Most typewriters from the twentieth century were built to be useful and forgotten. The Valentine wasn’t, and that’s the reason people still talk about it more than fifty years on.
A Deliberate Break From Tradition
Ettore Sottsass designed it with the British designer Perry King. It launched in 1969 and was still early in production the following year, built from bright, glossy ABS plastic instead of the metal and enamel every other typewriter wore.
Sottsass didn’t want a status symbol. He wanted something as ordinary as a pencil. The lipstick red, paired with a matching plastic case that worked more like a sheath than a proper cover, gave it a personality no office machine had carried before.
Pop Art on a Desk
Sottsass pulled from Pop Art directly, crediting Tom Wesselmann’s work for the orange spool nut covers. He picked red, in his own words, “so it would never remind anyone of monotonous working hours.”
Underneath that shell sat the internals of Olivetti’s Lettera 32. The looks were radical. The typewriter inside them was ordinary.
A Flop That Became a Legend
It didn’t sell. Priced above its competitors and mechanically unremarkable, it never found a mass market. The design outlived the sales numbers anyway: a supporting role in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, and a permanent spot in the collections at MoMA and London’s Design Museum.
It’s talked about now as an early version of a different idea entirely, a machine sold on feeling instead of function, the same thinking Apple would build a company on decades later.
Machine Record
No data to share on this one because I sold it. My affair with the Valentine was passionate, but brief. Alas, it was not meant to be.
I snagged this Valentine from a thrift store for $105. The spool nuts and iconic orange covers were missing, a little dirty, but in otherwise great shape. No worries, I can grab spool covers online. Or so I thought. Turns out, original spool covers are about $50 each, which if you’re keeping score, is about the same price I paid for the whole typewriter.
I opted for a replacement spool kit from Toronto Typewriters, sans covers, instead. After a light cleaning and the new ribbon was installed, I clacked out my first words.
In my opinion, the Valentine has the same hollow core as a beautiful woman who can turn heads from across a room, but empty the second you try to find out who she actually is. There’s nothing beyond the surface worth sticking around for. This was my first plastic machine and that’s exactly how it felt: like a toy. I did not enjoy typing on it at all. I didn’t even like the sound it made.
So, I bid my Valentine farewell and it was re-listed on Marketplace. The buyer was a new collector, an eccentric lady with a fondness for red.
I think they’ll get along famously.
