People & Links · Profiles
Martin Howard
A collector, author, and restorer of the 19th-century writing machines that transformed the newsroom, the lawyer’s office, and the novelist’s desk.
Martin Howard is one of the most widely respected collectors of 19th-century typewriters. His collection, built up over decades, includes a remarkable number of the earliest production machines — many of them the only known surviving examples of the early QWERTY models that would soon find their way onto every dime-novel writer’s desk.
The typewriter matters to Dark Lantern Tales for reasons beyond nostalgia. The machine’s arrival in the 1870s and mass adoption through the 1880s transformed everything about how fiction got written — the speed of production, the look of a manuscript, and even who could compete for the column-inch rates of the story-paper economy.
“The typewriter didn’t just make writing faster — it changed who did the writing, and where.”
— Martin Howard
The Collection
Howard’s collection is one of the finest in private hands, documented in his book on the subject and in his ongoing online archive. For anyone researching the 1880s office, the 1890s newsroom, or the long history of how a writer’s tools shape the writing, the antiquetypewriters.com archive is the first stop.
At a glance
About Martin
Specialty: 19th-century typewriters
Era: 1870s–1900s production machines
Author: Books and essays on typewriter history
Based in: North America
External Resources
Collection
antiquetypewriters.com — the Martin Howard collection
Photos, histories, and condition notes on one of the finest private collections of 19th-century writing machines in the world.
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