Ref.10162FORMER egg farmer Martin Pitt believes he could be the only collector of old and rare typewriters.

In fact, he says, there is one word that cannot be typed, the name for such a collector because it does not exist as far as his research has shown.

Over the last 40 years he has collected no fewer than 104 machines, many of which are displayed at his home at Yew Tree Cottage at West Overton, near Marlborough.

The display will be on show to the public for the first time on Saturday from 2pm to 5pm when Mr Pitt and his wife, Ruth, throw open their gardens in aid of the Marlborough Riverbank Theatre project.

All the proceeds will go the Kennet Valley Arts Trust and its bid to build a theatre in Marlborough.

The collection shows the development of the typewriter from the very earliest machines of the late 1800s

The 1893 Blick and 1894 Rem-Blick models used the "querty" arrangement of keys familiar to today's keyboard users.

Other typewriter builders hit upon another keyboard layout which they claimed was superior and which became known as the "dhiat ensor" after the letters on the bottom row.

The "querty" keyboard, however, won the competition by putting typists using the two systems against one another in a race.

Gunsmiths, who were already in the business of making intricate mechanisms, took up the first patent for a typewriter.

Remington typewriters became as well known as Remington rifles and pistols.

The shift key, enabling instant transition from lower to upper case when typing, was a feature right from the start.

Mr Pitt said he can't understand why some makers later tried keyboards with no shift key and which required twice as many keys.

Mr Pitt was one of the country's top free-range egg pioneers when he farmed at Clench Common. He once had 50,000 laying chickens. Now he and his wife have just four hens to keep them in fresh eggs.

Mr Pitt caught the typewriter-collecting bug almost by accident. At the same time his boyhood home was burgled and his prized stamp collection stolen his father came home with an early typewriter, the 1893 Blick, which he had salvaged from a bombsite after the London blitz.

"From the insurance money for my stamp collection I had enough money to buy a couple more typewriters," he said.

He says today it's rare to discover an old typewriter as most of them are snapped up by general collectors because of their age.

The most he has ever paid for a single machine is £180 and people who, in some cases, had still been using them, have donated several to his collection.

Mr Pitt said: "There is no real value in them because nobody else is collecting them."

His collection includes typewriters with keyboards for a variety of languages including Thai, Spanish, French, German and Russian.

Even old American typewriters differ from an English keyboard because they have a $ sign instead of a £ key.

Some of the old portables were designed with a folding carriage and fitted into cases smaller than many modern laptop computers.

Mr Pitts said one machine he would love to know more about is a Palantype stenography machine used to take verbatim notes in courts, councils or large businesses.

If anyone can remember using a Palantype, Mr Pitt would love to hear from them or from anyone who knows the name for a typewriter collector.