We've been meaning to post about this little fella ever since Richard posted about his typewriters here and here, over at the always excellent AceJet170.
It's the Olivetti Lettera 22, a portable mechanical typewriter which used to belong to Alistair's Great Aunt. It was designed by Marcello Nizzoli around 1950, and it's deeply tasty. The lower case L doubles up for the 1, and the non-lining numerals are great, particularly the 5.
On which point, we'll borrow an anecdote from the rather wonderful Derek Birdsall, talking about his Olivetti Lettera 35 in the fantastic Notes on book design by Derek Birdsall
"I told the proprietor [of the shop where DB bought his machine], Mr Hooker, how much I liked the non-lining figures. He had obviously never heard this term before. 'We call them billing figures,' he said, 'because the normal figures 3 and 8 could be mis-read on the 4th or 5th carbon copies of invoices.' I have not met a typographer since who had ever heard that term before."
See a full set of Alistair's shots here, and a gallery of Olivetti typewriters here.
