About
What this guide is, what it isn't, and where its sources come from.
The premise
Most typewriter guides try to tell you which machine is best. This one doesn't. It's a navigator for what other people — collectors, restorers, writers, archivists — have already said and shown about these machines, organized so you can find your way to the ones that fit how you actually want to write.
The value isn't another opinion on top of theirs. The value is the interface: feel-based clusters instead of brand listings, filter chips for touch and sound and era, a five-question flow that turns sensory preferences into a shortlist, and per-machine pages that aggregate every sourced qualifier I could confidently attribute alongside links to the people who know each machine best.
What's on each page
For every machine in the catalog, the detail page is organized around four questions:
What people say — attributed claims from named sources. Where Polt has written about it, where Messenger has covered it, where a notable user is documented to have said something specific. Each claim is paraphrased or quoted with the source named; longer treatments link out.
Used by — writers documented to have used the machine, the work they did on it, and the years they used it. Where the documentation is thin, the section is short or absent — better than fabricated provenance.
See and hear it for yourself — links to Joe Van Cleave's typing demonstrations, Typewriter Database galleries with user-submitted type samples, archive pages at MoMA or Rowan Oak or Finca Vigía where preserved machines are kept, and other places to encounter the machine directly rather than through someone's writing about it.
All sources — the full link grid out to every page that informs the entry, in the original source's form.
No buy buttons. No affiliate links. No rankings dressed up as objective.
What's deliberately out
This isn't a marketplace, a serial-number lookup, a repair manual, or a price index. Those resources exist and they're linked from each machine's page. The work this guide does sits upstream of all of them: helping you decide which machine to look into before you start hunting.
It also isn't an exhaustive catalog. The Typewriter Database lists roughly 1,100 brands; this catalog covers the consensus core — about thirty machines that come up again and again across the major resources. New entries arrive when a machine has been written about thoughtfully by at least two established sources.
The sources
Most of what's worth knowing about typewriters came from people who knew far more than I do and wrote it down. The recurring sources across this guide:
A note on coverage
Some machines have many sourced qualifiers. Others have none yet. The catalog is honest about both — a card with no attributed claim shows that openly rather than filling the space with my prose. As sources accumulate, those gaps close. If you have a sourced claim that should be in here, or a source I'm missing, write me.
The framework either fits how people think about typewriters or it doesn't. Individual entries can always be sharpened.