A Collection of Collections

Typewriters

Pic: Crandall (1884), the first typewriter to print from a single element, long before IBM’s “golf ball” lettering device

“Collecting antique typewriters has been a wonderful experience for me over the years. It all began in 1989, when I spotted an intriguing item high upon a shelf in a cluttered junk shop—which turned out to be a Caligraph typewriter from the early 1880s. When I read up on the subject and learned that literally hundreds of distinct typewriters were manufactured in the early days of typing, I was hooked. I also love to restore these finely built machines. It takes a lot of patience, but the pleasure of exploring and refurbishing the mechanisms of a 100-year-old typewriter, and the end result—a beautiful, smoothly operating artifact—is worth it.

From July 2007 to January 2008, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto put 25 of my machines on display in an exhibit called “Early Typewriters—Gateway to the Information Age.” As the popularity of the exhibit demonstrated, typewriters hold a special nostalgia for many of us. They create an immediate connection to the past, and you can’t help but marvel at how this tool has impacted all of our lives.”

-by Martin Howard
http://www.antiquetypewriters.com/
Featured in More of Our Canada, July 2009