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Description
Introduced on Valentine’s Day with a flurry of advertising, the Olivetti Company’s bright-red portable typewriter was an instant sensation of the Pop Art movement. Ettore Sottsass and Perry King designed valentine to be the “anti-machine machine,” meaning that it functioned as a typewriter but also had a humanized quality lacking in most office equipment. Sottsass noted that his seductive red typewriter was for use “in any place except an office … rather to keep amateur poets company on quiet Sundays.” To further differentiate valentine from workaday equipment, Sottsass’s early designs lacked both uppercase type and the bell signaling the end of a typewritten line. Understandably, Olivetti manufactured the typewriter with these necessary features, but the lowercase “v” in the logo above the keyboard recalls the designer’s original intention. 1969
Publication Date
6-24-2014
Publisher
RISD Museum
City
Providence, Rhode Island
Keywords
Rhode Island School of Design Museum; typewriter
Disciplines
Industrial and Product Design
Recommended Citation
RISD Museum; King, Perry A.; Nichols, Khipra; and Schapira, Kate, "Valentine Portable Typewriter and Case" (2014). Channel. 36.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/risdmuseum_channel/36