Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck loved this hardy portable typewriter: meet the Hermes Baby, once every war correspondent’s essential ally
- No stranger to active service, the Hermes Baby typewriter was a favourite with war correspondents long before the laptop
You’re a war correspondent chasing the story. You’re supposed to be pretty smart but you find yourself, not so clever after all, in a muddy trench with bullets whizzing by your head and smoke and cordite burning your eyes. Your deadline was an hour ago, the dispatch needs to be written and wired back to your editor in time for the morning edition.
So you’re frantically hammering away at your laptop, smack in the middle of the action, and those G and H keys jam together yet again. “Argh,” you say, “Enough! I’m finally buying that Hermes.”
Hermes (no, not that Hermès) was a typewriter designed by Giuseppe Prezioso for Swiss company Paillard in 1935. At 3.6kg and under 8cm thick, it was aptly named “Baby”, its clean lines, stripped-down details and portability all making it a worthy predecessor of contemporary laptop computers.
Because it was smaller than a volume of the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary and a lot easier to lug around than just about any other typewriter on the market, the Baby quickly became a favourite of writers, journalists and war correspondents, from Martha Gellhorn and William S. Burroughs to John Steinbeck and Susan Sontag. It was so popular that the design remained virtually unchanged over its 50 years of production, up until the mid-1980s.
