I consider Valentines 'designer' typewriters, and generally overrated. If you want to write on an Olivetti, I'd go for the Lettera 22/32/DL. The Valentine is based on the Lettera 32, so the mechanical part is solid, but the Valentine is not as well-balanced as the 32. And about ten times more expensive.

Glenn Horowitz, a rare-book dealer who handled the auction for Mr. McCarthy, told The New York Times earlier this week: “When I grasped that some of the most complex, almost otherworldly fiction of the postwar era was composed on such a simple, functional, frail-looking machine, it conferred a sort of talismanic quality to Cormac’s typewriter. It’s as if Mount Rushmore was carved with a Swiss Army knife.”