Let’s try a little experiment here: I’m going to start off a sentence, then keep adding words to it, and see how you react to those words as we go. Ready? Okay.

‘Tom Hanks.’

Everyone loves Tom Hanks, right? Fine actor, seemingly lovely guy, someone who I bet engenders warm feelings of affection in you just from reading his name. With me so far? Alright, let’s keep going.

‘Tom Hanks is writing a book of short stories.’

That might be good, right? I mean, Hanks might have had mixed success with his screenwriting work but he seems like a pretty smart, sensitive guy, and literate too, and he just had a story printed in The New Yorker, so that has to count for something.

‘Tom Hanks is writing a book of short stories about typewriters.’

That’s… what?

You may remember, if you keep up with the peccadilloes of Hollywood’s best and brightest, that Hanks is an avid collector of typewriters. In fact, it was the promise of a vintage typewriter that lured Hanks onto the Nerdist podcast a couple of years back, an arrangement to which Hanks consented in typically charming fashion. His publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, describes the book as ‘a collection of stories loosely connected to photographs of typewriters from Hanks’ personal collection.’ So it’s not even a book of short stories about typewriters, it’s a book of short stories about photos of typewriters?

Hanks, ever the gent, steps in to clarify: ‘I’ve been collecting typewriters for no particular reason since 1978 – both manual and portable machines dating from the thirties to the nineties. The stories are not about the typewriters themselves, but rather, the stories are something that might have been written on one of them.’

Okay, that makes slightly more sense, even if it seems a precariously precious conceit on which to hang a debut literary endeavour. As yet the book has no title or publication date, but c’mon – Tom Hanks is writing a book, there is no way you won’t hear about this thing when it hits shelves.