Olivetti Valentine

Olivetti Valentine

The Olivetti Valentine designed by Ettore Sottsass (with Perry King and Albert Leclerc)
Type	Portable typewriter
Inception	1969
Manufacturer	Olivetti S.p.A.

The Olivetti Valentine is a portable, manual typewriter manufactured and marketed by the Italian company, Olivetti, that combined the company's Lettera 32 internal typewriter mechanicals with signature red, glossy plastic bodywork and matching plastic case. Designed in 1968 by Olivetti's Austrian-born consultant, Ettore Sottsass (father of the Memphis Group), assisted by Perry A. King and Albert Leclerc – it was introduced in 1969 and was one of the earliest and most iconic plastic-bodied typewriters.^{[2][3][4][5][6]}

Despite being an expensive, functionally limited and somewhat technically mediocre product which failed to find success in the marketplace,^[4][7][8] the Valentine "subverted the status quo" of typewriter design,^[9] captured the zeitgeist of post-'68 counterculture,^[10] and ultimately became a celebrated international icon^[8] – largely on account of its expressive design.

The Valentine is featured in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York;^[11][12][13] London's Design Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum;^[8] the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney;^[14] as well as the Triennale di Milano in Milan.^[15] Italy's Association of Industrial Design (ADI) awarded the Valentine its Compasso d'Oro in 1970.^[16]

Poet Giovanni Giudici, who was employed with Olivetti, described the Valentine as "a Lettera 32 disguised as a sixties girl."^[17] Over time, Sottsass himself, who called the Valentine the oggetto rosso, the red object,^[5] would tire of its design, calling it "too obvious, a bit like a girl wearing a very short skirt and too much make-up."^[4][18]