A unique collection of 33 typewriters belonged to great authors such as John Updike, Ray Bradbury, George Bernard Shaw, Truman Capote and Tennessee Williamswas sold at auction by Heritage Auctions in Dallas, Texas, for a total amount of $282,825 (approximately 258,000 euros).
The protagonist was the Ernest Hemingway's 1926 Underwood Standard, the machine used by the American journalist and writer to write his letters from Finca Vigía, his villa near Havana in Cuba, rewarded for $162,500.
There Royal Empress by Hugh Hefner in 1962, that the editor of Playboy uses in a famous photo in which he is in pajamas and smoking a pipe, earned $30,000, while the 1963 Hermès 3000 of actor Tom Hanks, well-known typewriter enthusiast, sold for $8,750.
These machines, both tools of the journalistic trade and the icons of 20th century writing before the advent of computers and smartphonesare just some of the jewels collected over nearly twenty years Steve Soboroff, former commissioner of the Los Angeles Police Department.
He was nicknamed “The largest collection of typewriters in the world” (the largest collection of typewriters in the world) and started with the 1940 Remington Model J by Pulitzer Prize-winning sports journalist and Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray in 2005.
One of the most fascinating objects in Soboroff's collection is certainly the Bar-Lock from 1902, owned by Jack London produced by the Columbia Typewriter Manufacturing Company, a machine with unique features: “There are separate keys for lowercase and uppercase letters and the exclamation point is also missing – London should have first typed a period and then added a capital 'I' above it,” reads the auction house's press release, which cites the description from the American Writers Museum. The keyboard with a “2WBMRN” scheme instead of standard “QWERTY” along the top row of keys.
Other machines were in the collection, including those used by writers such as Philip Roth but also divi come Greta Garbo, Shirley Temple, Mae West, Julie Andrews and Bing Crosby.
The collection has long been exhibited in the United States and abroad and last year Soboroff donated six of his typewriters at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington: previously, they belonged to Maya Angelou, Joe DiMaggio, Elia Kazan, John Lennon, Jerome “Jerry” Siegel and Orson Welles.
A portion of the proceeds from the auction will be donated to one of Soboroff's favorite nonprofits, the Jim Murray Memorial Foundation, which funds scholarships for university journalism students.
