�y��vlog

This particular Urania, for example, was built in Dresden, and was sold at a shop on Ferdinandstraße in central Hamburg in 1939.

“It’s a Urania Klein,” my friend said, as he lifted the shapely antique typewriter from his car trunk.

You don’t have to be a connoisseur of antique office machinery to identify the Urania as a Nazi-era typewriter; it has that particular aesthetic.

Perhaps because the typical group of typewriter buyers overlaps with the far larger community of militariana collectors, typewriters with the “special key” usually command a premium, making them far more expensive than run-of-the-mill German machines, like Willy’s Tríumph or that Urania from Bel Air.

For me, the histories of Willie Müller or that Urania from Bel Air are more interesting than a special-keyed typewriter displayed behind glass, with no human context.