Some people only want Royals. Every model, every era, every color they can find, as long as the badge says Royal. That’s the one that matters to them.
Other collectors are chasing a particular color. Some want one of everything, never two from the same maker. The whole point is the spread. Some are trying to track down different typefaces. And some only want the first year of a run, the transitional machine before a design settled into whatever came after it.
These are all gateways into the same hobby, out of however many actually exist, and none of them needs to justify itself against the others.
Gatekeeping
The spirit of collecting gets lost the moment somebody decides there’s one correct standard everyone else should be measuring against.
There was recently a thread on Reddit about what counts as rare. One poster settled it, or tried to, by pointing to Most Wanted Typewriters as though the list were fact instead of what it actually is.
It’s a real survey, a group of collectors ranking machines on rarity and desirability, run twice over three decades and published both times in ETC Magazine. The compilers themselves call it a starting point. Not perfect. Not the authority on the subject. They said so on the page. The poster on Reddit skipped that part.
The same move works on any collecting criteria. Somebody could just as easily rule on which brand actually matters, which color counts as a real collection, or which era is historically valuable and which is just scrap metal.
Rarity was never really the point. The point was who gets to set the terms at all.
Gatekeepers never announce themselves as such. They just sound certain, which reads as authority even when it’s not backed by anything solid. The tell is usually the tone, not the content. Somebody citing “what real collectors know” turns a personal preference into a rule for everyone else’s collection.
Make It Yours
Your reasons are allowed to shift, split, or contradict each other, and none of that needs defending to anyone.
No forum gets a vote. No other collector, no matter how many machines they own or how long they’ve been at it. Disclaimer or not. The only standing anyone has to judge your reasons is whatever standing you decide to hand them, and you don’t owe that to anybody.
Which typewriters have you kept because they were beat up, the wrong color, the model everyone else said wasn’t worth the shelf space? The misfits. The ones you kept just because.
What makes your collection exclusively yours?
