I’ve shared a few posts on this blog about my affection for typewriters. During this time of social distancing and sitting at home for days on end, the typewriter is a machine that I’ve been appreciating more than ever. So I figured I’d take a minute to talk about one of my favorite machines in my relatively small collection, the Olympia SM9.
A lot of people refer to the Olympia SM9 as a “writer’s typewriter”. There is a good reason for that. Made in the mid-1960’s this machine pretty much represents the peak of manual typewriter technology. It has everything a typewriter user could possibly want. Tab controls that are easy to set and re-set. Touch control. Ribbon selector. Easy to change margins. The list goes on. Also, because the SM9 wasn’t made all that long ago, they tend to be in fairly good shape when you find them on the used market.
That sadly wasn’t the case with this machine though. When I found it every single key was stuck solid. Wouldn’t budge. Cosmetically the SM9 was fine, but it was also useless. Fortunately every typewriter lover knows that fixing sticky or seized up keys isn’t the end of the world. I paid a whopping zero dollars for my Olympia SM9 and all I had to do was strip it down, soak it in a soap bath for a couple hours, put it back together, and now I have a perfectly functional typewriter that is among my personal favorite writing tools.
So what is so great about the Olympia SM9? To be totally honest, it isn’t the looks. The Olympia SM9 isn’t a bad looking typewriter I suppose. I’ve seen far worse. However it isn’t exactly a timeless looking typewriter either. To my eyes it shares the same sort of lines that one sees on a 1970’s Volkswagen Rabbit. I guess there must have been a certain engineering aesthetic going around Germany at the time. Let’s just say, when one puts a typewriter such as a Royal or even another Olympia from the 1950’s in a room it instantly ups your sophistication vibe by a factor of ten. When one puts an Olympia SM9 on a desk in a room one immediately gets the sense that a plastic ashtray is soon to follow and it won’t be long before said ashtray is filled with cigarette butts that come with a lot of hard work writing.
Where the Olympia SM9 really shines is the way that it just works. This is the kind of machine that just lets the words flow. Good words. Bad words. Moments of genius and moments of dullness. The Olympia SM9 doesn’t judge and it doesn’t get in your way. It just writes really really well. I’m going to make a bold statement here and say that the Olympia SM9 is the best feeling typewriter that I own. It is effortless. The size of the SM9 is rather big for a portable which for long sessions is a good thing in my opinion. The rise of the keys is perfect and feels like there is just enough space between each key to allow the typist to gain speed without much effort but without feeling sloppy either. The carriage return lever is big and flat and easy to reach for. Knobs move with precision. The Olympia SM9 is a machine with decades of design behind it and it shows.
The Olympia SM9 went through quite a few subtle design changes over its many year production run. My sample is from the very first year which you can tell because the Olympia logo is a turquoise green. By the second year the logo shifted to chrome and in even later models a dedicated 1-key was added. Even later still, the turquoise accents were abandoned all together in favor of a black keyboard and black roller knobs.
If you are thinking about buying a typewriter you really can’t go wrong with the Olympia SM9. If you are already into typewriters and want to add more to your collection then the Olympia SM9 would make a great addition. In short, you should own one. Put lots and lots of pages through it and enjoy!