The Italian Typewriter With One Red Key

Marcello Nizzoli's Lettera 22 went into production at Olivetti's Ivrea factory in 1950. It was a flat, gray-green portable typewriter, 27 by 37 by 8 centimeters, weighing 3.7 kilograms. The carriage return was a slim chrome lever. Every key was the same dull oyster gray, except one tab key, painted bright red.

The red key is the design. Olivetti's brief had been for a portable typewriter cheap enough for students and writers and quiet enough for a hotel room — a competitor to the heavy office machines that ruled the postwar market. Nizzoli, who had trained as a painter and worked for Olivetti since the 1930s, treated the housing as sculpture. He removed every protrusion he could justify removing: no ornamental ribbing, no chrome trim around the keys, no decorative typography on the case. The eye lands on the one red key because Nizzoli has cleared everything else away.

The Compasso d'Oro, Italy's new design prize, gave the Lettera 22 its first award in 1954. In 1959 the Illinois Institute of Technology named it the best-designed product of the previous hundred years. It became the personal typewriter of Indro Montanelli, Sylvia Plath, Leonard Cohen, and most of postwar Italian journalism. Olivetti sold over two million of them before discontinuing it in the late 1960s.

Nizzoli's red key is the move that designers cite — the single deliberate accent that makes restraint readable. Without it, the Lettera 22 looks like a typewriter that the designer forgot to finish. With it, it is the one he stopped exactly in time.