Typing in GPG key manually

Over a decade ago I exported my public and private keys (GnuPG v1.4.6), printed them, laminated them and put them in my safety deposit box. I did this under the theory that I could manually recovery them (especially the private key) if necessary. It is now necessary. I have typed in the key using Emacs (so ASCII I assume) into a file I named "private-key.txt", but gpg won't accept it. I get this message:

gpg: CRC error; A21451 - CC06B1
gpg: read_block: read error: Invalid keyring
gpg: import from 'private-key.txt' failed: Invalid keyring
gpg: Total number processed: 0

My typed version looks the same as the laminated version. That said, these were exported in the "asc armor" format ... some kind of base64 if I recall ... so is my typed in file messed because of line returns, etc. Any advice on how to do this? My current self cannot recall all the details of 15 years ago: maybe this isn't possible.

gpg: CRC error; A21451 - CC06B1

This means the Cyclic Redundancy Check failed to match the value given in the transcribed text.

The error shows the mismatched CRC values (in hexadecimal) where the first one, A21451, is the value GnuPG calculated from your transcribed base64 text and the second one, CC06B1, is the value that was given on the last line of your base64 text (=zAax).

This means there are transcription errors somewhere in your text. Look over it again very carefully - especially lookalike font glyphs such as the number 0 and uppercase O (0O), the number 1, lowercase l, and uppercase I (1lI).

While gpg does allow an option --ignore-crc-error, I can practically guarantee it will just throw a different error because the data is malformed.

Bottom line: there is at least one transcription error you need to correct before the key can be imported.