QUORA question: “What’s a collectible typewriter I should purchase on sight?”

“What is a collectible typewriter that I should purchase on sight?”

Collectible.

If you mean, a typewriter that I can easily sell off for more than I paid for it and which will probably increase in value in the coming years:

Hermes 3000:

The bulbous Swiss typewriter with the minty green keys guarded by Mingus is a 1965 Hermes 3000, an iconic typewriter and favoured by respected writers and collectors like Tom Hanks, Sam Shepard and Larry McMurtry (who thanked his H3K in his Oscar speech for ‘keeping me out of the cold clutches of the computer’). Gorgeous design, precision (Swiss!) mechanics, and loaded with innovative features, this machine is worth buying blind if you can get it for less than 100$. They sell nowadays for anywhere between 200–700$.

Seidel & Naumann Erika M:

This is part of my S&N Erika collection. While the S on the far right is my preferred typer, the M (for ‘Master Class’) on the left is considered the pinnacle of the already astounding Seidel & Naumann range of Erika portables. It has pretty much any feature you might want from a modern machine — keyset margins, keyset tabulator stops – and it has an interesting shift mechanism — in most machines either the whole carriage shifts up (called ‘carriage shift’) or the basket segment with the typebars goes down into the machine (‘basket/segment shift’), but with the Erika M, the carriage remains on the machine, only the paper-carrying platen part is lifted (‘partial/skeleton shift’). Apart from all the features, the machine types like a dream and is aesthetically gorgeous. If you can get one for less than 100$, snap it up, because a clean refurbished M goes for 250–600$.

Groma Kolibri:

This East German Cold War typewriter became famous when featured in the 2006 German movie The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen), where a dissident author writes on an unregistered Kolibri that’s flat enough to be hidden under the floorboards of his apartment.

You can see it in this trailer of the movie, when it’s delivered under a birthday cake and later typed on and hidden under the threshold.

This is my main ‘in transit’ typewriter, for when I write outside my home. Like here, @ Vapiano Oosterdokseiland while sharing a pizza with my son.

It’s super-flat and fits in most backpacks, plus it’s a snappy typer. These machines are quite rare and will fetch prices around 350–750$. I bought mine for sixty euro and I’m not going to part with it, even though I had offers far exceeding what I paid for mine.

Olivetti Valentine:

This is the only collectible that I don’t have, nor want. Iconic design typewriter that has become incredibly popular among collectors, but I typed on one and it felt like a toy, not an actual typewriter. And since I’m only interested in machines I can actually type on, I’m not really interested in owning one.

Prices fluctuate, but Valentines can fetch from 200–600$, depending on their condition.

Edited May 12th, 2019:

And here I wrote about the Olivetti Valentine: “This is the only collectible that I don’t have, nor want. […] I’m not really interested in owning one.”
And today, while street-writing @ Nieuwmarkt, an elderly lady complimented me on my 1938 Seidel & Naumann Erika S, and told me she had a red typewriter that had a red box it slipped into. She was looking to sell it only to someone who really appreciated manual typewriters, would I be interested? So, that’s how i became the owner of a Valentine for forty euro.

Below are some typewriters that I think should become collectibles, because they are so, so fine:

Erika 10:

Not to be confused with the S&N Erika’s above, the 10 is a post-war German typewriter after Seidel & Naumann had been bankrupted after WWII. Made in the early 60, it is an astoundingly smooth typewriter with beautiful lines.

Swissa Junior:

Until jousted from the prime position by the Groma Kolibri, this Swissa Junior was my favourite ‘in transit’ typewriter. It’s Swiss, like the Hermes, and it types even better than the Kolibri, except that it’s bulkier and won’t fit in a daypack backpack. The type is incredibly straight, like a laser printer, and distinctive. It’s also my son’s favourite machine to write on:

If you want to know more about the Swissa Junior (and some of my other typewriters), you can find my blog article here. 

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