Type-ins, museum openings, auction results, and interviews with the people keeping mechanical writing alive across four continents.
Estate sales still surface the best machines at the best prices, but only if you know how to read the listing before the sale opens. Here are the signals that separate a productive drive from a wasted morning.
Six type-ins in six cities across two months. Attendance is up, the average age of attendees is down, and the machines being carried are, for the first time in years, mostly late-model portables under fifteen dollars.
Sixty collectors, forty tables, and a Hermes Ambassador that had not left its case since 1968. A dispatch from the informal Swiss typewriter gathering in a converted Zurich tram depot.
In fifteen years, Rita Duarte has repaired more than two thousand typewriters from her small workshop in Lisbon's Alfama district. She talks about learning the trade, the machines she has come to love, and the ones she refuses to work on.
Two hundred and forty machines from the collection of Ernest and Miriam Hammond, gifted to the Milwaukee Typewriter Museum on Ernest's death in 2024, opened to the public this month. The exhibition rewrites what we know about early American manufacturing.