Peter Paterson
For the collector, typewriters have one comforting quality. The first commerically successful models of the machine which was to emancipate women appeared only a little over a century ago, and already one can see them being supplanted by compu- ters, so the boundaries of the art are fixed. On the other hand, most typewriters are large and heavy, making it advisable to collect with discernment and leave bulk buying to the really mad. Many interesting and attractive machines can still be bought quite cheaply — unless, that is, you set your heart on such rarities as the fabulous 1902 Blickensderfer ribbonless electric golf ball typewriter, of which only two models are known to exist. However, you can still acquire a Blickensderfer in manual form for a couple of hundred pounds, and a very pretty and ingenious object it is. In fact, some of the technological flourishes which accompany the last gasp of the industry, including the golf ball and the daisy wheel, were present in the early days, only to be squeezed out by the Remington up-strike model invented by Gliddon and Scholes in the 1870s, and its successor, the Under- wood 'visible' — so called because you could actually see the words as you typed them, which was not possible on the first Remingtons. Some collectors are less attracted by the beautiful mechanics of the things than by exceptions to the Henry Ford rule: nearly all pre-1939 typewriters were black, so red, blue or green ones are especially admired.
Previous page
