Tom Hanks Has 250 Typewriters - and Keeps Giving Them Away

Tom Hanks has been collecting vintage typewriters since he was nineteen years old. Most celebrities accumulate stuff. He gives it away.

It Started With a $45 Machine in Cleveland

In 1978, a young Tom Hanks walked into a typewriter repair shop in Cleveland and walked out with a Hermes 2000 for $45. That was machine number one. Over the following decades he quietly accumulated more than 250 vintage typewriters - roughly 90 percent of them still in working condition. Rather than lock them in a vault, he has spent years routing them back out into the world.

The Boy Named Corona

In April 2020, Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson were recovering from COVID-19 in Australia when an eight-year-old boy named Corona De Vries wrote to him. The boy explained that he had always loved his name but that classmates had started calling him the coronavirus, which made him sad and angry. Hanks wrote back on a typewriter, told the boy he had a friend in him, and sent him a vintage Corona brand typewriter from his own collection. The letter closed with a handwritten line: "You got a friend in ME!" - a nod to Woody from Toy Story. The exchange was reported by NBC News, Time, and Newsweek.

Typewriters Showing Up on Doorsteps

In 2023, typewriter repair shops across the United States began receiving unexpected packages wrapped in green towels bearing the Playtone logo - Hanks' production company. Each contained a vintage machine from his personal collection and a personal letter. Cambridge Typewriter in Massachusetts received an autographed Olympia SM4. His note read: "It is yours now. Take good care of it and halp it keep doing it's job for another hundred years." The intentional typos were very much on purpose. At least four shops received machines that spring, with owners saying the packages simply showed up unannounced.

A Classroom, an App, and a Book

A Pittsburgh-area writing class once assigned students to send typewritten letters to Hanks. He personally typed back to every single one. In 2014 he co-developed Hanx Writer, a typewriter simulator app that hit number one on the App Store within days of launch. In 2017 he published Uncommon Type, a short-story collection in which every story features a different typewriter from his collection. His stated goal is eventually to keep just one machine - an Olivetti Lettera 22, which he considers a masterpiece of design. He is not in any hurry to get there.