Designed by Italian Ettore Sottsass and Briton Perry King, launched in 1969.
The Valentine’s transgressive design of Ettore Sottsass, defined by the poet Giovanni Giudici as “a Lettera 32 disguised as a sixties girl”, quickly became a cult product. It is the first example of a surprising, non-conformist office product that anticipates the evolution of the working world towards a more informal style.
It was probably the most famous of Olivetti’s typewriters.
The Olivetti company, an Italian manufacturer of computers, tablets, smartphones, printers and other such business products as calculators and fax machines, was founded as a typewriters manufacturer by Camillo Olivetti in 1908 in the Turin commune of Ivrea, Italy.
By 1994, Olivetti stopped production of typewriters, as more and more users were transitioning to personal computers.
