1958 Olympia SM3

If American manufacturers were racing toward color and styling in the late 1950s, Olympia of West Germany was after something else entirely: precision. The SM3 is widely regarded by collectors and users alike as one of the finest mechanical writing machines ever built. Engineering Over Everything Olympia built its postwar reputation on fit and finish. […]

1959 Tower President XII

Not every great typewriter wore the name of the company that actually built it. The 1959 Tower President XII is one of those. “Tower” was Sears, Roebuck & Co.’s typewriter house brand for decades, and by the late 1950s Smith-Corona was the one building it. The President XII sits on the bones of Smith-Corona’s 5-series […]

1970 Olivetti Valentine

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 […]

1956 Smith-Corona Silent Super

By 1956, Smith-Corona was building machines that felt serious and stylish at once, and the Silent Super still turns up in more collections than almost anything else from that decade. Silent True to its name, it was built for quiet: a softer platen compound to dampen the clack, felt glued inside the metal covers to […]

1949 Royal Quiet DeLuxe

Every writer’s biopic seems to reach for the same machine eventually, cast wide behind a typing hand. That’s the Royal Quiet DeLuxe, often called the QDL. By 1949 it had been in production a full decade, minus the years Royal spent building for the war instead of for writers, and this particular year sits right […]

Marblehead Lighthouse

Perched on a limestone bluff where Lake Erie meets Sandusky Bay, Marblehead Lighthouse is the oldest lighthouse still operating on the Great Lakes. Congress funded its construction in 1819, and builder William Kelly raised the fifty foot conical tower in 1821. The light first shone in 1822, guiding ships through the passage between the Ohio […]

The Price of Everything

I keep noticing the same thing, town after town: the interconnected forces of consumerism, economic decline, and cultural erosion in post-industrial and rural America, and how big-box retail capitalism has quietly rewritten local identity underneath it. The omnipresence of a handful of corporate giants is the through-line. Consolidating that much economic power has reshaped not […]