Zoë Sadokierski

This illustrated book celebrates the relationships writers have with their typewriters. There’s no internet connection on a typewriter. It serves no other function than pressing inked letters onto a page. Its sole purpose is to write. This is why the relationship between writers and typewriters is so focused, singular and intimate.

Typewriters that once belonged to famous writers are retired to museum or library archives, inanimate objects that represent the work of an admired individual. From these archives, I found photographs of 45 writer’s actual typewriters to draw from, and sought anecdotes about each writer’s relationship to their writing machine.

Leonard Cohen had a bath with his Olivetti, which ended predictably poorly; a priest told Anne Sexton, ‘God is in your typewriter’; Cormac McCarthy bought a second-hand Olivetti Lettera 32 for $50 and sold it 46-years later for $254,500; Ian Fleming commissioned a gold-plated Royal de Luxe, on which he wrote only one novel; Larry McMurtry thanked his Hermes in his Golden Globe acceptance speech; Raymond Chandler declared, ‘Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.’