Tom Hanks, the actor, and Steve Soboroff, the president of the LA police commission, are both collectors of typewriters. After they met sometime recently, Soboroff told Hanks that his collection mostly includes typewriters that were used by news or historical figures who had been on the cover of Time magazine. Well, Hanks apparently said, he's made it into that club twice. So he sent over a typewriter and now Soboroff has 23 writing machines in his collection — among them typewriters owned by Ray Bradbury, Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, George Bernard Shaw, John Lennon and others.

For Soboroff, the Hanks typewriter is the first acquisition where the provenance was known to him first-hand. "Doesn't get any better than that," he says. He tells me it will join his others on tour to continue raising funds for journalism scholarships through the Jim Murray Memorial Foundation.

* July 16: Adding photo and link to a column in the Guardian that mentions LA Observed.