About
What this guide is and where its sources come from.
The premise
There are many typewriter guides that list the best model names based on their experience. But how do you know what you'll like? This one is designed to help you navigate what collectors, restorers, writers, and archivists have said about these machines, organized so you can find your way to the ones that fit how you actually want to write.
Use the feel-based clusters and filters based on what kind of touch and sound and era you are interested in. Per-machine pages aggregate lots of high-quality sources 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. Each claim is paraphrased or quoted with the source named; longer treatments link out.
Used by — writers documented to have used the machine.
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.
All sources — the full link grid out to every page that informs the entry, in the original source's form.
What's deliberately out
This isn't a marketplace, a serial-number lookup, a repair manual, or a price index. Those resources are linked from each machine's page. The purpose of this page is to help 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. Feel free to recommend other models (and a photo I can use) if you think they should be included here.
The sources
Most of what's worth knowing about typewriters came from people who knew far more than I do. The recurring sources across this guide: