Trends: Collecting Vintage Typewriters
Vintage is fashionable and one of the newer trends is collecting vintage typewriters. How do you know the typewriter you found at the flea market is a collectible or not?
Collectible typewriters are machines that can easily sell for more than you paid for it and which will probably increase in value in the coming years.
If you want to mainly display them, look for oddly shaped typewriters like the Hammond and/or typewriters with special typefaces, like cursive or Vogue. A popular vintage collectible typewriter in this class that is also reasonably affordable is the Corona 3 Folding Typewriter.
If you just want to impress visitors with a cool machine, look for a Remington Noiseless, which has awesome praying mantis-like mechanics to get typeslugs to paper.
Personally, I mainly buy typewriters to type on them, so this article focuses on typewriters that are collectible and practical. And because I live in the Netherlands, these typewriters are from European factories.
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, Larry McMurtry (who thanked his H3K in his Oscar speech for ‘keeping me out of the cold clutches of the computer’), and Sylvia Plath, wrote The Bell Jar on a Hermes 3000.
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$. These first version 3000s sell nowadays for anywhere between 200–700$.
Not all Hermes 3000 are valuable. I own several Hermes 3000 machines, which came in three versions. The first version is the model above, with the bulbous spool cover, viewed ostensibly as the most aesthetically pleasing and therefore the most expensive; the second version is more square, but still full-metal, and less expensive than the first version; and the third version is square with a plastic cover, which fetches a much lower price than the earlier versions, even though it’s a very good typewriter.
Seidel & Naumann Erika M:
Seidel & Naumann were famous for their excellent sewing machines when they branched out into typewriters. Their portable Erika typewriters, named after Naumann’s niece, are engineering marvels. Their mechanics are so exquisite that these typewriters are sought after both by collectors and writers.
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.
The Erika M 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 Groma Kolibri is my main ‘in transit’ typewriter, for when I write outside my home. Like here at Vapiano Oosterdokseiland while sharing a pizza with my son.
Kolibri typewriters are super-flat and fit in most backpacks, plus they are snappy typers. I also acquired a burgundy Kolibri:
and this two-tone Kolibri Luxus:
These machines are quite rare — a mere 160,000 made between 1955–1962 — and will fetch prices around 350–750$, especially the QWERTY versions.
I bought my Kolibris for 60–100 euro and I’m not going to part with them, even though I had offers far exceeding what I paid for mine.
Olivetti Valentine:
This is the only collectible that I didn’t have nor wanted. The Olivetti Valentine is an iconic design typewriter that has become incredibly popular among collectors, but I typed on one and it felt like a toy, not an actual typewriter. And since I’m mainly interested in machines I can actually type on and their second-hand prices are way above my budget, I was not really interested in owning one.
Prices fluctuate, but Valentines can fetch from 200–600$, depending on their condition.
I had written this article and about a month later, I owned an Olivetti Valentine, finding its way to me even without me looking for a Valentine.
While street-writing poetry at Amsterdam 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 her typewriter only to someone who really appreciated manual typewriters, would I be interested? So, that’s how I became the owner of a Valentine for a mere 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 mentioned earlier, the Erika 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. Most of them are available in army green, but there are also more elegant ones around, like the stunning black Erika 10 above.
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.
