What old typewriters are worth

Typewriters are the category where the model name does almost all the pricing work, and where two machines on the same table can look like the same object and be worth triple one another. Nobody at an estate sale labels them. The badge gives you a maker and sometimes a model, and the rest you have to read off the machine.

Below are five with real completed-sale medians, then the tells that tell the close ones apart.

The five, highest to lowest

Hermes 3000, $469.99 across 15 sales. The one worth knowing on sight: a 1960s Swiss portable in pale seafoam green crinkle paint with a script Hermes badge on the ribbon cover. Nothing else on this list is that colour, and the colour is most of the recognition.

Olympia SM9, $225 across 22 sales. A steel-bodied German portable from the 1960s and 1970s, and the deepest evidence on this page after the Lettera.

Olivetti Lettera 22, $155 across 23 sales. The 1950s olive green Nizzoli design that sits in the Museum of Modern Art's collection. The most-sold machine here and the most reliable number.

Royal Arrow, $131.97 across 17 sales. A 1930s and 1940s streamlined deco portable with a chrome winged Royal emblem.

Royal KMM, $109.49 across 10 sales. A heavy black desktop from the same era, with glass side panels and bevelled keys. It is the biggest machine on the list and the cheapest, which is worth sitting with before you carry one to the car.

Two pairs that fool people

Olympia SM9 or SM8. Same shell, same decade, and the badge on the front says only "Olympia". The difference is at the space bar: the SM9 has tab set and tab clear keys on either side of it, and the SM8 has none, because its tab stops are set by hand at the back of the carriage. The SM9 also has chromed carriage ends where the SM8's are painted body colour. Those two keys are the whole check.

Olivetti Lettera 22 or 32. The 22 has round, glass-topped keys. The 32, which replaced it in 1963, has flat square ones and a lighter action. They are different machines with different markets, so read the keys before you price either. We do not have enough completed sales on the 32 to quote a median for it, and a guess dressed up as a number is worse than no number.

What the asking prices say

Four of these five sell for close to what people are asking, which is unusual. The SM9 asks $232 and sells for $225. The Royal Arrow asks $134.99 and sells for $131.97. The Lettera 22 asks $180 and sells for $155.

The exception is the Hermes 3000, asking $774.99 against a $469.99 median. That is a sixty-five percent gap, the widest here by a distance, and it is the signature of a machine with a reputation: sellers price it at what the best examples fetch, and most examples are not the best one.

Three things to check before you pay

Does the carriage move and the bell ring. A machine that will not advance is a repair, and repair costs more than most of this list is worth.

Metal or plastic. Every machine on this page with real sale evidence behind it is a pre-1970 metal-bodied one. The plastic portables that replaced them are in our corpus too and have not produced enough completed sales to price, which tells you roughly as much as a number would.

The keyboard layout. Plenty of these were built for European markets, and a German machine has a QWERTZ keyboard with umlaut keys rather than QWERTY. It is the same model and the same median search, but it is not the same thing to type on, so look at the top row before you commit.

Every figure here is the median of completed sales in our own comp data, re-checked live on 25 October 2026. Medians move: the Royal Arrow has come down about nine percent since the start of September, which is why these get re-checked rather than quoted from memory.