100 Years of Olivetti Typewriters: The Legacy of Camillo and Adriano

Would you give a typewriter to MythBusters, if Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman wanted one for one of those strike-a-match-and-see-how-high-it-flies experiments? No? Well … maybe one of those nondescript, rust-marked Nakajima ALLS taking up space in the shed. But an Olivetti Lettera 32? No way.

Lettera 32s may be one of the most common, and often the lowest-priced typewriters that pop up on eBays around the world on a daily basis, but no one in their right mind would deliberately allow an Olivetti to come to any harm.

Why? Because it’s an Olivetti. And that’s exactly why Lettera 32s are so common and so low-priced these days. An awful lot of people bought them 40 and 50 years ago (pictures above are of the author in 1979 and Richard Amery today). They were durable (think Cormac McCarthy), they did the heavy duty work, and they were light and compact at the same time. And they were nice to look at, too. I haven’t met a person yet who, having once owned an Olivetti Lettera 22 or 32, didn’t retain fond memories of it.

Some people might have abused them, and used them for garden sculpture, or  converted them into electronic devices, or used them as models for wooden artwork, or just for artwork. But that was just another way showing affection. So, too, it could be said, is using an Olivetti portable as a symbol as part of a protest against the suppression - and killing - of journalists in Mexico.

In terms of typewriters, is this all there is left of the legacy of Camillo Olivetti and his son Adriano? Far better that, I suppose, than the awful portable manual typewriter called an Olivetti coming out of China today – the Olivetti MS25 Premier Plus. Premier Plus? It’s a premier plus waste of money, as most people who have bought one will testify.

Indeed, a brief look at reviews on Amazon from the past 18 months reveals: “I found it to be a piece of junk. It is made in China, and it is HORRIBLE! It just doesn't work ... The best thing to do with this typewriter if you order one is to take it from the delivery man and throw it in the garbage.” “It was a huge mistake! … I don't know what circumstances might make this the ideal machine, but as is, it's an exercise in disappointment and frustration.” “Where do I start? Everything that could break on this machine did in fact … I took this machine to an old antique machine dealer, and he actually started laughing. Seriously, but so did I. Perhaps this situation alone made the machine worth buying.” “Basically, this machine will last a couple of weeks, if you’re lucky … A very sad product indeed ... the fact that the Olivetti name was sacrificed here for corporate identity-branding is another tragedy.” “This ‘typewriter’ comes ready for the scrap heap new out of the box!”

Do the reputations of Camillo and Adriano deserve to be dented like this? To be so seriously tarnished? No. Whoever is responsible for bastardising Olivetti’s great name in this disgraceful manner should be charged with defaming the dead – if that was possible.
Camillo and Adriano’s legacy in terms of the many fine buildings Olivetti erected around the world will last for generations. In years to come, however, people may look at these architectural achievements, see a company name, and wonder. What was Olivetti? Surely not the same company that put its name to the MS25 Premier. And, one might add, surely not the same company which took the naming rights and the designs of the fabulous Hermes Baby and turned it into piece of plastic dross (AKA the Olivetti Lettera 82).

With the Lettera 82 (Oh, how that Lettera name was ruined!) the Brazilian manufacturers couldn’t even be bothered putting the little metallic model name strip on the plastic ribbon cover – it’s made of cardboard!

One cannot resist the temptation at this juncture to raise the spectre of Ettore Sottsass and the Valentine. Now this is one Olivetti which also appears regularly on eBay – but at entirely the other end of the price scale from the Lettera 32. The starting prices are invariably way over the top, to a ridiculous degree. And almost inevitably, of course, sellers make the claim the Valentine was designed by Sottsass.

Well, the truth is, Sottsass came up with the concept, but Perry A.King put the finishing touches to what Sottsass was to describe as a “tart”. Sottsass feared dying and being remembered only for this typewriter. He did die, and his name is still associated with the Valentine. The real irony here is that when Sottsass came up with his concept of a typewriter equivalent of the Bic biro – a throwaway – he claims Olivetti executives dismissed the idea out of hand, saying a “cheap, plastic, Chinese thing” did not fit their corporate image. So what did Olivetti do instead? Make the cheap plastic Lettera 82 in Brazil, then put Olivetti’s name to the MS25 Premier in China.

What makes mention of the Valentine irresistible is the question: What would have happened if Sottsass had approached Camillo or Adriano Olivetti with his idea? OK, both men were all for quality. But would the notion of a cheaper typewriter, “a typewriter for the people” as Sottsass called it, not have appealed to them? Maybe the people who took over the running of Olivetti in the 1970s just lost sight of the original Olivetti vision.
One thing that I suppose can be said in favour of the Valentine is that it is at least continuing to keep alive in typewriters the broad concept of "Olivetti style". And in that regard it is already a collector's item - of sorts. It seems most likely eBay buyers pay the prices they do for it, not to use it but simply to look at it, to use it as a decorative piece (three Valentines other than the more common red are seen here, with what Sottsass called their "too-short skirts").

If the Valentine is indeed now considered a "collectible" - way ahead, perhaps, of all other post-war Olivetti typewriters - it may well be because some are influenced by Paul Robert's reference on his Virtual Typewriter Collection website. Paul shows the Valentine under the heading "The end of history" and says of it, "If there is one post-1920s typewriter that deserves a place in this museum, it is the Olivetti Valentine ... This space-age machine ... can be found in many collections of industrial design. Mechanically, the machine is not fundamentally different from the average machine that was built half a century earlier. Today, Olivetti is the only Western company still producing manual typewriters."
But to me the "end of history" for manual potables came much earlier, with the Lettera 22 and 32, the choice of real writers, poets and singers, lovers and dreamers, and other sundry wannabes: 

In terms of what they might have made of the Valentine - that is, the Valentine that emerged after Sottsass had walked away from the project - what we know about Camillo and Adriano Olivetti is that their idea of a typewriter was not just something which looked good, but something that worked efficiently as well. We cannot say that of the Valentine. We can say it of the Lettera 32. It’s beautiful, and it’s a workhorse. Can’t beat that.

So in four previous posts on the 100 years of Olivetti typewriters on this blog, we have looked at the start, with the M1 going public at the World’s Fair in Turin on April 29, 1911; the Olivetti dream of a socialist factory and a Utopian society; the aesthetics of Olivetti typewriters, thanks largely to Adriano’s appreciation of art; and the spread of Olivetti from a field outside a village in Italy to become the world’s dominant typewriter manufacturer. Taking all that into account, what has Olivetti the typewriter maker come to today? To the MS25 Premier. Oh, dear … what a sad, sad situation indeed.

Typewriters, Valentines, and a Very Grumpy Old Man

It almost seemed as if Ettore Sottsass was trying to hang on into 2008, in the hope of perhaps stealing some thunder from Olivetti’s centenary year. Sottsass died, in Milan on New Year’s Eve 2007, still believing he had a score to settle with the Ivrea-headquartered company.

Sottsass’s had long been a lone voice as the giant corporation continued to perpetuate the myth that Sottsass was responsible for its iconic if largely useless 1969 typewriter, the bright red Valentine. As it turned out, obituaries published around the world compounded the misconception. Clearly it suited – and goes on suiting – Olivetti to let people believe in the false connection.

Sottsass, if anyone was prepared to listen, had been only too forthcoming in disowning the Valentine. He intensely disliked the machine – it was, he said, "too obvious, a bit like a girl wearing a very short skirt and too much make-up" - and he hated being remembered for it above his many other great designs, which included truly remarkable typewriters such as the electric Praxis 48 (Alan Seaver is the lucky man who owns this one).

One of Sottsass’s last English language interviews appeared in the Los Angeles Weekly arts section on March 29, 2006, on the occasion of the LA County Museum of Art Sottsass survey. In Greg Goldin’s article, "In the Realm of the Senses", Sottsass said, “I worked 60 years of my life, and it seems the only thing I did is this ****ing red machine. And it came out a mistake. It was supposed to be a very inexpensive portable, to sell in the market, like pens. It didn’t have capital letters, it didn’t have a bell. I wanted the case to be inexpensive. Then the people at Olivetti said you cannot sell this kind of cheap Chinese thing. So, everything was put back: the capital letters, the bell, even the expensive plastic, which I was thinking would be this horrible, cheap plastic. So, it was a mistake.”

Sottsass, an Olivetti consultant, had come up with an “anti-machine machine” concept, for a typewriter equivalent of the Bic biro - a disposable typewriter. It wasn’t an entirely new idea. Royal had produced its Signet at the height of The Depression, in 1932, and between that same year and 1940, Remington followed with similar “cut-back” models, aimed at a largely adolescent market, such as the Remie-Scout/Monarch Pioneer (Richard Polt's seen here), Bantam and Cadet.

It’s mindboggling that today, websites such as Wikipedia quote Sottsass as describing the Valentine as being the “biro” among typewriters – inferring he thought it had vivacity. What he actually said was “biro”, not “brio”. Just shows how things can get really get twisted in people’s minds.

When Olivetti disagreed with the “Bic biro” idea, Sottsass walked from the project. Under the supervision of the Canadian Albert Leclerc, it was completed by an English designer, Perry A. King (above), made in Barcelona and launched on to the market on St Valentine’s Day 1969. Olivetti ensured Sottsass’s name was attached, to enhance the machine’s desirability, but the company was careful with its choice of wording, preferring “devised”, for example, to “designed”. Technically, Olivetti was at least partially right, because the “innards” of the Valentine belonged to the earlier, unspectacular Dora (below, from Will Davis's websites), which Sottsass had designed.

The Valentine’s attraction has grown over time. Today, people looking on eBay for a manual portable typewriter as a home or office decoration – rather than writing machine - are prepared to pay up to $400 for one in red (lime green rarities fetch as much as $3000 – the blue and off-white models are also very uncommon, All three are seen above.). The Valentine is prefect as a representation of late 60s pop art in practical machine form.  But the Valentine is not a practical typewriter. On the occasion of the machine’s 20th anniversary, in 1989, Olivetti Australia presented one to the Powerhouse Museum at Ultimo in Sydney. It remains there, in the Powerhouse’s vaults, while the Praxis 48 is upstairs on display. The Valentine is still in its original packing case, but the Powerhouse took it out long enough to test it and declare, on its website, its “mediocre” performance. It may seem an ungrateful assessment, but it’s all too fair.

One of the primary reasons for the Valentine’s poor “typeability” is that heavy, rigid ABS was attached to light, flexible Dora framework. The original Dora casing weighs much less. The standard Lettera 32, from which the Dora and thus the Valentine were mechanically developed, has an aluminium casing. Unlike the Remi-Scout, the Valentine’s light, fancy front lip fails to give it any real balance. ABS, or acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, is a thermoplastic used to make products such as piping, music recorders, golf club heads, car body parts, protective head gear and LEGO bricks. What’s more, rising oil prices at the time of the Valentine’s launch pushed up the cost of plastic, and therefore the Valentine, way beyond the realms of what Sottsass (or Olivetti) would have considered “disposable”.

Sottsass, founder of the Memphis School of Design, always maintained his involvement with commerce was purely for the sake of making things accessible to “the people”. The Valentine was Olivetti’s last great attempt to hold its market share against a growing flood of cheap but more practical Japanese imports, from Brother, Nakajima and Silver-Seiko. But it made its bid based on looks rather than price. Similarly, Smith-Corona-Marchant had Ghia, also of Turin, design a copycat machine, the Super G (below), and later, more clumsily, Royal brought out its Saturn electric. It was all in vain.

Irony has been heaped upon the Sottsass-Valentine story. Olivetti’s judgement that “you cannot sell this kind of cheap Chinese thing” is invalidated now that Olivetti manual portable typewriters are made in Jinan in China. But even the MS 25 Premier Plus, based on a Brother design but with extremely poor alignment, is not as cheap and nasty looking as the plastic Lettera 82 Olivetti made in its factory in Sao Paulo in Brazil. This was based on a Hermes Baby design for which Olivetti had bought the rights.

Olivetti is unjustifiably proud of the Valentine and would endorse the comment of Paul Robert of Amsterdam, who on his Virtual Typewriter Museum website says it is “the end of manual portable history and one post-1920s typewriter that deserves a place in this museum …” But Paul, a collector with impeccable taste, is no doubt referring to the Valentine’s distinctive styling rather than its standing among “typeability” typewriters.

The Valentine is on permanent display in the New York Museum of Modern Art. But so, too, is the greatest of all Olivetti portables, the Lettera 22, designed by Marcello Nizzoli (below), awarded the Compasso D'Oro in 1954 and in 1959 nominated by the Illinois Technology Institute as the best design of any product of the previous 100 years. The Lettera 32 was developed from it, but subsequently Olivetti lost the plot.

It was Nizzoli who taught Sottsass what he knew about typewriter design. But that was insufficient for Sottsass to find a place among the echelon of 20th century typewriter designers, up there with, say, Wellington Parker Kidder, Frank S.Rose, Lee Burridge, Richard Uhlig, John H.Barr, Giuseppe Preziosa, Henry Dreyfuss or Nizzoli.

Perhaps, however, the final irony for the Valentine came with Sottsass’s death. With him died the truth about its design. And thus its auction value will doubtless continue to rise.

Converting an Olivetti Dora Portable Typewriter to a Valentine in Five Easy Steps (while ogling Brigitte Bardot)

This will only be of interest to anyone owning an Olivetti Valentine portable typewriter which has some significant mechanical problems and/or missing parts. It certainly assumes you already own a Valentine and are prepared to take it apart. Unless the need is felt to be truly great, I wouldn't bother with it at all. Indeed, it may even be considered in some quarters to be unwarranted recklessness, irresponsible or downright unethical (depending on what you plan to do with the converted Valentine). However, it's potentially an awful lot cheaper than buying another Valentine! Please also bear in mind the conversion is not just about fixing serious carriage wobble (that is, missing ball bearings) - if that alone is the concern, a simple replacement of just the carriage (Dora to Valentine) and nothing else might prove quicker and easier, especially in skilled hands. But this exercise is for the benefit of someone owning a Valentine with more extensive replacement and/or repair needs.
Just such a person is a 70-year-old former Czech soldier, Josef T of Wollongong, a man with an eye for beauty (it was Josef who found all these images of Brigitte Bardot with a Valentine). Apart from typewriter-related Bardot photos, Josef has a penchant for rare maps, air-cooled Volkswagens 1939-1978, Surrealism, and Marcel Duchamp.

Josef started writing to me at the end of April about his wish to add a Valentine to his typewriter collection. "Foolishly, I believe that if I make the Valentine my last love fling, I can promise myself to stop (or at least slow increasing) my collector's clutter already filling our house with old cameras and vintage Volkswagens and parts thereof," he wrote.

A short while later, Josef announced he had found a Valentine at a Cash Converters store, paying a not unreasonable (given the ridiculously high prices this model has been fetching for many years now) $229. As Josef observed, "For a red baby, this seems a bargain in this country."

Sadly, however, there appeared to be a major carriage ball bearing problem and an empty slot for the tab setting and clearing switch (perhaps it's already a converted Dora???).
Josef asked for advice on removing the mask. He also rightly remarked that "There are horror stories about removing the carriage and not being able to re-insert the ball bearings in the retainers, not to mention the drawband." Josef began to find there were many other shortcomings with his typewriter, including a sluggish typing action. "Normal access to the works from underneath, to wash and perhaps lightly oil, is denied by the design."
At this point I suggested to Josef that his best course of action was probably to buy an Olivetti Dora (or similar model) and completely replace the mechanics of his Valentine. Anyone contemplating this same undertaking should bear in the mind that the Olivetti Dora is also known as the Olivetti Lettera 31, Ventura, Italia '90 and Class, the Underwood 310 and 315, the Montgomery Ward Escort 33, and the Mercedes and Mercedes Super T (probably among many other labels). As well, generally the Dora and its myriad of variations can be found for far lower prices than a Valentine, so financially a conversation such as this can be a quite viable option.
My advice to Josef only seemed to produce further headaches for him. "I am still trying to tinker the Valentine to perfection," he wrote. So I decided to demonstrate the conversion technique. To do so, however, I needed a Dora (or like machine) and there are none left in my dwindling collection. In desperation, I contacted Canberra's only other Typospherian, Jasper Lindell, in the slim hope he might own such a thing. Jasper came straight back saying he not only owned a red Dora, but would be happy to bring it over and allow me to take it apart so I could illustrate this project.
So here is a pictorial essay of the conversion:

Jasper's red Olivetti Dora above, and one of my remaining Valentines below. Some of the more obvious outward differences (mask aside) are the black/red carriage-end covers and the design of the paper plate. The Valentine also has a button on the left side carriage knob to free roll the platen, as well as a red right-side tab key and a left-side tab setting and clearing switch, all of which this Dora lacks (it has an empty slot for the left-side switch). Such Dora variations as the Underwood 315, the Ventura, the Mercedes Super T and the Olivetti Class have the red tab key and the tab setting-clearing switch, if you feel these things are essential, but most lack the button on the left side knob. Free rolling the platen is achieved on all machines by setting the line spacer switch to "0". Both of the typewriters illustrated here have the "return indent" key at the top left of the keyboard, but the keyboard configurations differ.

Below, unmasked - practically the same machine, but very different prices:

The most significant differences seen in these two images are the tabulation mechanism (left on top photo) and tab setting-clearing switch mechanism (right on top photo).

1. Remove the mask from the Valentine. Start with the front piece protecting the spacebar while the machine is in its case (using long-nosed pillars to undo the nuts), then unscrew the main section, slipping it off gently by placing the typewriter on its back section (case handle flat) and holding down the top bank of keys.

 The front piece is held on to its metal arms by nuts which attach here.

Below, the back section (top of case) is held on to the typewriter by two nuts (each side) and two screws (centre), each covered by small, very brittle caps. Take great care when removing the caps, as they can split or break easily if not manoeuvred off gently.

2. Below, this is how the side nuts attach. The threaded metal pieces on to which the nuts wind represent the ONLY significant difference between the back plate of the Valentine's innards and of those of the Dora.

The two images below show the threaded metal piece on the Valentine (top) and the nut on the Dora. There are two ways of going about this part of the conversion - one is to replace the entire back plate from the Valentine's innards, the other is to deal with just a replacement of this piece from one machine to the other.

Below, I am using toothpicks here to illustrate how the Valentine's back section would screw on to the Dora. The second image shows the screw holes on the Valentine.

Below, the Valentine on top, the circles showing the differences between the two (the tabulation rack on the Valentine can also be clearly seen):

3. Below, the metal arms for the front guard bar screw on to the Valentine's innards here. Happily, the Dora's innards have the screw holes already available to attach the front guard arms to them:

(Oops: Sorry, my right side circle is one slot too far to the left!)

4. If you plan to use the Dora's mechanics with a Valentine mask, naturally you will have to remove the bottom metal plate from the Dora innards:

5. Replacing the carriage end covers and the paper plate should also be straightforward. Happily, on most 60s Olivettis, this process is simple, if time consuming. Screw off the platen knobs, unscrew the end covers, remove the platen, then transfer the paper plate and end covers from one machine to the other: