Monica 2 Goes Under the Hammer: The Typewriter That Wrote Rutshire Into Being

Jilly Cooper's Olivetti Underwood Lettera 32 — backup machine, gazebo resident, blackout survivor — hits Christie's December auction with a £10,000–£15,000 guide price.

There is a particular kind of literary object that earns its auction estimate not through association alone but through use. Monica 2 is emphatically that kind of object. This Olivetti Underwood Lettera 32 — manufactured around 1964, named with the casual intimacy Cooper extended to all her trusted machines — was not a display piece. It lived in a gazebo. It had scissors taped to it. It typed through Gloucestershire power cuts while the rest of The Chantry stumbled in the dark. Cooper's naming conventions tell you something about how she worked. 'Monica' was not one typewriter but a dynasty: a succession of machines that served rotating duty, with Monica 2 standing in whenever the primary Monica was away being serviced by Colin, the only repair technician Cooper trusted. Monica 2's most documented stint was writing Jump!, Cooper's 2010 racing novel. The machine's provenance is specific, logged, and verifiable — the kind of detail that separates a relic from a prop. The Christie's auction, titled Love and Lust: A Literary Guide and scheduled for 9 December, groups Monica 2 alongside approximately 30 items spanning Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, and Lady Hamilton. The timing is not accidental: the second series of Rivals, the Disney+ adaptation of Cooper's most famous Rutshire novel, has just returned. Christie's is selling the afterglow of a cultural moment as much as the machine itself. What makes this interesting beyond the celebrity-object circuit is what the typewriter reveals about Cooper's actual compositional method. She typed in layers — new passages typed and physically stapled over earlier versions before assistants retyped the whole. The scissors weren't decorative. The cut-and-paste was literal. Monica 2 was infrastructure for a pre-digital revision process that produced millions of words of published fiction across four decades. Cooper died in October 2024 at 88, following a fall at The Chantry. Monica 2 was found in her office there. It enters the auction market at a moment when the television adaptation has reintroduced her work to a new generation — which is exactly the condition that inflates guide prices on this kind of artefact. Whether the final hammer price lands inside or well above the £10,000–£15,000 estimate will depend on who in that room, or on the phone, grew up with the Rutshire chronicles.