Typewriter: A Celebration of the Ultimate Writing Machine

Favored by many famous and upcoming writers and poets as their tool of choice, and benefitting from the nostalgia of steampunk and Mad Men, typewriters (like vinyl) have experienced a resurgence—especially among hipsters. This fascinating book celebrates that renaissance through images of the most beautiful, curious, elaborate, and heralded typewriters in history, along with the stories of people who have created and used these beloved machines. Written by two typewriter collectors and experts, it features 125 color photographs tracing the typewriter’s evolution from the nineteenth through the twentieth centuries—ending with the advanced IBM Selectric—along with print advertisements, vintage photographs, patents, and other memorabilia.

Paul Robert is a journalist and photographer. He bought his first manual typewriter in the early 1990s after happily discarding them from his work environment. The first machine led to a second and became the beginning of a collection and a new field of research. The result was the Virtual Typewriter Museum (typewritermuseum.org), a newsletter, a biography of typewriter inventor George Blickensderfer, and two other books aimed at other typewriter collectors. Paul lives in the Netherlands.
 
Peter Weil is a retired associate professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Delaware, a contributing editor to the typewriter journal ETCetera for ten years through his quarterly typewriter “Ephemera” column, for which he won the QWERTY writing award in 2013, and an avid typewriter and ephemera collector for 20 years. During this period, he studied the history of the typewriter and its cultural and social impact. As part of this research, he has created one of the largest existing archives of photographic, written, and printed materials concerning the production and use of the typewriter in the century between the 1870s and the 1970s. Peter lives in DE.