Hermes 3000 (1962)

Hermes 3000
 
Year of production:  1962
 
Company:  Paillard-Bolex, Yverdon, Switzerland
 
This wonderful and iconic Hermes 3000 typewriter was made in Switzerland in 1962 and comes in the standard Hermes pastel green colour with mint green keys ,space bar and carriage knobs .
 
Hermes typewriters were designed and made in Switzerland by Paillard before production moved to France and then to Brazil . They have a good reputation as wonderfully engineered machines , as you would expect from the Swiss .
 
It comes with a copy of the original instruction booklet showing all its features and giving tips such as changing the ribbon and setting the margins  . The body of the typewriter  measures 32 cm by 33 cm by 14 cm high .
 
This Hermes 3000 comes with a carry case lid which is also in a very good condition and it just clips down over the typewriter to give you a handle to carry it around. 
 
Popular Culture:
 
William Kotzwinkle's 1972 novel was named Hermes 3000 after the machine.  
 
During his acceptance speech for "Best Screenplay (Brokeback Mountain)" at the 2006 Golden Globes, author Larry McMurtryspecifically mentioned his Hermes 3000, stating: "Most heartfelt, I thank my typewriter. My typewriter is a Hermes 3000, surely one of the noblest instruments of European genius. It has kept me for thirty years out of the dry embrace of the computer".
 
Other notable users of the machine are Sam Shepard, Eugène Ionesco and Stephen Fry.
 
Beat writerJack Kerouac wrote his final novel, Vanity of Duluoz, on the Hermes 3000 in 1966.
 
In a March 2018 auction at Bonhams in London, the Hermes 3000 on which Sylvia Plath had typed her only novel—The Bell Jar—in 1962 was sold for £26,000.
 
In 2013, in an appearance on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, actor Tom Hanks named the Hermes 3000 as the luxury item he would choose to take with him.