Heritage – Historical Platinum Signature Auction
December 15
HA.com/6280

DALLAS, TEXAS – Like so many collections, it began with a single purchase made on a whim — in this case, the typewriter used by a Pulitzer-winning sportswriter. The man who bought the machine, Steve Soboroff, was a fan of the man who used it, revered Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray, whose words Soboroff devoured each morning, especially after nights when Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax hurled fastballs using “The Left Hand of God.” Soboroff wanted the 1940 Remington Model J so desperately that he outdueled two others competing for it at auction in 2005: the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Dodgers. It was a hell of a score.

Not long after, Soboroff put another typewriter on the shelf beside Murray’s — this one, a 1926 Underwood Standard, belonged to Ernest Hemingway and was used during the author’s sojourns to Cuba. More machines followed in short order, each a typewriter that once belonged to someone who had appeared on the cover of Time. Novelists and playwrights, among them Jack London, Tennessee Williams, George Bernard Shaw, Ray Bradbury, John Updike and Philip Roth. Actors, including Greta Garbo, Shirley Temple, Mae West, Julie Andrews and a typewriter collector named Tom Hanks. Musicians, from crooner Bing Crosby to tenor Andrea Bocelli. Visionaries. Journalists. The famous. The infamous. Playboy creator Hugh Hefner. Samuel T. Cohen, inventor of the neutron bomb. And Ted Kaczynski, the man called Unabomber.

The result: “The World’s Greatest Typewriter Collection,” as the Huffington Post called Soboroff’s assemblage in 2015, which has been written about in outlets ranging from ESPN to The Atlantic and exhibited in myriad institutions, among them the Paley Center for Media, where a scheduled four-week stint stretched well past 14 months. The collection, assembled over two decades, was even the subject of a Jeopardy! question in December 2015. Just last year, Soboroff donated six of his treasured typewriters to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

The remaining 33 from his vaunted collection will serve as the centerpieces of Heritage’s December 15 Historical Platinum Session Signature Auction. A portion of the auction’s proceeds will go toward one of Soboroff’s favorite nonprofits: the Jim Murray Memorial Foundation, which funds scholarships for undergraduate journalism students.

Soboroff had just one rule as he painstakingly filled out his collection over two decades: The typewriters had to belong to people who appeared on the cover of Time. Just one of the 33 in this auction breaks that rule.

That would be the 1887 Crandall New Model, named after its inventor, Lucien S. Crandall. It’s among the most beautiful in Soboroff’s collection and was purchased because of its significance and condition.

Upon patenting the so-called “type-sleeve” machine in 1879 and bringing it to market shortly after, the Crandall Machine Company of Groton, N.Y., claimed it made a “strictly first-class two-handed typewriter, inferior to none in utility, range of work, speed and convenience.” It cited among the machine’s myriad benefits: The user could always see what they were typing — a first! — and its ability to type in eight styles in English. The company also boasted that it was $50 cheaper than its $100 competitors. It was, Crandall boasted, “The Writing Machine of the Period.”

“Mine is in the finest condition of any Crandall in the world,” Soboroff says. “The prettiest of the pretty.”

Jack London’s 1902 Bar-Lock #10, made by the Columbia Typewriter Manufacturing Company, is among the most surreal offerings in Soboroff’s vaunted collection, as it looks almost nothing like its modern-day contemporaries. As the American Writers Museum noted in 2020, when it was part of its “Tools of the Trade” exhibit, “There are separate keys for lower and upper case letters and there is also a lack of an exclamation point — London would have had to first type a period and then added a capital ‘I’ above it.” Its keyboard also boasts a wild layout: “2WBMRN” rather than the standard “QWERTY” along the top row of keys.

London, whose 1903 novel The Call of the Wild was once required reading in every elementary school English class, was famously among the most prolific authors of the Twentieth Century, having banged out more than 200 books, short stories and essays during his career as literature’s premier adventurer.

Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 Underwood Standard is perhaps the most significant in Soboroff’s collection.

Hemingway used the machine to write his letters from Finca Vigía, his estate near Havana, some 2,500 of which are stored at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Museum Library and Museum. As the Raab Collection noted earlier this year, those missives “touch upon writing, life, filming The Old Man and the Sea, fishing, travel, and, perhaps most importantly, death and the afterlife, including his near-death experience in two airplane crashes.”

For information, 214-409-1887 or www.ha.com.

Featuring The Soboroff Typewriter Collection
[Ernest Hemingway]. 1926 Underwood Standard Portable (Serial Number 183598).
1887 Crandall New Model (Serial Number 4937).
[Truman Capote]. 1961 Smith-Corona Electra 110
(Serial Number 6SE2137001).
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