A quiet workshop, a printed record

The Ribbon & Platen began in 2019 as a set of notes taped inside the lids of typewriter cases in a small workshop in Porto. The notes were meant only for the machines' owners, who kept losing them. The website was the response — a place where a restorer's log could live alongside a collector's questions and a historian's essay, and where none of them would ever go missing again.

What we cover

We publish original writing on the collection, restoration, history, and culture of mechanical typewriters made between roughly 1870 and 1985. Our beat is not electric calculators, not word processors, and not any machine whose keyboard was designed to send an email. We are interested in the specific pleasure of a machine that prints one letter at a time by physical impact, and in the community of people who keep those machines working.

Who writes for us

A small rotating group of contributors — a restorer in Lisbon, a Milwaukee collector, a German bench mechanic, an Italian design historian, and a handful of correspondents in other cities. Every article is signed. Every claim about a machine is drawn either from hands-on bench work or from a named primary source. When we do not know something, we say so.

What we will not do

We do not run affiliate links, sponsored posts, or paid product placements. We do not publish anonymous "best of" listicles assembled by non-owners of the machines being ranked. We do not use auto-generated text. If you find a factual mistake in our writing, write to us — the correction will appear with the correction date, in the same place as the original.

Where we are going

The plan for the next year is more field reports from type-ins, more model-by-model restoration guides for machines that no one else has documented in English, and a small series of interviews with the last generation of professional typewriter repairers before their notebooks are lost. If you have a machine, a story, or a workshop we should visit, please get in touch.