Hermes baby

A Hermes Baby with a Swiss-German keyboard. There were different versions of this machine.

The Hermes Baby is a mechanical typewriter that was manufactured between 1935 and 1989 by the former Swiss precision engineering company Paillard-Bolex . It is designed as a flat, lightweight and durable portable typewriter and weighs four kilograms at a height of six centimeters. When it was launched in 1935, it was cheaper than all comparable competing products at 160 Swiss francs . The model also quickly became very successful in exports: With an export of 42,000 Hermes Baby, Switzerland became the world's third largest exporter of typewriters after the USA and Germany .

The Hermes Baby was also very popular with authors: the owners of a Hermes Baby include Ernest Hemingway , John Steinbeck , Peter Härtling and Friederike Mayröcker (the latter is said to have said she was married to her Hermes Baby). In the novel Homo Faber by Max Frisch , the Hermes Baby was also immortalized in literature as in Dieter Meier's book Hermes baby and its title poem. Also Emmi Creola-Maag (better known as Betty Bossi ) tapped her cooking tips 1956-1971 on a machine of this type.

Web links

Hermes Baby: The authors' favorite child at www.swissinfo.org
Model Overview (English) ( Memento of 31 March 2008 at the Internet Archive )
Extensive information about the Hermes Baby collected by typewriters.ch

Individual evidence

↑ The poem Hermes Baby , performed by Dieter Meier .

[1] The poem Hermes Baby , performed by Dieter Meier .