I often see typewriter enthusiasts “debating” over which is the prettiest or best typeface, and often, they’re making their judgement on one machine they happen to have or really wish they had. Rarely are these judgements made with multiple typefaces on the same page for easier direct apples-to-apples comparison, so I threw together a small sample from a few in my own collection.
Gut reaction time: Which of these is your favorite?
I am going to go with the Hermes 3000. Just enough “character” to the font without being fussy.
From wikipedia:
Larry McMurtry specifically mentioned his Hermes 3000, stating: “Most heartfelt, I thank my typewriter. My typewriter is a Hermes 3000, surely one of the noblest instruments of European genius. It has kept me for thirty years out of the dry embrace of the computer”.
Other notable users of the machine are Sam Shepard, Eugène Ionesco and Stephen Fry. Beat writer Jack Kerouac wrote his final novel, Vanity of Duluoz, on the Hermes 3000 in 1966. In a March 2018 auction at Bonhams in London, the Hermes 3000 on which Sylvia Plath had typed her only novel — The Bell Jar — in 1962 was sold for £26,000 ($46,071). In 2013, in an appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, actor Tom Hanks named the Hermes 3000 as the luxury item he would choose to take with him.
@chrisaldrich I like 1962 but perhaps that’s from primarily using similar typewriters early when I was learning to type.