became meditations. Mr. Montgomery would order a BLT with avocado and make it last 90 minutes, telling stories between bites and savoring every morsel as only someone who had grown up without much could.

Other than a sister in California, he had no family. He slept in the back of his shop on an orange vinyl hide-a-bed couch. At 92, he existed almost completely outside the system.

Lundy had been a 20-minute lunch guy his entire career — eat fast, back to work, back to the grind. Now, somehow, he found himself slowing down, learning a different rhythm. Lunches became a practice in patience, a different way of being in the world.

“Mr. Montgomery was such a nice guy,” Lundy says, emphasizing “such.” The old man made him feel seen. And listened to. Like everything mattered.

After a few months, Lundy noticed typewriters stacking up faster than Mr. Montgomery could repair them. Business had surged after the article. “Can I help?” Lundy asked one day.

Mr. Montgomery said yes. Lundy started coming after his facilities job, heading straight to the shop. Mr. Montgomery set him up a bench with a typewriter and photocopied repair manual pages. He left him to figure things out.

Lundy’s hands, accustomed to managing air-conditioning systems, had to learn a new language — to feel the difference between correct tension and too loose or too tight. When he thought a repair was perfect, he brought it to Mr. Montgomery, who tested it with quick fingers dancing across the keys and, invariably, pronounced: “That is not what I would have done.”

He showed Lundy the right way. No anger. No frustration. Just quiet insistence that good enough was not good enough.

Sometimes Mr. Montgomery would partly disassemble a machine and leave it on Lundy’s bench — a test, a puzzle, a method of teaching as old as apprenticeship itself.

“It’s like Zen,” Lundy says about those hours at the bench. “There are times when it is just very relaxing to be standing in front of the machine and slowly cleaning it, tweaking the adjustment so visually things start to really line up.”

One Saturday Lundy arrived at the shop to find men with clipboards pointing at Mr. Montgomery’s equipment. They were evicting him, readying everything for the dumpster; 13 months of unpaid rent had finally caught up.

Lundy could not abide the thought of all that knowledge lost, all that skill and history being tossed away. He called his wife. “They’re kicking him out!” he said. “My whole opportunity might be lost. I think this might be what I want to do.”

“You’ve done crazier things,” she replied. “Do it.”

The building manager arrived next, spelling out the cost: 13 months at $200 per month, equaling $2,600 total. For Mr. Montgomery, who had maybe $200 in the bank, this was insurmountable. For Lundy, with his steady salary, it was doable.

“I will pay his back rent if I buy his business,” Lundy told the manager. “I’ll pay monthly rent going forward.”

Deal.

The eviction crew left. Mr. Montgomery, who had watched the chaos with the remote calm of an elder, looked at Lundy and said just one word: “OK.”

Lundy bought the business at the end of 2014. Soon, he quit his job and walked away from its stultifying steadiness, its salary and benefits. His colleagues were sure he had lost his mind. But Lundy knew he was trading security for meaning, predictability for possibility. “I was happy,” he says simply.

For the next few years, Lundy and Mr. Montgomery worked side by side in that cramped fifth-floor shop. Mr. Montgomery was still the master, but he was slowing, taking longer naps. More and more often, he would look at a typewriter that had come in for repair and turn to Lundy: “You do this one.”

The teaching continued, deeper now, Mr. Montgomery pulling tools off the pegboard — tools he had organized decades ago, many he had made himself, his initials etched in the handles. “He knew everything about every typewriter, just off the top of his head,” Lundy says. “I know maybe 10 percent of what he knew. Maybe.”

Eventually Mr. Montgomery would watch his student work and deliver his highest praise: “You are OK.”

By the time Mr. Montgomery reached his mid-90s, life was catching up with him. His friends had intervened, helping him sign up for the veteran and Social Security benefits he had never claimed and finding him subsidized housing at a nearby retirement home — his first real home in decades. But he kept coming to the shop regularly, taking the bus in the morning. The bus drivers knew Mr. Montgomery and seemed to have memorized his routine — if he was running a bit late, they would wait.

Mr. Montgomery fell and broke his hip. His health declined fast, the way it does when the very old finally succumb to gravity. One afternoon, Lundy visited him in his apartment and threw out uneaten food that had accumulated in the refrigerator. Mr. Montgomery watched for a while, then said quietly: “I’m glad you did this.”

Both men knew he was talking about Lundy continuing the tradition at the shop.

Mr. Montgomery died in September 2018, at age 96. Full military honors were held at the cemetery. Lundy gave the eulogy, his voice breaking as he tried to convey the sum of a man who had lived through the Depression and World War II, who had become an iconic community fixture and spent 70 years fixing machines the world had forgotten, who had worked until the very end because work was who he was.

What neither man could have known was that they had been standing at the edge of the typewriter’s unlikely resurrection. The revival began quietly in temples of analog nostalgia — think Brooklyn coffee shops and Portland boutique hotels. Tom Hanks became an unlikely patron saint, writing a book about typewriters, collecting hundreds of them. Then came 2020. Everyone stuck at home, screens everywhere, Zoom fatigue setting in. People craved something tangible. Typewriter sales exploded.

“The kids get it,” Lundy says. “They’re not trying to be nostalgic for something they never experienced. They’re trying to escape what they experience every day.”

Now it is a Saturday morning. October 2025. Paul Lundy hunches over an IBM Selectric, a machine nearly 50 years old, probing its guts with the delicate touch he learned from Mr. Montgomery. The machine has taken its share of falls. Oil and dust have conspired over decades to form clogging sludge. Dog hair, too — there always seems to be dog hair.

He keeps solvent flowing, working back and forth through the brown muck, treating the dirt not as debris but as the accumulated record of life lived hunched over a keyboard — the residue of a marriage proposal, a first novel, a military order, a last will and testament.

His shop is different now. Brighter, airier, on the main floor of a building that was wasting away in downtown Bremerton until Lundy cobbled together enough savings to buy and renovate it, using all those facilities management skills he thought he’d left behind. He had kept the business in that cramped fifth-floor space for six years after Mr. Montgomery’s death. Management was planning apartments, Lundy says, so he wound up here — in a 1910 building that once housed a local electric utility’s headquarters.

From the basement below his wooden floors comes the thump of bass guitar, the crash of drums. Rock bands practice during many of his working hours. The structure shakes with enthusiasm. He smiles, tugs on his workman’s apron, adjusts his black-framed glasses and does not lose attention.

He clicks a return button. The Selectric whirs. He listens.

“The problems you see — and sometimes the problems you hear,” he says, wryly, as he adjusts the operational shaft, “are not always the real problem.”

Now the stubborn machine is yielding its secrets at last. Lundy has flushed its brown sludge, freed its operational shaft, oiled the precise points where metal meets metal.

Mr. Montgomery’s soul fills this space. The 1916 Royal Model 10 that stood guard at the old shop stands here now. There’s his woolen hat. There’s a photo from Bremerton’s Bob Montgomery Day, which he bristled at because he didn’t like attention. There are his community theater awards — best director, again and again — testament to the love of performance that began in those old Seattle theaters. There sit his notes, repair manuals and tools: blue-handled wrenches, metallic probes, soft-bristled brushes. Mr. Montgomery’s bench is where Lundy works.

“It’ll always be his,” Lundy says of the shop, now called Bremerton Typewriter Company. “I am just borrowing it.”

Lundy’s wife, Lisa, works at her own bench. She started learning repair work during the pandemic and became proficient, helping with the backlog.

The phone rings steadily; customers call from as far as Florida, New York and beyond. The novelist who needs an escape from the internet’s magnetic pull; the screenwriter convinced that only keys that fight back can force out good work; the teenagers who have just found a grandmother’s pristine Corona, a grandfather’s portable Hermes.

It is Lundy who takes on apprentices now. He teaches the way Mr. Montgomery did: patiently letting mistakes happen because mistakes educate best. It’s a steady transfer of knowledge, a careful passing of the seemingly arcane, a customer-is-always-right way of doing business.

Want to come in and type a poem on a 1920s Underwood? Sure, take a seat, don’t rush.

You’re over 90? Front of the queue.

“Gotta lay out the red carpet for our elderly customers,” Lundy says. “People forget that when you were younger, you did things. You made a difference. Then you get old and society just sees an old guy waiting for the bus, and it’s almost like you don’t exist.”

This year, Paul Lundy turned 65. Had he stayed in his old job he would have retired, probably on his birthday. Instead, he is working six days a week and smiling through it: “I cannot imagine stopping.”

BYD and other Chinese carmakers are spearheading a mini-renaissance of plug-in hybrids in Europe, opening a new battleground for western rivals that are campaigning for a longer life for petrol engines.

Although environmental groups allege that, with a combustion engine and a large battery, plug-in hybrids are often more polluting than advertised, many see them as a greener interim option for people who are not ready to switch to electric vehicles.

For legacy carmakers, it is also a segment of the car sector where they can still leverage their competitive edge in traditional engines against Chinese rivals, which are far ahead in EV capabilities and affordability. 

However, the European car industry may have already lost the war before it has even begun. While car groups are lobbying hard for Brussels to loosen the region’s 2035 petrol ban to allow PHEVs and other technologies, Chinese brands are already starting to win over consumers with their plug-in vehicles that are cheaper and have longer ranges. 

“Today, the European automakers are still not on par with the Chinese on plug-in hybrid technology,” Pedro Pacheco, an analyst at Gartner, said. “If the market were to pivot towards plug-in hybrids in 2035 in Europe, it will still fall into the hands of the Chinese.”

BYD’s Seal U has become the top-selling plug-in hybrid model in the region with a 5.5 per cent market share of the category during the first nine months of 2025, according to Schmidt Automotive Research. In the UK, Chery’s Jaecoo 7 was the best-selling plug-in hybrid in August.

Until recently, European brands which promoted plug-in hybrids have been those on the premium end, including Volvo Cars, Mercedes-Benz and BMW since they are more expensive than petrol and other hybrid models.

But after European tariffs of up to 45 per cent on Chinese EV imports came into effect last year, Chinese carmakers pivoted to selling plug-in hybrids, which are not subject to similar duties.

While Prius-type full hybrids had been cheaper both to buy and run since a traditional engine runs alongside a smaller battery which is not plugged in, newer models of plug-in vehicles from Chinese makers have become more affordable because of their production scale and control over battery supply chains.

The new Omoda 7 plug-in hybrid, for example, will be cheaper than the full hybrids offered by the likes of Toyota and Honda in the UK, with a starting price of £32,000 when it goes on sale early next year. 

The model promises up to 56 miles of EV range, compared with 51 miles for Volvo XC60, the second best-selling plug-in hybrid in Europe, which has a starting price of £55,360.

“We always retain approximately 20 per cent battery power within the car so the car can always drive as an EV,” said Oliver Lowe, head of product at Omoda and Jaecoo in the UK. “That’s where we really differ from the legacy manufacturers and their implementation of plug-in hybrids.”

Chery has also continued to invest in increasing the thermal efficiency of its petrol engine. “I anticipate the disparity between the previous plug-in hybrid producers and us will continue to grow,” said Lowe.

In the first nine months of the year, sales of new plug-in hybrids in Europe and the UK increased 32 per cent from a year earlier to nearly 920,000 vehicles, compared with a 25 per cent rise in EVs to 1.8mn vehicles, according to European car industry body Acea.

During the third quarter, PHEVs accounted for 10 per cent of the regional new passenger car market with Chinese carmakers accounting for one in seven new models, according to Schmidt Automotive Research.

Sales of plug-in hybrids started to grow in Europe following a tightening of the EU’s carbon emissions regulations in 2020 but demand fell sharply just three years later as countries such as Germany and France ended subsidies for buying these vehicles.

Despite the latest sales growth, environmental campaigners question whether plug-in hybrids are truly green, with many plug-in hybrids remaining uncharged.

According to research from Transport & Environment research, actual carbon emissions of plug-in hybrids registered in 2023 were nearly five times higher than official figures.  

Even if plug-in hybrids were mostly driven in electric mode in daily short trips, Jan Dornoff, research lead at the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), said actual emissions from plug-in hybrids remained high if a few longer-distance trips on petrol were made.

In the longer term, analysts and car industry executives are divided on whether plug-in hybrid technology has a future for an industry already squeezed by the rising costs of EV and battery investments.

Many carmakers have embraced plug-in hybrids to help comply with the EU’s emissions targets. But with the tightening of these rules from this year to better reflect the actual emissions levels, analysts say there will be less incentive for carmakers to sell the vehicles. The surge in sales this year was also helped by the rush by auto groups to push older models before these rule changes.

In Europe, much will also depend on whether plug-in hybrids will be allowed after 2035 — a decision which Brussels is expected to reveal when it announces a package of automotive policies on December 10. While Germany and the car industry have lobbied hard for their inclusion, France and Spain remain opposed. 

“It’s much more electric with a backup engine, which is used now and then,” said Volvo Cars chief executive Håkan Samuelsson. “I think it could be a good compromise maybe for legislators as well.”

While Chinese carmakers may shift back to EVs once BYD and others begin local production in Europe, their executives stress that PHEVs are here to stay as long as there is consumer demand.

In China, sales of plug-in hybrids increased from about 240,000 in 2020 to 4.9mn last year, while their share in the new passenger-car market more than tripled to 19.5 per cent in just two years, according to the ICCT. The average electric range of PHEVs in China was 116km last year compared with 78km in Europe and 70km in the US.

But even in the world’s largest car market, there are signs of slowdown as the cost of EVs has come down and battery ranges have become longer. In the first half of this year, the PHEV share of its new electric passenger car sales fell to 38 per cent from 41 per cent year-on-year, marking the first decline in recent years, according to ICCT.

Plug-in hybrids, as a result of their complex structure, were likely to become more expensive than electric vehicles as battery costs fall, said ICCT’s Dornoff.

“I don’t really feel that there is going to be demand for plug-in hybrids at some point,” he added.

Additional reporting by Andrew Bounds and Alice Hancock in Brussels

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has signed a bill to compel the Justice Department to make public its case files on the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a potentially far-reaching development in a yearslong push by survivors of Epstein’s abuse for a public reckoning.

Both the House and Senate passed the bill this week with overwhelming margins after Trump reversed course on his monthslong opposition to the bill and indicated he would sign it. Now that the bill has been signed by the president, there’s a 30-day countdown for the Justice Department to produce what’s commonly known as the Epstein files.

“This bill is a command for the president to be fully transparent, to come fully clean, and to provide full honesty to the American people,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said Wednesday.

Schumer added that Democrats were ready to push back if they perceive that the president is doing anything but adhering to “full transparency.”

In a social media post Wednesday as he announced he had signed the bill, Trump wrote, “Democrats have used the ‘Epstein’ issue, which affects them far more than the Republican Party, in order to try and distract from our AMAZING Victories.”

The swift, bipartisan work in Congress this week was a response to the growing public demand that the Epstein files be released, especially as attention focuses on his connections to global leaders including Trump, former President Bill Clinton, Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, who has already been stripped of his royal title as Prince Andrew over the matter, and many others.

There is plenty of public anticipation about what more the files could reveal. Yet the bill will most likely trigger a rarely seen baring of a sprawling federal investigation, also creating the potential for unintended consequences.

What does the bill do?

The bill compels Attorney General Pam Bondi to release essentially everything the Justice Department has collected over multiple federal investigations into Epstein, as well as his longtime confidante and girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for luring teenage girls for the disgraced financier. Those records total around 100,000 pages, according to a federal judge who has reviewed the case.

It will also compel the Justice Department to produce all its internal communications on Epstein and his associates and his 2019 death in a Manhattan jail cell as he awaited charges for sexually abusing and trafficking dozens of teenage girls.

The legislation, however, exempts some parts of the case files. The bill’s authors made sure to include that the Justice Department could withhold personally identifiable information of victims, child sexual abuse materials and information deemed by the administration to be classified for national defense or foreign policy.

“We will continue to follow the law with maximum transparency while protecting victims,” Bondi told a news conference Wednesday when asked about releasing the files.

The bill also allows the Justice Department to withhold information that would jeopardize active investigations or prosecutions. That’s created some worry among the bill’s proponents that the department would open active investigations into people named in the Epstein files in order to shield that material from public view.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a longtime Trump loyalist who has had a prominent split with Trump over the bill, said Tuesday that she saw the administration’s compliance with the bill as its “real test.”

“Will the Department of Justice release the files, or will it all remain tied up in investigations?” she asked.

In July, the FBI said in a memo regarding the Epstein investigation that, “we did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.” But Bondi last week complied with Trump’s demands and ordered a federal prosecutor to investigate Epstein’s ties to the president’s political foes, including Clinton.

Still, Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican who sponsored the bill, said “there’s no way they can have enough investigations to cover” all of the people he believes are implicated in Epstein’s abuse.

“And if they do, then good,” he added.

The bill also requires the Justice Department to produce reports on what materials it withheld, as well as redactions made, within 15 days of the release of the files. It stipulates that officials can’t withhold or redact anything “on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.”

Who could be named?

There’s a widely held expectation that many people could be named in case files for investigations that spanned over a decade — and some concern that just because someone is named, that person would be assumed guilty or complicit.

Epstein was a luminary who kept company with heads of state, influential political figures, academics and billionaires. The release of his emails and messages by a House Oversight Committee investigation last week has already shown his connections with — and private conversations about — Trump and many other high-powered figures.

Yet federal prosecutors follow carefully constructed guidelines about what information they produce publicly and at trial, both to protect victims and to uphold the fairness of the legal system. House Speaker Mike Johnson raised objections to the bill on those grounds this week, arguing that it could reveal unwanted information on victims as well as others who were in contact with investigators.

Still, Johnson did not actually try to make changes to the bill and voted for it on the House floor.

For the bill’s proponents, a public reckoning over the investigation is precisely the point. Some of the survivors of trafficking from Epstein and Maxwell have sought ways to name people they accuse of being complicit or involved, but fear they will face lawsuits from the men they accuse.

Massie said that he wants the FBI to release the reports from its interviews with the victims.

Those reports typically contain unvetted information, but Massie said he is determined to name those who are accused. He and Greene have offered to read the names of those accused on the House floor, which would shield their speech from legal consequences. “We need names,” Massie said.