J'adore vintage typewriters. I was asked the other day if I had any photographs of mine. Since my photos are in any number of boxes, or on mysterious thumb-drives, I took some fresh ones. Here are a couple from my collection. The first one is an Hermes 3000, introduced in 1958, made by by Paillard-Bolex in Yverdon, Switzerland.
"William Kotzwinkle's 1972 novel was named Hermes 3000 after the machine. During his acceptance speech for "Best Screenplay (Brokeback Mountain)" at the 2006 Golden Globes, author Larry McMurtry specifically mentioned his Hermes 3000, stating: "Most heartfelt, I thank my typewriter. My typewriter is a Hermes 3000, surely one of the noblest instruments of European genius. It has kept me for thirty years out of the dry embrace of the computer".
"Other notable users of the machine are Sam Shepard, Eugène Ionesco and Stephen Fry. Beat writer Jack Kerouac" [[a relative of mine, on the French Canadian side]] "wrote his final novel, Vanity of Duluoz on the Hermes 3000 in 1966. In a March 2018 auction at Bonham's in London, the Hermes 3000 on which Sylvia Plath had typed her only novel -- The Bell Jar -- in 1962 was sold for £26,000. In 2013, in an appearance on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, actor Tom Hanks named the Hermes 3000 as the luxury item he would choose to take with him." source Wikipedia
The Guardian later noted that the Bonhams' sale placed the value of Plath's Hermes "comfortably above Jack Kerouac’s, also a green Hermes, which pulled in $22,500(£16,000), and John Updike’s $4,375 (£3,110)".
Next is an Olivetti-Underwood Lettera 32, designed by Marcello Nizzoli in 1963.
"It’s been the machine chosen by countless writers throughout the century, including some of the most iconic creators of our times; Thomas Pynchon, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen."
“Cormac McCarthy used an Olivetti Lettera 32 to write nearly all of his fiction, screenplays, and correspondence, totaling by his estimate more than 5 million words. The Lettera 32 that he purchased in 1963 was auctioned at Christie's on December 4, 2009, to an unidentified American collector for $254,500, more than 10 times its high estimate of $20,000.” source article A Timeless Work of Art (that also writes).
