Typecast: 1969 Olivetti Valentine

Posted: May 14, 2019 | Author: | Filed under: Amsterdam, Tourism, Typecast, Typewriters, Writing | Tags: , , , , , , , | 8 Comments
Street writing at Nieuwmarkt Amsterdam on my 1938 Seidel & Naumann Erika S, with the Olivetti Valentine in its case next to my bench.
Overview of the Olivetti Valentine as I’m wrting the typecast below.
This machine was Made in Italy. That seems quite obvious for an Italian brand, but from my research it seems that only the first few Valentines were made in Italy. Most of them are from either Spain or Mexico.
The earlier models had the small orange bolt to keep the black metal spools tight against the machine. Later models have a wider orange bolt, covering most of the spool.
The very odd serial number, 3000-08.
Edited to add, see the close up below, the hyphen is acutally a 4
The keyboard, with the missing key top for the margin release. The empty slots to the left and the right are for the tabulator set/clear and the orange tab button, both absent on my machine.
The iconic case with the black rubber cross tabs, still fully intact.

Edited to add:

I wondered about the missing tabulator settings and key, but I found this link about a first edition Valentine, also Made in Italy and also missing the tabulator set/clear and key.

And the mystery about the serial number is solved — Stephen Green from the Facebook Olivetti Valentine group suggested that the hyphen might actually be a 4, so I cleaned it up some more and took another picture and, yes, the number is 3000408. Since the first Valentine was the 3000001, this is one of the first Valentines.