The novelist Don DeLillo, one of my literary heroes, has said: “What the words look like is important.  What the words look like in combination.  I have to see the words."  For most writers now words aren’t physical things but apparitions on a screen and the act of writing is entirely bodiless.  What of this world, long-gone, when words were real things and writers saw them and grappled with them and fought for them?

The Valentine by Olivetti, a portable typewriter from 1969, gets at the tactility of words and the act of writing.  A classic, designed by Ettore Sottsass and Perry King, it has the brisk, efficient appeal of a machine and also a whiff of high-technology about it although it isn’t even electrified.  The curved red plastic body evokes a sensual love while its name suggests a more lighthearted attachment.  Can we love words the same way without seeing their physicality, their weight, their character?