From Taylor Swift to Tom Hanks: Tapping into the charm of the typewriter

Typewriters have been infiltrating the pop-culture landscape of late, from Taylor Swift tapping away on a Royal 10 model from 1925 in last year’s video for Fortnight to Jenna Ortega regularly bashing the keys of a 1930s Juwel 3 in the 2022 television series Wednesday.

Taylor Swift tapping away on a Royal 10 model from 1925.Credit:

Then there’s Tom Hanks, the world’s biggest advocate for this outmoded but increasingly beloved technology. He owns about 300 vintage typewriters, wrote a book of short stories (Uncommon Type in 2017), each one featuring a typewriter, and starred in a documentary called California Typewriter (2016) with a few fellow acolytes, including musician John Mayer and the late, great playwright and actor Sam Shepard. Hanks travels with a portable, gifts typewriters to people he thinks will enjoy them, and it’s said that if you type him a letter, he’ll respond in kind.

“Who uses typewriters anyway?” Swift asked in the title track to her most recent album, The Tortured Poets Department, which leaned heavily on typewriter imagery for its promotion. “The main demographic I’m seeing is younger people,” says Robert Messenger, 77, a Canberra-based typewriter collector and historian, and one of only about a half-dozen typewriter repairers and restorers in Australia. “Most of the people I deal with are kids, some as young as seven, up to people in their early 30s. So this isn’t nostalgia for their own past because they didn’t grow up with typewriters.”

Tom Hanks owns about 300 vintage typewriters.Credit:

The typosphere – the term for the community of typewriter collectors and aficionados – started growing steadily almost 30 years ago but accelerated, Messenger says, after the 2016 documentary, and also as a result of the influence of Instagram, where people share and display their finds. And, of course, the Tay-Tay effect didn’t hurt.

Messenger has noticed that the majority of people entering this world aren’t collecting typewriters to sit on a shelf: they’re actively using them. As for the appeal of a machine that needs a ribbon, doesn’t allow the easy correction of a mistake and requires a new sheet of paper after each completed page, as well as greater digital dexterity – and force – of its user than a computer keyboard, he feels that it’s part of a wider trend.

“People are now making a conscious move away from digital back towards analogue,” he says. “I see parallels with the vinyl record revival. With typewriters, I think people see the same attraction. They want to write, and they don’t want to be disturbed and distracted by going on Google. Can you imagine E. E. Cummings writing his poetry in a Word document, with [the software] capitalising the beginning of every line? He’d be kicking the screen in.”

Many famous authors have sworn by their typewriters, even after the advent of computers. Cormac McCarthy estimated that he wrote more than 5 million words over the 50 years he used his Olivetti Lettera 32. Danielle Steele churned out more than 170 novels on a 1946 Olympia she nicknamed Ollie. Ernest Hemingway even wrote a poem about his beloved Corona No. 3, admiring the way that it “chatters in mechanical staccato”.

As for what’s popular, Messenger has seen a shift from pre-World War II typewriters to machines from the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s.

“One of the more sought-after typewriters that fetches large amounts of money is a 1969 Olivetti Valentine,” he says. “It’s a pop-art design by Ettore Sottsass: plastic, bright red. People just love the look of them. They’re not actually a great typewriter to use, but they can go for about $700 to $900.”

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