Low-tech rising
As a child, I made many discoveries in my grandmother’s house. My favorite of these was her Underwood No. 4 Standard Typewriter, made in 1911. Today, this typewriter sits near my desk. It is both a reminder of my grandmother and a handsome example from the field of vintage office equipment-typewriters, adding machines, telephones, glass-domed Edison stock tickers, and original advertising posters for these things. For years, passionate individuals and museums have sought out vintage office equipment, especially typewriters, but these early machines have yet to become widely popular collectibles.
Ironically, the market for office antiques is far more active in Europe, where Russians, Asians, and Europeans are snapping up American-made machines. There are established typewriter collectors’ clubs in France, Germany, and Italy, and in Cologne there is a specialty auction house, Auction Team Breker, which is well known for its biannual sales of vintage office equipment.
In a November 2007 sale, Auction Team Breker featured a rare 1902 Blick Electric typewriter, one of three currently known to exist, and sold it for an impressive $100,400 (including buyer’s premium). This machine was manufactured by the Blickensderfer Typewriter Company of Stamford, Connecticut, and was consigned by the Onondaga Historical Association in Syracuse, New York (which has an important typewriter collection focusing on those made in New York State). The revolutionary Blick Electric was the world’s first all-electric typewriter and prefigured much later IBM machines with its type wheel, lightness of touch, and 
automatic carriage return. Unfortunately, it was also a commercial failure for reasons that probably had something to do with the lack of standardized electric current between cities and the fact that many offices did not have electricity.
Some collectors in the field specialize in late nineteenth-century to early twentieth-century machines from the golden age of typewriter invention (roughly the 1880s to the 1920s) such as the Sholes and Glidden Type Writer (1873) said to be valued at $25,000 to $35,000, and the Malling Hansen, valued at $85,000 and up. Other collectors seek out the far more reasonably priced portable models with a lot of design appeal from the 1950s to 1970s like the 1969 Olivetti Valentine designed by Ettore Sottsass and Perry King.
According to Paul Robert, founder of www.typewritermuseum.org, what makes a typewriter collectible is what makes other antiques valuable, “condition, age, and rarity sum it up quite nicely,” he says. “But then, of course, there is personal taste. A good example of a not so rare machine is the New Crandall, which is nevertheless regarded as one of the most desirable machines due to the mother-of-pearl inlays in 
the frame. Another example is the Hammond 1, with its wooden cover and piano keys.”
Among other examples of vintage office equipment that I am particularly drawn to is the Edison stock market ticker from the 1920s, marked “M’F’D by T. A. Edison, Inc.” Breker sold one in May for $5,475 (including buyer’s premium). It is an object familiar to me from films about the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression, where it can be seen reporting the important news of daily stock transactions on that narrow strip of paper that spilled out from its middle. Now silent, its glass dome sits atop the cast-iron base in such a way as to give it the look of a valued specimen or artifact that has been preserved for contemporary enjoyment and contemplation.
STEPHEN MILNE is a designer who specializes in identifying trends in collecting and design.
Images from above: Blick Electric typewriter made by Charles Blickensderfer Typewriter Company, Stamford, Connecticut, 1902. Photograph by courtesy of Auction Team Breker, Cologne, Germany.
Stock market ticker made by Thomas A. Edison, Incorporated, c. 1920. Cast-iron base and glass dome. Marked “M’F’D by T. A. Edison, Inc.” Breker photograph.
