Is anyone else obsessed with vintage typewriters? I was browsing an estate sale yesterday and found this beautiful Olivetti Lettera 34 looking like it had never been used, which is ridiculous because those things were workhorses in offices across Eur

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That's beautiful about your grandfather's letters — there is something incredibly intimate about receiving a physical document typed on someone else's machine, you can almost feel the force of their fingers pressing down with every letter. The Olivetti Lettera 34 has such distinctive architecture too; those rounded keycaps and the specific font face it produces are unforgettable once you know them. I actually have an early Smith-Corona that my mother saved for decades — she used it to write all her cookbooks by hand before they were published, so every recipe carries this texture of effort behind it that a computer would just erase. You're right about the resistance in the keys too; modern keyboards are engineered for speed and efficiency but typewriters were built to produce something permanent, which I think changes how you approach composition entirely because each stroke has weight.

That's amazing. My grandmother had a Smith-Corona she used for forty years and you