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.
Baby’s compact design was admired for its durability, engineering and smooth key and lever action, making it a quick and responsive machine for hard professional use, such as in a war zone.
In one of his Chicago Tribune dispatches, war correspondent Jack Thompson had this to say about the 1944 storming of Omaha Beach: “Down came our landing ramp. Machine-gun bullets flayed the water just ahead of Taylor, first to jump off into the chest-deep water. I followed, instinctively shielding my face with my prized lightweight portable typewriter, a Swiss-made Hermes. Hermes must have been my good luck charm. I wasn’t nicked, nor were any of my comrades on the boat. We all escaped injury that day. (Fifty years later, I’ve still got the typewriter. I’m writing this story on it.)”
Speaking of journalists, Ho Chi Minh, the founding father of modern Vietnam, used one through the “Resistance War Against America”.
